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8:30 AM Tuesday, November 8, 2005: Not an easy market. Best played short-term. Recent picks Qualcomm and now TiVo have done well. Whole Foods and InSite Vision bounced up, then eased off. How short-term to play? A day or two for some. Months for others. Keep tight stop losses -- no more than 10%. Key tools:

+ Google alerts can tell tell how "hot" a stock is. Receive many alerts each day you know the stock is "hot." The service is free and easy to turn on and off. Click here.

+ Short-term stock movements are useful. The Wall Street Journal has list of daily gainers and losers. For the gainers, Click here. For the losers, click here.

+ Stock screeners can highlight large earnings gains, etc. Yahoo! Finance has one. Click here. SmartMoney has one. Click here.

Sorry tech state from Fred Hickey: Fred writes the best newsletter on tech stocks. It's called The High-Tech Strategist. He knows the industry intimately. Sadly, he's mostly bearish. His November newsletter shows him long AMD, Borland, Novell, 3Com and Adaptec. But he's mostly in cash and treasuries. His summary of the industry:

After reviewing the quarterly reports from many of the major tech companies last month, it became clear that the industry is still in a sorry state. There are too many vendors with too much capacity and that has led to widespread pricing and margin pressures. It's profitless prosperity ... 2006 is shaping up to be a year to forget. Once again, I hope to capture some of the downside through put options....

Visit Ad-Tech. If you're in New York, come over to the New York Hilton and visit the Ad-Tech trade show. "Learn the disciplines, tools and techniques that today's executives need to succeed in the new "Age of Engagement."

Useful facts:
+ In West Virginia if you run over an animal, you can legally take it home and cook it for dinner.
+ Rameses condoms are named after the great Egyptian pharaoh, who fathered 160 children.

Are you nuts?
During a visit to the mental asylum, a visitor asked the Director what the criterion was which defined whether or not a patient should be
institutionalized.

"Well," said the Director, "we fill up a bathtub, then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to
empty the bathtub."

"Oh, I understand," said the visitor. "A normal person would use the bucket because it's bigger than the spoon or the teacup."

"No." said the Director, "A normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a room with or without a view?

Recent column highlights:
+ Dumb reasons we hold losing stocks. Click here.
+ How my private equity fund is doing. Click here.
+ Blackstone private equity funds. Click here.
+ Manhattan Pharmaceuticals: Click here.
+ NovaDel Biosciences appeals. Click here.
+ Hana Biosciences appeals. Click here.
+ All turned on by biotech. Click here.
+ Steve Jobs Commencement Address. The text is available: Click here. The full audio is available. Click here.
+ The March of the Penguins, an exquisite movie. Click here.
+ When to sell stocks. Click here.

Harry Newton

This column is about my personal search for the perfect investment. I don't give investment advice. For that you have to be registered with regulatory authorities, which I am not. I am a reporter and an investor. I make my daily column -- Monday through Friday -- freely available for three reasons: Writing is good for sorting things out in my brain. Second, the column is research for a book I'm writing called "In Search of the Perfect Investment." Third, I encourage my readers to send me their ideas, concerns and experiences. That way we can all learn together. My email address is . You can't click on my email address. You have to re-type it . This protects me from software scanning the Internet for email addresses to spam. I have no role in choosing the Google ads. Thus I cannot endorse any, though some look mighty interesting. If you click on a link, Google may send me money. That money will help pay Claire's law school tuition. Read more about Google AdSense, click here and here.
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