Procrastination, the trader is told, is an unpardonable sin.

Yet, for five years – five long years – you have been selling Eaglecrest Explorations.

Yet, it still is unsold. The gun is cocked, but you haven’t been able to pull the trigger.

The ticker symbols on your chalkboard constantly change, like trains passing in the night, but not EEL. EEL somehow survives: Like a relative who comes to stay for a weekend and never leaves.

EEL has survived a crushing bear market, four computer crashes and 8,439 screaming sell signals. The Bolivian gold play on the TSX Venture exchange is the poster child for breaking trading rules.

You bought shares in the Vancouver company at 19 cents five years ago and that killer of all stock market emotions – greed – wouldn’t let you sell when it spiked to 73 cents in ’99.

Twice, you’ve booked a sell online but, like the time you had to put ol’ Yeller out of his misery, you didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.

Three times, maybe four, you’ve been at the front of the line with the ask price, but no takers.

Shareholders haven’t exactly been enamoured with exploration results from the San Simon project.

You stubbornly refused to fill the order on the bid price.

For the past several months, while virtually every other junior mining stock has been on a roll, you’ve watched the stock float in a narrow range from a dime to the low teens.

But then, it briefly shot up to 16 cents – while you were taking out the garbage.

And even when pro day trader Tyler Bollhorn’s Stockscores signalled a technical screaming sell, an inner voice shouted down common sense.

You always knew how the game was supposed to be played. You knew that trading discipline dictated that you take small losses on your losers before they become devastating losses.

You knew damned well that only boneheaded traders tie up capital on penny stocks with dead money. But selling, that was a confession your inner voice could not stand for – an outright confession that you were wrong.

And pride, damned pride, wouldn’t let you sell.

You figured that if Jesuit priests travelling through Bolivia in the 17th century could discover gold, as you learned at www.eaglecrestexplorations.com, Eaglecrest had to be on to something big.

Although you learned there were no gold-production records available for the past 20 years, the company website told you that “it has been estimated by local residents to be in the order of 65,000 oz gold.”

You’ve scolded other investors for carrying dog-eared stocks based on hope, and then you held yours – on hope.

But now, at long last, it’s game day and you’re ready to swallow your pride, to take your lumps, to book Eagle as a loss and to chalk it up as trading lesson No. 8,976.

As Dr. Phil would say, it is time to “GET REAL.”

So now you vow to get the monkey off your back, erase the bad memory from the chalkboard and move on.

On the morning of reckoning, you take a long pre-dawn walk. You drink three cups of Starbucks dark roast, sign on to your online E*Trade account and check to see what the market has to say about your old sparring partner EEL.

The market is not exactly pounding the table on the prospects in Bolivia. Fifteen minutes before the opening bell, EEL is acting like EEL – bidding 11 cents, asking 11.5 cents.

Swallowing hard, you place an order at the bid price to guarantee an order fill and prove you have at least one ounce of precious mettle.

You click on LIMIT order.

You punch in the price – $0.11.

In a cold sweat, you type your trading password.

Your eyes momentarily wander to CANCEL order.

You blank it from your mind and ease the cursor over SUBMIT.

Your trading finger trembles over the ENTER key. Suddenly, you have a life-threatening cramp in your trading finger.

You call for backup.

In desperation, you call your wife into the room to pull the trigger on EEL.

SOLD.



HOT STOCK: THYSSENKRUPP BUDD CANADA
BUD-TSX $11.50
Up $5.19 (+82.2%) on 13,400 shares (for week ending Feb. 20).
Just when you figured ThyssenKrupp was headed for the auto wrecking yard, the Kitchener auto parts maker blew the doors off shareholders by announcing their first quarterly profit since fiscal year 2000. ThyssenKrupp earned $32 million (35 cents per share) for the quarter ending Dec. 31 to boost its stock despite light volume.



COLD STOCK: JAGUAR NICKEL
JNI-TSX $1.12
Down 30 cents (-21.1%) on 7.5 million shares (for week ending Feb. 20).
This upstart nickel play was a monster 10-bagger in the last half of ’03, spiking from 20 cents to $2. But shareholders, who had already begun to take profits, punished the stock on news of a major increase in the Toronto company’s cost projections for its Guatemalan nickel/cobalt property.

(Gyle Konotopetz, trembling over his keyboard, can be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)