The difference between a trade and an investment?  You know for a long time I thought that liking a company and investing in it when its price was down was a smart idea.  However, it is a terrible idea because there is no catalyst.  I recently did this with AAPL, my thinking was clear at the time but now seems convoluted.  What is AAPL?  It's a company that attained the largest market capitalization in the world through ground breaking innovation.  So what was my problem in believing in that?  The problem was and still is that there is no catalyst.  I simply believed that this great company will revolutionize the world again.  They did it with the iPhone so why cant they make a watch just as ground breaking?  I don't know, maybe they can, the point is I acted on the impulse, I believed that AAPL is so great that they will come out with something great again.  I have no information to work with except for their past performance.  As information becomes instantaneously priced into the market, acting on past performance is simply stupid. AAPL is an investment that offers some dividend protection and should continue to grow, slower than we want but it should still grow.  To trade AAPL with no catalyst was not a good idea.  Well, I did have expectations for a catalyst, I thought there would be a substantial dividend increase, but that was based more on expectation than substantial information.  AAPL never said it was going to increase its dividend, I just expected AAPL to do it.  Unfortunately I am not the CEO so I traded on what I thought should happen rather than trading on actual information.  This is why I love trading micro cap stocks.  Important information is actually stated in conference calls.  The best part is that institutional investors pay no attention to these companies and their conference calls because the market cap is too small for them to make significant money.  The best stocks in the world are followed by the dumbest players in the market.  Why? Because they are attracted to the number of shares they can buy and the possibility of hitting a ten bagger.  That is why when I was 14 years old I invested in a company that supposedly made laser keyboards.  Just looking at their shitty website and zero sales should have given it away, but the idea in my head of using a laser as a keyboard seemed so cool that I threw money at it. Stay away from these scams, better yet you should short them.  The important thing to remember is that micro cap stocks provide you the opportunity to find legitimate stocks that are screaming undervalued and have real catalysts.  Because these legit companies are not claiming that they found a cure for AIDS or just figured out how to eliminate hurricanes, they are heavily shorted and that is why I rely on the catalysts.  The catalyst is do or die time.  If a CEO makes it clear that a big deal with Mercedes is going to happen then all I can do as a trader is look at the CEO's credibility.  In the case of REFR, the CEO checks out and all the executives have bought stock on the open market.  Essentially they are frustrated with the stock price.  There is no doubt that REFR is a choppy stock, but that is not the trade.  The trade is the main catalyst.  The CEO made it clear that on May 15th the Mercedes S-Class will be introduced at the Hamburg, Germany Autoshow and REFR's Smart glass will be an option in it.  This is the catalyst and if that catalyst does not transpire, it is then that I sell and move to the next great company that has a viable catalyst.

Trade smart,
Austin