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Actionable & LARGE
Stocks Guru Cracks Buyside Code
By Thom Calandra
All rights reserved
The only difference between the stock market and the race track is ... in the market, you get to watch 'em come 'round again.
-- My friend and fellow journalist, Walter K. Lopez
Years ago, when I was a freshly scrubbed newspaper reporter, a close friend showed me how deceit and greed work together to pull off a neat hat trick.
I think my pal's demonstration sets the stage for this book, an actionable bullet list of fiscal tricks favored by the planet's most cunning money merchants. One or two of the maneuvers barely, just barely, trace what's legal in financial markets. But that's OK. Trust me.
I'll get to my friend's demo, a cute little stunt actually, in a moment. But first, I'd like to pull the curtain back, so you can see whether you want to buy into Actionable & LARGE.
In these chapters to follow, I intend to demonstrate that that many Americans have no idea how to make money in markets. They have no idea how the big money is made in markets. Few ordinary folks working their bums off to make ends meet can tell you what it means to master the buyside code and apply it to their holdings.
I'll do my best to illustrate these (entirely legal) concepts:
1. Pump (Promote), Stump (Confound the Experts) and Win
2. Secure "Inside" Information, Legally (Getting Your Phone Calls Answered)
3. Bet A Bunch When You've Got a Hunch (Actionable & LARGE!)
4. Do What the Executives Do, Not What They Say (Magic of Form 4s)
5. Execute Your Own Fund-to-Fund Crosses and Save Big on Taxes
6. Reap EXTREME Gains from Reverse Transfers and Penny Stocks (EXTREME RISK!)
7. Profit from Dilution and Other Enemies of the Shareholder
8. Benefit Big from PIPEs (Private Placements) and SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Corporations)
9. Know Who Else Holds Stock and What They Really Think
10. Steal The Freaking Stock: Buy LARGE When Everyone Else Is Selling (CRACKING THE BUYSIDE CODE!)
At the heart of this book is what I call the golden ticker: the buyside code of protocols that investors must crack if they are to swipe their chosen stock at the right price, and from the very laptops of the silk-suited money merchants who control large blocks of it. Those merchants are hedge fund managers, mutual fund chiefs and asset wizards of one type or another. They are geniuses at what I call Pump, Stump & Win, the art of talking up their own buyside book of dirt-cheap stocks, talking their own portfolios up BIG, whenever they have a podium, then stumping the Wall Street analysts, confounding the brokerages and doink, the dunce-capped experts and in-the-dark journalists as their anointed stocks levitate to the clouds ... and sometimes beyond.
But these market sorcerers make mistakes too: big blow-up boners. That's what makes the buyside code actionable, as we'll see in a moment.
Many of the maneuvers in these pages, such as year-end stock crosses between hedge and mutual funds, are not likely to be in the repertoire of my intended audience: ordinary folks in their garage lofts, using their laptops to add a unit or two to their net worth and retire in style, get the grand-kids some extra tuition cash, or maybe pay off their small slice of the national debt.
What's more, much of the buyside code is hidden behind curtains, shielded by secretive hedge funds and venture capitalists, or by mutual fund bureaucracy, and again left unreported by those, doink, those dunce-cap financial writers and beat reporters. There's drama, too. Maybe not on a Broadway scale, but who needs "Spring Awakening" when you're cracking a big-money code?
I know I am getting carried away, but you have to hear this little tale. The other rainy day here, on the lip of Richardson Bay within wind-assisted spitting distance of the Golden Gate Bridge, I was dutifully dropping off our little girl at her grade school just north of our home in Tiburon, California. Once back home, what do I see on my little Queen of Toshiba computer screen, which sits cuddled into a corner of our family room? Shares of one of my absolute deadbeat stocks of this new century, Airspan Networks, were hitting the skids yet again.
Now, if I told you that from time to time, I had bought shares of this microscopic telecommunications company from Florida at $4.50 apiece ... and that over a couple of years' time, they had withered to $1 (rainy January 2008), would you bother continuing with this book? Well, guess what? The expert money merchants were buying the stock BIG at $2 a share (Autumn 2007), in what Wall Street calls a secondary stock offering of 15 million shares.
The reason why Airspan stock, on what Lemony Snicket might call this awful terrible wonderful day, was getting its stock market bum smacked was an unknown to 99 percent of the planet. The zero-point-zero-zero-zero-zero
Translation: The bipolar stock had become paper origami and in no way represented a company that was providing the parts necessary for wireless broadband networks in the 3.65 gigahertz band.
FOR MORE ABOUT THOM'S NON-FICTION BOOK PROJECT, CHECK HIS THOMCALANDRA.BLOGSPOT.COM ThomInAtor Alerts!
- Thom Calandra in Tiburon
Thom Calandra's novel PABLO BY NUMBERS was excerpted in autumn 2007 on the StockHouse.com group of web sites in Canada and the USA. Thom
was a co-founder and a columnist and broadcaster at CBS MarketWatch. He left in 2004. His report, The Calandra Report, is now only available in archived form in the graveyard
of investment newsletters. Thom will be making several appearances in 2008 to speak about his new project, a nonfiction examination of the brilliant and stupid things great investors do regularly. It's called
"Actionable & LARGE: Guru Cracks Buyside Code."
Colombia: Medellin
