New Ticker Trax service
seeks to catalog instruments of wealth

Later this week, we will sneak preview the subscription report TICKER TRAX BY THOM CALANDRA.

It has been many years since my last service, The Calandra Report, put me at center stage and filled my spirit with a tad too much enthusiasm for the art of researching, globetrotting, then buying and selling stocks and other investments. I include here a link to one of The Calandra Report editions, kindly posted by the nice folks at database operator Fran Finnegan & Co. in San Francisco, just across Richardson Bay from our home. Click here to view it.

As stated in my work and on Stockhouse, I entirely recognize the shortcomings that led to my U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission settlement during those wonderful but manic weeks and months some years ago.

In a consent decree with U.S. securities regulators, one typically neither admits nor denies any of the claims regulators make in a civil suit. And I was no different.

Still, I always have said the SEC's intervention at a peaking point in my MarketWatch odyssey was welcome and the best thing ever to happen in my professional life. There is plenty more color, cosmic tears and even a life lesson or three in the interview editor Darin Diehl conducted with me not long ago. I know I am tooting my own French horn when I say the two-part interview is worth a brief scan … and can be seen by clicking here.

Time to get fuh-Gaze-ee? (Not fugazy, mind you – which has an entirely different meaning.) I think yes.

At Stockhouse.com, they continue to work earnestly on Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra. Stockhouse runs offices in Toronto, New York and Vancouver, Canada, and I am a laptop shooter in Tiburon, California.

I had forgotten how much macaroni elbow grease goes into the preparation of a new service, what with templates and a delivery mechanism, layout and graphics and product design and what not. As all goes according to plan (yeah, right!?), later this mid-November 2008 week, we will show our audience a fresh example of Ticker Trax.

1969 Pizza Pronto

G’ morning, Baltimore. (Dubai, Osaka, Perth, Atlanta, Cape Town, Baotou, Hampstead Heath, Gravesend, Pralin, Tiburon, Calgary . . .)

What do we hope to accomplish with the subscription service?

Ticker Trax By Thom Calandra will explore planet Earth for those few stakes that offer the prospect of excellent, in some cases cosmic, returns. It is for those who are entirely at ease with stratospheric levels of risk and are willing to endure pain, suffering, shingles perhaps on very bad days … but some very, very fine meals and thin-crust pizzas (think fig prosciutto & gorgonzola pie or risotto di seppie with an exquisite dash of intensely fresh saffron) in all their planetary venues and forms.

As we complete our investment research, we fully hope and expect, but cannot and do not promise, stratospheric returns. For example: I personally have been bewildered by the whupping that risk-leaning investments have – I want to say endured but have they really? – have taken these past (choose one) 18 days/weeks/months. The other day, I finally threw in the beach towel on roughly half my stake in Airspan Networks (NASDAQ: AIRN, Stock Forum), a maker of WiMAX broadband Internet equipment. I took a real whupping, yet still am probing the reasons why many promising securities, even pieces of land and chunks of metal, have become wide-eyed orphans looking for new homes.

Still, we at Ticker Trax hope over time to compile a compact list of investments and strategies for investors willing to endure original research, first-hand interviews and tales of good humor. Our audience will meet some lively characters and have opportunities to dine at international tables renowned for their world-class pizza (1969 Pizza in Medellin, Colombia, for instance) and other hearty and soulful meals.

Our audience, we hope, will become part of a small entourage of garage-loft investors who can rely on one another for insights from the attic, for secrets buried in zee basement and of course, for lower-back massages and a hand to hold in times of mead.

We do hope to increase wealth of knowledge, scope of understanding and size of holdings. We do not envision compiling a portfolio designed for daily, weekly or monthly trading. More TK, as in to come.

HOLDINGS: Thom’s cosmos of holdings is listed for free Stockhouse members on www.Stockhouse.com under the “portfolio setting” for user TCALANDRA. For more ThomWatch, please see Stockhouse and ThomCalandra.com.

THOM’S STORY: For investors who profited from a meteoric rise of commodities, mining and life sciences companies, Thom Calandra acted as a beacon. Thom helped his audience find value in a quagmire of investment choices.  Thom co-founded and was the driving editorial force and spirit of CBS MarketWatch, MarketWatch.com and FT MarketWatch in Europe. As the voice of Thom Calandra's StockWatch and The Calandra Report, Thom fancied $300-ounce gold before that metal became an investment rage. Thom visited bioscience companies, metals mines and scores of thin-crust pie joints across the planet in a search for profit, fashion and pizze de trippa gorgonzola. Thom's novel PABLO BY NUMBERS was completed in summer 2008. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

     Thom Calandra

For a wide-ranging interview with Thom, please see Stockhouse's series of articles: Taking Stock of Thom. He and his family live in Tiburon, California. Visit his web homes at www.thomcalandra.com and thomcalandra.blogspot.com.