The Tycoon Report

The TickerHound Challenge

Wednesday, December 26, 2007 | Wayne Mulligan

First off, Happy Holidays!

I hope you spent your holiday well, ate lots of good food and enjoyed some quality time with your loved ones.  I tried to relax a bit, but we've been pretty busy over here at TickerHound Headquarters.  Let me give you a quick recap (please note:  to stay up to date on the latest TickerHound news and developments, check out our blog by clicking here or visiting http://blog.tickerhound.com).

It's been a fun and wild week over here at TickerHound HQ. I could write about all of the good things we've been doing, but I'd rather bring you back behind the curtain and talk about some of the "fires" we've had to put out over here this week.

For starters, on the first day of the TickerHound launch our servers started to buckle under the weight of all the traffic coming to the site.  It was something we expected, but obviously didn't prepare well enough for.

So, if some of you had problems accessing the site last Tuesday morning, now you know why.

We also had some slight problems with e-mails getting delivered.  Just so you know, whenever one of your questions gets answered, TickerHound sends you an e-mail notification in real time.  This way you don't have to constantly check the site for updates.

Well, some of those e-mails might've ended up in your SPAM folder, so you should probably go take a look or just log back into the site.  You'll find all your Notifications there.  You'll also want to make sure you add "staff@tickerhound.com" and "tickerhound@tickerhound.com" to your whitelist. Click here for our whitelisting instructions.

We also had some fantastic Q&A's getting posted to the site this week!

I want to take a moment and highlight a few of them as well as some of the members who dug down deep and really put some effort into educating and empowering other investors.

This one is probably one of my favorites - it's a Q&A session among three of our Top TickerHounds this week: EthanR, JoeConlin and ChaosNantuko:

• A different type of dollar cost averaging

I really liked this next one because there's a bit of a debate swirling around in there - it's good to see all of the different perspectives on the market being put in one place and hashed out for all to see (and learn from).  What's your take on this one?

• Do you think there will be a major correction in the stock market?

And this one really exemplified what we're trying to do here on TickerHound - one of our members, redlodge75, asked a question about a specific trade he was working on, and two of our Top TickerHounds gave their take on it.  I hope it was helpful!

• I sell a covered call, the stock goes down; what would the reason be to buy these calls back at a much lower price?

Over a hundred other questions were asked over the last 2 - 3 days, so be sure to check the site and answer a few of them.  Or, if there's something you'd like to know, feel free to ask your own.

TickerHound Challenge

And here it is, the first of many TickerHound Challenges!

The basic premise behind the Staff Challenges is to really see if the "cream" does rise to the top in the TickerHound community.  Each weekend, we'll sit around and come up with questions that we feel will be fairly challenging and valuable to the community.

Then we'll post them to the site on Saturday and challenge you and other TickerHound members to answer them over the weekend.

Instead of receiving 10 points, the Best Answer for these questions will get 50 points!  So this is a great way to get your name up on the Top TickerHounds list fairly quickly.  So here goes…

1.    What's the best way to generate income if my goal is NOT "preservation of capital"?

2.    What are the three most important ratios to look at when valuing a business?

3.    What are the most important technical indicators to look for in a trade?

We'll be announcing the winners here next week and on the TickerHound Blog.  Good luck!




Wayne Mulligan
CEO
TickerHound