Saturday, June 30, 2007

Growing Shares Portfolio for Non-Premiums

Non-Premium players of Blogshares have a tough time keeping up, because they are limited in the number of transactions they can execute in any 24-hour period. There's still a good way to grow your portfolio; it won't let you compete one-on-one with the premium players, but it will get you close. I've used it to build up a 660+ blog portfolio worth an average of about $3 million each, all without tangling in the cut-throat world of the top-100 blogs.

First, you need to know that artefact-based share transactions don't get limited by the 21-turn-per-day restriction. Restructure, Hostile Takeover, and Pressure Public are great tools for acquiring blog wealth.

If you have more than 750 Karma, any vote you place on a blog automatically puts it into the industry you voted. You can use this tactically to your advantage, because each artefact has the potential to buy two different blogs in a day (if you could find ones in the right industries). If you aren't at 750 Karma yet, vote well and vote often to get there. This tactic still works, but takes more time and is limited to once per day.

One more important piece of information: when you buy a blog from the market (limited to 25% of the existing shares at one time), the price-to-earnings ratio goes up one step. When you acquire all of the shares in the blog through a Pressure Public artefact use, the P/E ratio will continue to increase every 15 minutes for about the next 2 hours. A fresh blog starting at about 1.0 P/E should end up around 80 or so.

So here's a strategy using the above information:

1) Go to the following pages and look for blogs with a low P/E and available shares:
-- Stock Tips (the current lowest P/Es in the index)
-- Lowest Priced Shares (10 lowest priced blogs)

2) Pressure public on the blogs you find, to get the available shares off the market. Look at the transactions on this blog for an example, where I just did a Pressure Public. Note how the share price increases in 8 increments, each about 15 minutes apart.



3) If you find one you want to take away from someone, use Restructure until you get 20% ownership -- usually 2 times -- then do a Hostile Takeover. Avoid doing this on blogs where the blog owner has a significant stake (> 50%), because it's hard to get the shares needed for a takeover. I just did this on this blog, and it took 4 Restructures to get over 20%.



In this case, the blog had recently crashed and was at less than B$ 0.01 per share, so the move looks pretty small, but with one hype in there I was able to get the price up over B$ 0.72, which is almost 100 times what I paid for it.

Note what happens to the price in the 2 hours after my takeover of each blog -- pretty spectacular rise in value (after a slow start). I'll update this post in a bit with images of the share price history, since the blogs will probably continue to change over time.

This whole strategy works best if you have a lot of artefacts. Vote and Moderate industries (if you have enough Karma) to get chips, which you can sell for cash. Use the cash to buy ideas for the artefacts you don't own yet. You can win chips, ideas and artefacts playing chances. You win shares in blogs too, but those are usually dead blogs not worth holding -- report the dead ones for more sigma, plus 20 chips each.

Try this whole pattern for a week or so, and watch your portfolio grow. I'll bet you can double your holdings in less than that time.