Packeteer (PKTR)

PKTR Packeteer is another stock I picked up from some list of up and coming stocks, probably Zacks.

I bought on a dip. This is good. I hung on through ups and downs.

When the stock got to $14, I started to get very nervous. The price had already run up 60%, and I wanted to protect my gains. A "stop-loss" order seemed the ideal solution, essentially saying "If the price falls to $x.xx, sell for at least $y.yy."

What I didn't understand is that the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange implement these orders differently! On the NYSE, the price of the last trade is used to activate the order; on the Nasdaq, it is activated by the bid price. Since people are always trying to get a bargain, bids are usually lower than the last trade.

So, I awoke on May 8 to find that my order had been activated by a big price drop, and that some of my shares had already sold. Since PKTR trades on the Nasdaq, my stop-loss order had been triggered by low bids, even though the actual trades were still above my limit.

Since the price recovered and went up another $4, that turned out to be an expensive Learning Experience.

After PKTR hit a new 52-week high on June 6 and then slid sharply lower, I sold my remaining shares at at 73% profit.

It's possible that PKTR will climb to additional new highs, but there's no guarantee of that. In this case, "bird in the hand" reasoning won out over greed.