Sniper pulls the trigger

A friend and colleague recently described my investing strategy back to me as sniping. I had chosen my target companies, and for each one of them I had identified a target price.  The cross-hairs were set and I was ready.  The trigger finger was not particularly twitchy, but it was ready to fire the moment that something appeared in the sights.

Anyway, I recently went traveling, and so was pretty much off line for about a month.  Knowing that this was  going to be the case, I decided that I'd put in some low-ball buy orders on the market before I went, just in case a stock market crash occurred while I was away.  I won't be so bold as to say that that was a prediction - well - the crash was, but not the timing.


Interestingly, my initial low-balls were so low that Comsec would not accept them:

Your order cannot be accepted due to the following reason.  Price not accepted - Your order cannot be accepted as your 'At Limit' price is too far from the stock's last traded price.

WTF?  Why do they care how low my low-ball is?  They don't explicitly tell you what "too far" is, but I suspect that it's around 10-15%, but may depend on volatility or volume.  Anyway, I was about to set sail for my journey, and was in high spirits, so I decided to raise my thresholds so that I would at least have some buy orders out there - even if the price wasn't quite as low as I would have preferred.

Anyway, 3 weeks in to my trip, I get an email "Trade Confirmation...".  I had set a buy order on JBH at $14.00, and it had executed.  The low turned out to be $13.35 (not as low as my initial low-ball), so Comsec's stupid price limitation cost me a bit there, but I still got it at a far better price than the $15.65 that others were recommending. 

Time will tell whether or JBH is a good investment (great company) or not, and also whether or not I should have waited for the uncompromised buy price.  I certainly got a better price that 99% of others over the last 12 months, having only paid 70% of what some others have paid (and therefore got a 42% better return).

I am still very bearish on the stock market over the next few years, and so will happily wait before sniping any more investing opportunities.  I've reset the sights to where they should have been.  Trigger ready.  No hurry.