Two Way Radio Directory - Blog

Early June I went to a local Lenscrafters to get sunglasses. They had to order them. A month later, no glasses. I went in and got a refund. They said the lab had sent the wrong lenses three times.

 In July I went to the Eyeware Center in a local Target store. I asked if they were affiliated with Lenscrafters and the person told me they were owned by the same company that owns Lenscrafters. I told him about my experience and he assured me they would take care of me. Two weeks later, and I called today since I had not heard from them. No glasses. I went by the store to get my refund and the nice person told me about how their computer system had never gotten my order to the lab because the model number for the frames was not in the computer system correctly.

All these stores and many other brands in the U.S.A. are now part of the Luxottica Group. Apparently their drive to consolidate the business for increased profits has been done without attention to the back office parts of the business.

I am now going to find a vendor who is NOT affiliated with this group. So, if you are in the market for glasses, be warned.

 Maybe I should be shorting their stock!

A couple of months ago I built a new PC and set it up running Linux. This was prompted by my desire to familiarize myself with that OS due to its similarity to Unix, an OS used on many new servers we recently upgraded to on the Public Safety radio system I manage at work.

After some period of gaining enough familiarity to be able to do the basic things, I am becoming increasingly impressed.

This weekend I installed Wine, a package that says it is not an emulator, but allows applications created for a Windows PC to operate in a Linux environment.

I am running a Linux distribution known as Mandriva 2006. Running Wine on this, I was able to install Amibroker, my favorite stock charting software on the Linux PC. 

Linux is open source and has a reputation for being very stable.

In this climate of world volatility, the markets behave similarly. I find this unsettling and have gradually changed my trading method to try to adapt. Over the past three months this has been successful for me.

Rather than depending on trailing stops, I have begun to exit at decent gain points. When an equity reaches the 5% point, I start watching closely, and usually exit soon after.

I buy in small blocks, usually 100 shares and track each individually, selling each block as it becomes profitable. This has worked much better for me than averaging all purchases together and tracking as a lot. I have done well with MOT using this method.

I also keep an eye on a few stocks I am comfortable with and buy them on pull backs, then sell on a gain position. I rarely buy on an uptrend.

One recent success was WLV. After making some money on it earlier this year in a few days, I bought it again and sold this past week for a 25% gain on an early morning run up, that pulled back later. I believe the run up may have been shorts buying to cover.