William Franceschine

I bought 5% of the EPT San Remo winner and was only paid 10k of my winnings. Evidently he sold off more than 100% of himself in the tournament and owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to people in my same situation. I’ve been told by a Dutch attorney I can sue him, but the attorney did not want to take up the case. If anybody has any knowledge of the Dutch legal system and would like to assist me in getting my money through the courts, please get in touch.

You can read more about the staking mess here: Constant Rijkenberg

I was pretty much MIA from April to July and while personally things did not go well, my investments didn’t seem to notice and I’ve woken up to a nice heaping pile of cash. I have now more than quadrupled my investment in the stock market and my online businesses have been piling up money with me previously ignoring them completely.

I feel extremely fortunate to have gone through two personal crises in the last 18 months and both times came out squeaky clean financially at the end of both of them.

I still think stocks are cheap and people with liquid assets should get in before it is too late. Here are my holdings;

BAC (Bank of America)
AXP (American Express)
MGM (MGM Mirage)
GE (General Electric)

The graph on them since I picked them up in March is just disgusting, especially Bank of America which I bought at less than $4.00 – it is now over $15.00 per share. GoBama.

Been awhile since I’ve made a poker post – been awhile since I’ve played seriously but I’ve started to again. I’ve got lots of free time now and need something productive to do so I’ve decided to grind. I always thought if all else failed I could just grind 2/4 NL online and make an easy $150 an hour. WRONG!

$0.50/$1.00 NL I am having a hard time with. Nearly every player is at a level where they have read a poker book and played 50,000 hands it seems. There is the occasional donk but they are few and far between. Now it’s all about how to beat competent players and find and exploit their weaknesses.

Stacking people just doesn’t exist now unless its a cooler. AK hardly ever flops an A and goes broke to a set. They are smart and can read hands well – at micro stakes!

If I can keep making $40/hour+ I’ll keep playing just to have something to do but man wtf at how hard the games got! The US needs to regulate and legalize poker, we need those fish and we need them badly.

I’ve been working long and hard for nearly the last year on an amazing website. ThePlayr.com. I’m finished hiding who I am and what I own so here it is:

www.theplayr.com
www.rakeaid.com
www.psmoey.com
poker.wikia.com
www.buildaroll.com

These are all my sites and will all be branded under ThePlayr.com. This site is going to blow every other poker site out of the water as it will be totally free (no more paying for training videos) and offer the best rakeback and bonus rates available.

ThePlayr Poker Wiki alone I think can be the best resource in poker. Mason Malmuth is adamant that the good old posts not be put together in stickies. So we’ll just put them all together on the Wiki. If he wanted I’d probably turn the Wiki over to 2+2 control as he’d be able to recruit more helpers than I, however since they wont even return my emails I don’t think that will happen soon.

Welcome to the new Degen with a new site and doing things the right way. I know a week of being cool isn’t going to prove anything to anybody but you will see. I am here to stay and I’m in line. Prepare to be blown away by ThePlayr.com.ThePlayr T Shirt

Interesting fact I learned recently, while attempting to find a laundromat in Zurich. Not even the working poor do their own laundry in Switzerland. Every apartment comes with laundry service standard. The entire nation never has to touch their own dirty underwear, other than to put them into their laundry basket. Oh, there are no homeless people either, everybody gets free healthcare and higher education – and if you are a heroin addict, the government will give you a fix when you say you need one – so you don’t go rob somebody to get it!

Why is Socialism a bad thing again?

Euro’s love them some soccer. Amsterdam has been overtaken this weekend by a beer guzzling, whore mongering heard of costumed Dutch and Scottish 25-35 year old guys. Evidently there is a big ‘football’ game between Scotland and The Netherlands. The closest thing I’ve seen to this in America are the Oakland Raiders tailgate parties or the USC football games.

Mostly Scottish revelers overtook Dam Square (pictured) all of Saturday and left it littered with beer bottles and boxes.

Kilt wearing Scot’s getting plastered in Dam Square

Dutch supporters in an alley off of Dam Square, going into the Red Light District

More Drunken Dutch near Dam Square

Bagpipe playing Scot in a Red Light District Coffee Shop

I have just crossed an important milestone, at least for me: I have now gained over 100% on my original investment-in just under one month-thanks mostly to BAC going from 7.22 to 7.64 in early trading today.

Current positions and % of total investment:

BAC 65.95%
GE 24.95%
AXP 4.95%
MGM 4.15%

My strategy of day trading to a larger position in BAC has resulted in a one day gain of 11.11%, meaning I now have 11.11% more shares than I had yesterday-while using no margin and with the same investment.

I started the day by exiting my position at $7.87, which I had entered the day before at $7.16. I then re-entered at $7.7299 when it looked like the stock was done dropping after the open, but sold it at $7.56 when it appeared it was going to drop a lot farther. I then bought it back at $7.4599 and sold it again at $7.60 after a nice rally. I again entered at $7.4599 on a dip and closed my last position of the day on a rally up to $7.6151.

I sent an email into Dan Dicker from TheStreet asking what he thought of my blog posts and strategy, and he advised against day-trading a stock I am bullish on-suggesting that I instead maintain a long position and day trade it separately. That is what I am going to do today-using my margin account to day-trade the dips and rips (buy going long when BAC is cheap and selling when it has rallied). Each time I will book my profit by selling less shares than I bought-and keeping them in my long position-thus constantly re-investing my profit. If I have a losing trade I will then sell more off next time around to bring my margin balance back to $0.00.

I think this is a solid bankroll management strategy. It will surely require some tweaking.

