Stock Picks, Investment Advice, Penny Stock Picks :: Daily Stock Pick

How do I use this text messaging thing anyways?

I was driving home from work tonight and had to make a call. I picked up my Verizon phone and called a friend of mine who text messaged me earlier in the day. I don't have the unlimited text plan so I still use the standard phone to communicate (but I probably look completely out of place actually talking on the thing).

And, that got me thinking... why haven't I invested in VZ? It's a great stock that pays a good dividend. Take a look at Verizon and seriously consider adding this one to your portfolio - I will be buying some soon.

Energy stocks looking good

Last week, TXU was one of our daily picks. Check out the chart - in the last month, we've seen pretty steady growth. The stock has gone from 65 to nearly 68, or a growth of about 4%. I'd say that's pretty good for one month, and there should be more to come.

TXU 30 Day Graph

Another stock that has some serious potential is Florida Power & Light (FPL). This company is very similar to TXU, but services the state of Florida by producing and distributing electricity to many of the state's residents. Florida is a energy consuming state - consider how much power the state uses each day in air conditioning alone during the summer months.

Have a happy Memorial Day and check back for next week's picks!

First week coming to an end

Today a friend of mine showed me a very userful tool on Morningstar. It's called Instant x-ray, and with it you can analyze your entire portfolio. It gives you an idea of your risk, the sectors that you are invested in, and your growth ratio. Very useful for your long term investments.

Our first full week of picks is coming to a close. I've noticed that our news feeds aren't working for all of our stocks. I'll be looking into this next week to make sure they're up to date. Also thinking of adding a "latest blog" section to the home page.

First pick - TXU

Monday's pick, TXU, has been a strong stock in our portfolio. I originally purchased TXU 2 years ago, but with the ever rising costs of energy production and supply, I think there is still headroom in this stock. I'd say this should be a long position though.

Another stock that caught my eye today is DaimlerChrysler. The Daimler unions were pushing for the break of Daimler and Chrysler, and they got it. Unfortunately, this might mean some job cuts at Chrysler, but I think it means positive things for the stock. I'll be watching this one, but don't be suprised if this stock pops up in the next few weeks.

We've got another good one picked for Tuesday, so check back tomorrow morning for the latest.

Daily pick starts this week

We'll be posting our daily picks starting Monday.

Newsletter feeds now working, AAPL going strong

Our newsletter (News > Recent Newsletters tab) feeds are up and running, updated 3 times daily. Check them out when you get a chance - there is a lot of good info on the day's hot stocks.

In stock news, even though the market was mostly stagnant this week, AAPL continued to impress. It's flirting with 110, which is where I would probably stop funnelling cash into it.

Welcome Technorati

I signed up for an account with Technorati today. For those that don't know what Technorati is - it's essentially a search engine dedicated solely to weblogs (blogs). It's a powerful tool that tracks updates on your blog and updates it's records accordingly. Hopefully it will help me get the word out for The Daily Investment!

AAPL doing very well

Today was another great day for the market, along with our pick AAPL. Since we first acquired this stock in June 2006 @ 59.50, we've seen almost a 75% gain. Not bad for less than 1 year in Apple!

An interesting play that appeared on our penny stock boards monitor today is Aastrom Bioscience. ASTM develops autologous cell products for the repair or regeneration of multiple human tissues. While this may not be a long term buy, I think you could very quickly make 10% on your money by investing at the right time on this one. I'd wait for another dip of 0.1 or 0.2 and scoop some up for the short term.

New stock on my radar

AVID - Avid Technologies. For those of you who don't know what Avid does, here's a short summary.

Avid Technology, Inc. develops, markets, sells and supports a range of software and hardware products for the production, management and distribution of digital media content (audio / video / graphics). Avid's products are used worldwide in film studios, post production studios, TV editing, advertising, etc. They produce a popular home edition of their software, called Avid Xpress which is fairly inexpensive for high end home video editing.

Anyways, Avid was pounded last week, losing over 12%. Right now, you can pick up shares of this stock for under $34. At this price, it's a great buy, because I'd be interested in this stock up to $50.

I'm fairly busy at my conference this week, so I may not be posting again for a few days.

A Strong Week for the Market

What a week - the Dow started the week around 12,960, and finished the week at 13,120. Again today our pick was up, another 1%. How long will the hot market last?

The housing market woes may creep up on the market in the next few weeks - but, this will be a great opportunity to load up on good stocks! I'll be away for a conference next week, and haven't been able to tie up the lose ends on The Daily Investment yet. Be sure to check the blog for updates - if I have internet access I might add some comments next week.

Another Record Day for the Dow

The Dow reached an all time high today, closing slightly above 13,105. While The Daily Investment is getting its finishing touches, we've been recommending Apple. Today alone, AAPL was up over 3%, closing at 98.84! Believe me, when I say that the stock is a good investment up to the 110 range, I mean it.

Good news today on the market for Microsoft, with it's Q3 sales up 65% due to high demand for Vista. I'm going to hold of on buying MSFT for now, but it's on my radar for the near future.

Now is as good a time as any to start investing in the market! Check out our boards for expert opinions from around the web!

Market is on fire

The Dow hit 13,000 today, and ended up closing at 13,089! Look at the performance of some of the stock in our portfolios - here's a few good examples:

SYT - up 9.25% since the end of Mar
TXU - up 8.5% since end of Jan
AAPL, our current pick - up 9.5% in the past 5 days!

It's a great time to be in the market. Earnings reports are solid, and personal wealth is at a high. We can only hope that the Fed cuts rates to kick start our "slowing economy" - this will surely bring out the bulls and we'll see stocks climb higher. The Daily Investment will keep you up to date on the best picks during this exciting market climb!

Database connectivity fixed!

I spent some time this morning adding to Presstopia's data access code, to eliminate the 'disappearing' database error. Turns out it wasn't Presstopia's fault, but a problem with my web host and ODBC driver connectivity. I think it was time well spent - no errors yet on the blog. Please send me a comment (or add a comment to this post) if you're on the blog and get an error.

The daily investment should be at 100% soon! I'm at a conference next weekend, so hopefully I can apply the finishing touches before then.

Database disappearing error GO AWAY

The error is still happening, rewrite, hopefully tomorrow (Sun).

Feeds are back up

Feeds have been fixed, data should be up to date on "today's pick", "the boards", and "the news". Newsletters are still out of date, but this is an unrelated thing that I'm going to work on soon.

I also uploaded a fix for the blog database disappearing error, it looked like Presstopia was not releasing database connections correctly. Maybe this will work - if not, I'll be rewriting some of the database access code.

Day 1 - various issues

I've noticed that occassionally an error occurs when accessing the blog. The error message makes it seem that the database is "disappearing" with no rhyme or reason. This causes the page to crash and the error message appears. I'll be looking into this.

Also, it looks like some of my feeds no longer work. I checked the server log files, and I suspect that the web host has changed a security setting without letting me know. This is why "the boards" and "the news" sections are not updating properly. I'll be fixing this one too.

I'll update the blog when these items are fixed!

The Daily Investment blog is online!

After a few weeks of reviewing different blog platforms, I've picked Presstopia. It's a very simple blog for ASP.NET, and works with many different databases. It took me about 15 minutes to get up and running.