MIVA Dropped

This morning, I dumped my position in MIVA, which I bought into in February in hopes that they could either turn around the companies they'd consolidated or sell them off to bigger players, but neither has happened thus far and there's no sign that it ever will.

The result, a net loss of 52.4% ...



They've been flirting with disaster for a few months now, and have bounced below and back above my usual stop-loss of 50% for penny stocks - I finally decided to get off the dime, before the share-price fell to a dime - and divert the cash to better bets.

Weekly Summary

In general, it's been a good week for me - transfer of additional funds into my portfolio to take a risk on Freddie Mac has diluted my return ratio, but it's still looking pretty good.



My sickest dog (MIVA) has pulled back from the edge of a stop-loss sell order, and a handful of them are doing well - especially Krispy Kreme. I'm at a loss to explain that, in the absense of any market news - but I don't feel the need to worry about a ray of sun in an otherwise stormy market.

Weekly Summary

My portfolio's been looking better in recent weeks - between the ups and the downs, I'm back on top by an appreciable margin:


Of all my positions, I've got two that are serious losers: GOIG has fallen to a small fraction of its former value. Rather than waiting for it to fall off the books, I'm going to donate my shares to charity and write off the purchase price as a deduction - and MIVA has been teetering on the brink, and has finally fallen beyond the point of no return: unless it takes a leap upward after the bell on Monday morning, I'm going to cut my losses on that one as well.

Weekly Summary

This week, I'm back in the black by an appreciable margin, largely due to my recent investment in eTrade and the continued progress of Krispy Kreme:



While the beleaguered big-board stocks have been making sufficient gains, my "true" penny stocks are continuing to flounder, with Miva dancing at the edge of my tolerance for bad performance - but in the end, my losses and gains have largely balanced one another out, and I've yet to stumble across a multi-bagger this year.

Miva, Inc. (MIVA)

Company:	Miva, Inc.
Web Site:	http://www. miva.com
Purchase Price:	$1.64
Current Price:	Click Here

Miva is a small and growing firm in the Internet advertising space, which salvaged the remains of several companies in the wake of the dot-com crash and has been quietly gaining momentum for the past four years. Its value proposition is aggregating several best-in-breed solutions offered by individual companies, enabling its customers to balance and adjust their campaigns to adjust to changing trends in new media promotions.

Admittedly, there's nothing on the immediate horizon that I expect will cause a dramatic, short-lived increase in value, but the company remains strong and stead, albeit small, and seems to be greatly undervalued, so I sense that it 2008 may be the year that the company turns itself around, or gets bought out. Given that the shares are selling at close to their book value, I sense there's a profit to be made, either way.