As I mentioned on Saturday I had bought 100 shares of Shanda in expectation of solid earnings.  I had based this expectation on their competitors reporting solid earnings.  I was wrong.

Tonight Shanda reported a loss of $.04 a share vs an expected $.26 per share profit.  The stock, which was up a couple percent during the day, tanked after hours by around 18% (I’m down around $3 per share).  I expect it will recover some over the next few days but I may have to use covered calls to get back to even on this one.  I’ve done a bit more research on the company and despite it’s aweful earnings report I think the stock is still undervalued at this price.

I haven’t yet decided if I am going to sell and take the loss or hold on and wait for it to recover.  I’ll dig into the numbers some more over the next few days and make that determination.

is up at the Money Blog Network.  My first carnival submission actually…

Hazzard over at Everybody Loves Your Money wrote and article on how keeping up with the Jones’ happens in many ways. He makes a couple good points, inspired me to write this post…

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Friday saw some good results coming out of a couple of Chinese Internet companies. (Netease.com) The whole sector rose nicely. I’ve been watching Shanda Interactive for a while (SNDA). It was mentioned by Cramer a couple of months ago as being a good company that had been beat up. Shanda releases earnings on Monday which I am guessing are going to be positive. I bought 100 shares to cash in on it if it does happen. This is about as close to gambling as I get with my investments…
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As I wrote about before, when my wife lost her job we had to turn in the company lease cars we had. We had anticipated this and purchased a 2004 Ford F150 so we could tow the horse trailer around and have some reliable transportation. We also own a 1990 Honda Civic which we bought about a year and a half ago from the parents of a friend who passed away. We paid $600 for it.
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It seems the interest rate I offered was too low (5%) and my listing only received 1 bid for $100.  I withdrew the listing in order to free up that person’s money (a winning bid is essentially held in escrow and cannot be bid on any other loan requests.)

I may try again in a bit but since I can still borrow more money at 0% from a couple of credit cards and even more at 1.99% I may just pass.  For now I think I’ll wait and slowly increase the number of loans I have until there is some cash flow coming in.   Once that is happening I may consider borrowing even at 1.99% and loaning the money out.  It should be relatively easy to earn better than that even with a default or two.  The loan payments could then go towards paying off the credit card and whatever is left could be used to finance further loans.  Will have to see how smoothly things go with the money I am prepared to lose 100% of before committing any that I am not…

I sold Mittal today (MT) @ $33.17 per share.

I had intended on keeping it up until last night.  Was doing some research on it and just didn’t get a good feeling about their merger with Arcelor.  My gut just told me to sell.  I may be wrong but I did have better than a 20% return on the stock since November.  Taking the Covered Call losses into account the total return is around 10%.  I’ll take that any day.
I still hold 200 shares of Ameritrade (AMTD).  It seems to have lost its momentum since the special dividend.  My current plan is to hold on to it until the benefits of their merger with TD Waterhouse begin to hit the bottom line.

This leaves me with a fairly significant cash position at the moment (> $5000).  I’m not yet convinced that DEO is the right stock for me at the moment so the search continues for my next purchase.  More later.

Well my funds showed up in my Prosper.com account. I bid on a loan as well. Small business, $25k loan @ 15%. The borrower has B credit and expects to pay the loan back in far less than 3 years. I only put in $100 so if it goes bust it won’t be the end of the world. I still plan on doing some other loans as well to spread the risk around.

Someone asked for a $20 referral to Virtualbank a day or so ago. I logged on to their newly redesigned site but could not find the link anywhere… Until just now.  It’s very buried.  Basically, to get there you log in, then click the statement archive link in the lower left.  Once you’ve done that, a link to the Refer a Friend page will show up (again in the lower left.)  Of course when I tried to actually send the referral it failed… :)  I’ve sent a note and I’m sure they’ll get it fixed shortly.
By the way, the eMoney Market account there is now paying a competitive 4.5% rate (4.6% API). Not as hot as HSBC’s 4.8% or Ing’s 4.75% but not bad either. I am sure all rates are subject to change but we’ll likely see even higher interest rates soon.

I was logging on to my 401k account this morning to make sure MS Money was in agreement with Vanguard. To my happy surprise there were several thousand more dollars in there than I expected.

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