The Rise of a Stock-Market Blogger – Barron's – Barrons.com
Kristine Andersen likes to blog, tweet, and trade stocks. And a lot of people like to follow her—more than 64,000 at last count. Pinpointing the number of followers is an inexact science, but the sheer size of Andersen’s figures rivals those of much better-known bloggers like Henry Blodget, who claims 77,000.
Andersen is one of the more prolific bloggers on Seeking Alpha, where 1.7 million online subscribers get stock-market analysis from a very diverse group of 7,000 contributors. Many have or, like Blodget, once had jobs in finance. Some haven’t, but are well-placed to analyze industries in which they work. Still others are accountants or economists who suss out investing opportunities using financial ratios and macroeconomic indicators.
She doesn’t fit into any of those categories. Based in Santa Monica, Calif., Andersen is a mathematician who has been trading off and on for nearly 20 years. She’s a self-taught investor who churns out three blog posts a day, and has a talent for marketing, which is on display at seekingalpha.com as well as her own Website, StockMarketCookBook.com. (Blodget is on a different platform.) There Dr. Kris, as she’s known online, opines on everything from market internals to fundamental trading themes like sector rotation, while serving up investment ideas from a pink-bordered recipe menu that includes Earnings Etouffe and, of course, the daily Blue Plate Specials, for which she charges.
Dr. Kris, as she’s known, has turned her math and marketing skills into a very popular online investment cookbook.
Ian White for Barron’s
Those who find her site a little kitschy should know that the former cheerleader also was valedictorian at Whitewater High School, outside Milwaukee. She went on to get a bachelors degree in math and a Ph.D. in geochemistry from MIT. Her doctoral thesis was on mineral spectroscopy, the study of light wavelengths as they pass through or are emitted by minerals, often on distant planets. Her first fieldwork at an observatory prompted a career change. “Staying up all night staring at dots in a cold planetarium isn’t as much fun as it appears on TV,” she says. “Life is all about not getting bored.”
In 1995, Andersen sold her interest in a Los Angeles engineering company and took off to travel the world. That led to travel writing, but she needed a better way to build a nest egg. Investing was the most challenging alternative. She dabbled in blue chips and mutual funds for a time, but they didn’t capture her interest. Instead, she dove into options trading, which is complicated, fast-paced, and occasionally dangerous, as well as market charting. “As a math major, it just makes sense that I would lean toward technical analysis,” she says.
She read a lot of books and lost a lot of money for awhile. Eventually she was raising her portfolio balance about 4% a month, mostly writing covered calls on tech stocks as that market ballooned in the late-1990s.
Then, in August 2000, she decided to escape a volatile market with a trip to Cape Verde Island, off Senegal. She should have gone in July. Andersen glimpsed a newspaper headline by chance about the market crashing. By the time she got to a computer (this was pre-smartphone era), she had lost a bunch—$30,000 on one position alone.
“You really don’t learn a lesson until you lose money,” she says. The setback has informed her trading and advice since. She took 2001 off and re-entered the market in 2003, then moved to cash before the 2008-09 kerfuffle. She has been trading heavily since 2010 and has increased her portfolio more than 50%, she says.
GIVEN HER HISTORY and curiosity, it’s little surprise that Dr. Kris has, in five years of blogging about stocks, tackled just about everything from momentum shares to sector rotation to seasonal plays to channeling (where a share price strays outside the upper or lower limit of its moving average). “I’m a jack-of-all-trades and master of none,” she says. “I love bringing things to people’s attention, but it’s up to readers to research their own trades.”
She writes three blog posts a day that get published on both sites. An example from last week: “Children of the ’70s will remember the Moody Blues’ classic Ride My Seesaw. That tune pretty much sums up recent market action—up one day, the next day down. Day traders have been very happy riding this seesaw.” Then, there’s time spent chatting in Seeking Alpha’s StockTalks forum, Twitter.com, and StockTwits.com. She devotes at least five hours a day to writing and analyzing on her Windows laptop or Samsung Galaxy Note II smartphone. Right now she’s bullish on the rest of 2013.
ANDERSEN IS A frequent visitor to financial-news sites, but most of her trades and blogging ideas are a combination of work on electronic broker optionsXpress’s site (optionsexpress.com) and the technical analysis Website QCharts (qcharts.com). She first goes to the “hot lists of tickers making new yearly highs and lows, percentage and point gainers and losers, what’s gapping up, and what has unusual volume or block trading. Then I turn to the charts.”
The charts led to her best score, a trade on the beaten-down shares of the
U.S.: Nasdaq
$68.37
-1.16
-1.67%
April 10, 2014 4:00 pm
Volume (Delayed 15m)
:
2.63M
AFTER HOURS
$68.36
-0.01
-0.01%
April 10, 2014 4:56 pm
Volume (Delayed 15m):
50,506
P/E Ratio
23.40
Market Cap
$23.35 Billion
Dividend Yield
2.75%
Rev. per Employee
$1,074,980
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CME in
Your Value
Your Change
Short position
(ticker: CME), which netted her a $25,000 profit in 2005, because its all-important price and volume charts screamed “buy.” She bought a chinchilla coat and a big aquamarine cocktail ring with some of the proceeds.
Her recipes have definitely attracted diners. One follower recently tweeted his thanks for recommending oil refiners. Another complimented her for providing market limits on a daily basis, referring to support and resistance levels that he finds helpful in his day trading.
The positive responses prompted Dr. Kris to package her ideas as “recipes” on StockMarketCookBook.com. Point trades like Straddle Strudel sell for $10 apiece and are on the “menu” alongside the Blue Plate Specials. This $20 monthly e-mail service includes three picks a day—tickers on the move, long-term blue-chip plays, and positions ripe for technical trades. Currently, 89 out of the 106 positions in this six-month-old model portfolio hold unrealized gains.
Dr. Kris figures she’s finally found a calling that doesn’t get boring. “Something new pops up every day,” she says. “I like to figure out puzzles, and the stock market is an ever-changing puzzle.”
E-mail: [email protected]
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The Rise of a Stock-Market Blogger – Barron's – Barrons.com
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