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trading protocol
Through a Dangerous Door
Life in the 21st century is more connected and accessible than ever before. The Internet has brought whole new worlds of opportunity that would have been all but unimaginable before.
New opportunities have also created new pitfalls. Online stockbrokers have opened new doors for small-time traders, racing to cut commissions and expand access to trading instruments—even ever riskier ones.
Traditionally, trading features such as derivatives and margin trading were reserved for experienced investors who had money to lose. New online trading platforms have been pushing down the barriers to entry, allowing traders with just a few thousand dollars to their name to make heavily-leveraged speculative bets.
Our investment philosophy centers on traditional equity investing. We believe in owning pieces of real companies that have physical property and actual products. This provides no guarantees for us; equity investments are considered volatile, and they risk loss if a company disappears from the map.
Even so, these risks are small potatoes compared to what investors may get themselves into when they start playing around with complicated investment vehicles. Derivative investments can very easily be wiped out, and margin traders may find themselves owing more money than they put in to begin with. Traders beware!
At some point, it seems frankly irresponsible to turn inexperienced traders loose with such dangerous financial instruments. (In June, tragedy followed when a young trader misread his online trading statement and thought he was $700,000 in debt.) Online platforms have opened some doors that would have been best left closed.
Our goal here at 228Main.com is to make investing more accessible, more transparent, and more understandable for our clients. Part of that mission is making sure that we are not steering clients into inappropriate investments, a protection that do-it-yourselfers trading online lack.
We do not believe our role as advisors is to play “high priest” and tell you that we cannot be bothered to explain things to laypeople: we want to lay everything out on the table and make sure that our clients understand what they are getting into.
Clients, if you have any questions or concerns please call or email us.
Content in this material is for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
All investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.
Stock investing includes risks, including fluctuating prices and loss of principal.
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The Things We Do Together
We figured out a long time ago that three things we do matter the most.
Clients, talking with you is at the top. We connect to understand your situation and collaborate with you on your plans and planning. You are the most important part of our business. Otherwise we have no one for whom to research investments or manage portfolios through LPL Financial.
Research and portfolio management are the other two core activities. Our principles drive both of these: avoid stampedes in the market, seek the best bargains, ‘own the orchard for the fruit crop.’ And both are informed by our connection and collaboration with you.
Although each member of the team serves you in multiple ways, we think of our support infrastructure as the trade desk, the research desk, and the logistics desk. (By logistics, we mean taking care of the details of doing business with you.) These functions connect our main activities.
A funny thing happened when we concentrated on the three activities that are most valuable to you. Less pleasant things that dominate the schedules of most financial types simply disappeared: selling, searching for prospects, marketing to strangers. Ever since, we’ve been able to spend a much higher fraction of our time talking with you and striving to grow your buckets.
If your buckets grow, you like it and our revenues grow. Why waste time and energy on strangers when we can invest it in our friends? It sure raises the enjoyment factor for us.
Clients, we do not know if this is of any interest to you. Writing it helped clarify our thoughts about what we are doing and why. If you would like to discuss this or any other pertinent topic, please email us or call.
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.
All investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.
News from the Trade Desk
As a hands-on research and portfolio management shop, we develop capabilities that many advisors do not need or have. If we were just finding money and sending it off to a third party to manage, life would be simple (and boring).
From time to time our research uncovers potential opportunities in discounted corporate bonds. The market for these high yield bonds is challenging. At times the market is “thin,” which means there is a lack of buyers and sellers. That makes it difficult to complete the purchases we desire.
Fortunately, LPL Financial has experienced and capable traders on the bond desk. They help us execute multimillion dollar bulk transactions at the best available prices. Buying for many accounts at one time in a bulk deal is a more efficient way to do it.
The opportunity in bonds is somewhat rare. We have only purchased eight different issuing companies in sixteen years. But there is another kind of trading that is relatively constant—the purchase and sale of stock.
The bulk bond purchases led us to a breakthrough in our stock trading protocol. One day we learned at 1 P.M. that a big bond purchase had been completed. We needed to go through eighty accounts and make sales of stock to raise money to pay for the newly purchased bonds. We had two hours before the market closed.
We had devised a protocol (a set of rules) to guide us. The four holdings we liked the least were ranked in order of priority to sell. In each account, we sold in that order until the bonds were paid for. Greg Leibman worked from one end of the list, Mark Leibman worked from the other, and they met in the middle before the market closed.
More recently we adapted the protocol concept to make stock trades. We came to a negative conclusion about an industry we previously invested in—at the same time we uncovered a new opportunity in another industry. We devised a protocol to sell one and buy the other, and completed more than five hundred stock trades in a single day.
The trade desk is where two of our key activities come together for you: research and portfolio management. We are pleased at the continued development of our research. The time we save with effective operations goes back into communicating with you—so call or email if you would like perspective on any money question.
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results.
The market value of corporate bonds will fluctuate, and if the bond is sold prior to maturity, the investor’s yield may differ from the advertised yield.
Stock investing involves risk including loss of principal.
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