Looking over Mr. Market’s shoulder (and other poor behavior)

The purpose of this post is to give a brief update on my recent buying and selling activity, but first, I’d like to start by fessing up to some poor behavior during the past couple of weeks. No, I haven’t been out stealing candies from the mouthes of babes, nor have I been shoplifting ‘just for the fun of it’ like they do in Hollywood. And no, I haven’t been involved in insider trading either! Rather, with all the action in Premier Exhibitions and Gravity over the past month, I’ve been ‘looking over Mr. Market’s shoulder’ a bit too much. Yep, monitoring the market, watching the tape, as they say. Ostensibly it was to dispose of my positions in the two aforementioned stocks. Unfortunately, I kind of extended things. I got sucked in. In the end it was like giving a serial shopper on a stroll down Madison Avenue  a platinum Amex card, without a chaperone.

So what’s the damage? Mostly in ego I think. Since it’s the discipline that counts in value investing, a binge is disheartening, to say the least. But on to the details of my bingeing! I added some shares to a few existing positions as the market pulled back (or at least the shares I was interested in) over the past couple of weeks. I’ve added shares in NovaGold (I plan on a full position before the spinoff at month-end) as well as rounding out my position in AbitibiBowater dba Resolute Forest Products (couldn’t they just change the name?) at around $14 a share and finally couldn’t resist a BAC warrant or two at $4.50. I also began selling off a few shares of MFC Industrial (for reasons I laid out in my post a few days ago). Unfortunately I also dabbled in a few new positions; RadioShack (RSH) and The Hartford Financial warrants (HIG-WS). I plan on posting more on these new positions over the next week or so. They are both small starter positions, and I anticipate building them up over the next 6 months if Mr. Market affords me just the right opportunity.