At the open today the stock plunged and I got back in pre-market at $7.22 and day-traded an additional block at $7.22. I sold the day-traded portion on a breakout to $7.32 and according to plan re-invested my profit by selling only enough shares to cover what I had borrowed on margin. My position gained another 1.36% in the process and I now have a position of 12.43% of my original investment – after only two days of employing some variation of my share buying re-investment daytrading strategy.

In early trading my investment shares (all 112.43% of them) are up from $7.22 to $7.34, a solid start to this day.

I’ve never seriously day traded before, though I have studied investing and the stock market semi-actively for several years. About a month ago I decided to use some free capital to make a bold bet on an economic recovery, and began acquiring blue chip stocks. After following them closely the last month I have taken a particular interest in and linking for BAC (Bank of America). I am beginning to sense that I can anticipate where the share price is going-either in the short run (next 10 minutes) or over the further out near term (next half day of trading). I also have a sense that it is headed up over the next two years-and that is a gradual upward climb. Though along a climb like the one BAC is going to make (From $3.60 back to a peak of $50+) there are bound to be corrections from the surges in share price that a stock makes when gaining 1,000%+ of its value. Those corrections are what I think I can sense coming-or at least I have been right often enough to give me a false sense of confidence in my ability to predict them coming. Time will tell whether it is dumb luck or a ‘feel’ or ‘read’ I have on this stock-much like those I learned to make at the poker table.

The last two days have been a big learning experience for me, as I have begun actively day trading BAC. On the 24th I made a couple of bad predictions, and made some costly timing and firing mistakes, that a more experienced trader never would have made-but I stuck to my strategy of limiting my losses and letting my gains ride-and in the end turned a small profit on the day after and end of day rebound in share price. On the 25th I had a great day but again made a silly rookie mistake firing my orders at the opening, and was on a laptop using mobile wireless all day and not online for crucial times like market open and the next half hour after. If I was able to execute my strategy technologically (meaning actually having fired the orders when I wanted them fired) I would have made a further 5% on one of my early trades-and since my trades are all 100% of my position (I do not use margin or leverage)-that would have been a big 5%. However I correctly exited early in the day after a pre-market rally, to have the stock fall from 7.64 to 7.16, where I bought it all back. Effectively reducing my share price by .48. The stock then surged back to 7.70 at the end of the day and now is just under $8.00 in pre-market.

The beauty of a day like that is that if I had gone to the beach and just checked the shares at the end of the day-I’d have seen a $0.06 gain on the day and would have been satisfied with that. However by spotting when the stock might be overheated (at the open after surging pre-market) and then when it might have fallen to far (when it went from 7.93 to 7.16 in less than two hours), I was able to take advantage of those swings, and add a nice cushion to my profit on an otherwise normal +$0.06 day.

Yesterday BAC opened at $7.80 but was crashing in pre-market. I had picked it up at $7.00 the last time, and wanted to book my profit-so sold it instantly when it came onto the market. I then set a Short order to sell it if it dropped to 7.28 or lower, and this order executed at 7.26. I was not at an internet connection and did not have an exit plan and for the next short while the stock dropped. then it sharply rebounded and stayed steady. This is where I would have covered, booking a small profit and possibly ready to re-enter my position. I’m trying to take advantage of sharp corrections which are irrational-not normal price fluctuations (which I want to have a long position for-as I think they will rise in the long run). However by the time I got to check where it was at it had risen back to the $7.40 level. I decided here that I both wanted to stop my short losses early (I chose $7.50) and to re-enter the stock if it starting moving up again, as it could easily have another $0.75 upward climb, but it would be unlikely to have that same sort of freefall, as we are now into normal trading). So i chose $7.70 as the place I would go long if it rose to that. I indeed crossed through $7.70 so my short was covered and I was long my full position at $7.70. Well now it corrected again and down to $7.30. I thought this was too low so added another 40% to my position, so I was operating at 140% of what I normally have in BAC. The price did recover and opened today at $7.64 (where I exited-booking a small profit overall after I covered my short-which ended up being a losing bet overall, though only $0.24 per share.

Today should be a fun ride as well, after typing this I see the stock is above $8.00 in pre-market trading, now an $0.84 per share gain from where I got it yesterday. My strategy going into this will be to set a tight trailing sell order so if the stock loses say $0.05 per share early on, I dump it all and take my profit. I wont short it this time, I think I’ll not double my risk and exposure-but I will exit and wait for a re-entry point. Ideally around $7.50 per share, so I can reduce my cost per share by another $0.50+.

Going forward I think my new bankroll management strategy will be to have a specific dollar value in BAC, not a specific number of shares (which is what I have been doing). So for instance if I gain 10% and sell, then re-enter when the stock loses back 5% of that 10% gain-I will be able to by 5% more shares than last time-without using margin or increasing my investment. If I can do this just twice per week, it will have the following effect on my overall investment:

Assume; 100,000 shares for simplicity
Week 1: 105,000 – 110,250
Week 2: 115,762 – 121,550
Week 3 127.628 – 134,009
Week 4 140,710 – 147,745
Week 5 155,132 – 162,889
Week 6 171,003 – 179,585
Week 7 188,564 – 197,993
Week 8 207,892 – 218,287
Week 9 229,201 – 240,661
Week 10 252,695 – 265,329

So in just ten weeks I added 165% to my position. Though notice that adding 10% per week for 10 weeks is only 100%. A bonus 65% with the beauty of compounded interest!

After ten weeks of this I would probably grow bored and want to let the money work for me with much less effort, so if I leave those 265,000 shares alone and my plan works, I could easily have a further 100% gain in less than six months. That would equate to a 400% profit on my investment in less than 10 months. 400% in a day or a week might be a pipe dream. But in a market like this with stocks as low and volatile as they are-it seems more than possible for a savvy investor.

We shall see if I am that savvy investor, or just a sucker who is getting lucky in the casino that is the stock market.