Missed the Boat again

Now if you invest in the stock market, you probably know there are two types of investing. One, you pick companies with actual value in them and you buy and hold for the long term. This is usually the smarter move. The other type is pretty much gambling. If you watch the market close enough, you start to see patterns. In fact, a psychology major might do pretty well, since most people in the market are regular people like me and you or just prospectors reacting to buzz and news.

Anyway, Palm was doing their announcement for their "new-ness" they were buzzing about. I knew that this announcement was going to make or break them, so I didn't want to make any moves market-wise. Well, I stayed on top of the announcement and realized that Palm had a pretty good contender for the smartphone category. I figure I was too late to enter so I didn't buy any shares. Palm was up $0.09 after the announcement. A small blip. Well, by the end of the day, Palm was up $1.15. A near 30% gain. I kicked myself a bit, but didn't think too much. I missed the mob buying in and I'll live with it. Well, I just checked again today and Palm is up another $1.62 (35%). Boy, am I pretty annoyed now.

Now Palm is a decent company that made a lot of money on Palm Pilots and then the Treo before the smartphone market exploded. But they made some not so good decision recently and paid for it with loss of market share. So this buy would've been a gamble. But this was a good gamble that I missed. Here are the reasons and lessons that I've learned from this:

1) A floundering decent company buzzing about some new product garners a lot of attention. People either want to see them succeed and comeback or watch the company crash and burn. So a lot of eyes were on this announcement.
2) The new Palm pre is pretty darn cool. It isn't as revolutionary as the iPhone when it came out, but it definitely makes it's presence known among the iPhones, Storms, and G1's out there. They have wireless charging and a pretty slick OS.
3) The market can be slow to respond with tentative news like this. Usually the market goes up on the rumor and down on the actual news (recent bank bailouts and auto bailouts). But this one, people weren't confident Palm could do it. Palm announced the Centro and the Treo Pro to very little fanfare. So when Palm announced the WebOS and the pre (and they were actually pretty good), it was a bit unexpected. Therefore, the market didn't respond till after it sunk in that they might actually comeback as a real contender in the consumer smartphone market.

In any case, I missed the big gain. We'll see how they price the pre to see how Palm will do in the future. Hopefully, Palm realized that they need to keep up with the other competitors and keep the "new-ness" coming and not just update the pre for another five years like they did with the Treo.

Oh, in case you were wondering, if you had 100 shares in the morning yesterday, you would have made $260+ right now. But again, it would have been a gamble. Palm could've just as easily announced a Treo 900 or the market might not have responded so well. So if you're risk-adverse, go buy Coco-Cola. As someone said: "Economy good, people drink Coke. Economy bad, people drink Coke."