Cherry picking to sell a serivce...some ramblings about Plan M

I get lots of emails from people trying to sell their service, that comes from doing tons of investigating of a variety of services while scoping out their plan and method and, as it turns out, even try some on for size.

I am down to one advisory service now...I will wait until after this pullback is complete to give a final comment on it.

Suffice it to say that I have not stuck with any other service that I tried and I checked out far more than I tried.

Today I received an email from one that chattered on and on about a pick that is currently at the 27% return mark. Now I must admit that the dividend yield, due to the purchase price, was something like 21%...but high yielding stocks are easy to find right now I suppose. I have not been looking as I do not have the capital to buy and hold a stock for a good yield.

I usually skipped the emails altogether that made claims of success based on a single position, usually, but not always, an un-named one. In order to find out what the trade was I would have to sign up or at least click on their link... oh, do they mention that they get some sort of payback even for that?

If I were to decide to sell a service, newsletter...or whatever I could very easily cherry pick some of my picks and come up with some decent winners. Of course I could ignore the losers and really paint it nice but I don't really want to do that.

Since I have been playing and trying to stay within my cash allowances while picking trades and strategies I have necessarily restricted myself to trades that work for me in my situation, otherwise I would have been wasting my time.... of course if I chose to sell information I could virtually do the trades and pass them about and just draw in cash for the information. No restrictions on valuations, position size, loss allowances... I would be willing to bet that almost any of my more tested strategies would have been profitable in a virtual situation. I know they mostly all backtested very well.

That is not my thing though. Due to playing with options now I can widen my scope so some of the nicer picks are available where they were not previously. Loss allowances can be built into the option trade easier than with a $60 or $70 stock trade.

This, of course, leads me back to my latest "Plan M"... which is in the works... but then even that leads me in another direction again.

Focus, simplicity and repetition will be the new keys.
Small position sizing and tight loss allowances the regulations.
Trend channeling and predetermined targets the triggers.
Put and call options the medium.

Even though my TFSA is committed in full I plan on aiming this at a $5000 account size anyway and providing for at least a 15 to 25 position portfolio... even with only 32 stocks (or so) options allow for multiple time frame trading, rolling positions and profit crystallization...some things not possible with a stock trade. The "headroom" allows for an initial drawdown without affecting the number of positions possible as $5000 could hold as many as 35 active $120 positions and allow for commission costs

Well, enough babbling for today. Hopefully I can post some trades by early next week, or at least some ideas applied to some older picks that I did not follow through previously....or maybe even get some charts back in here. I do like playing with charts.

Jeff.