I think we missed a great opportunity on Tuesday (election day) to get our country back on track.
That leaves me quite discouraged about the prospects for the next four years. That's because I think there's an agenda in play to wreck our economy, and most voters don't even see it coming. The evidence is out there. It'll be too late when you're trying to figure out how to feed your family and keep a roof over your head, and all of your neighbors are in the same predicament.
Recap
As for stocks, since the last post the stock winners were SPRD, MLNX, PCLN, JAZZ, CDNS, TICC, OCN, ARR, ABT and APPL. Stock losers were PAY.
Options winners were many of the stock winner names plus FLO, TAL, TICC, PDF, DDD and OCN. Option losers were PAY, TGP, BIDU and MLNX.
Misses
I bought more MLNX shares before and after the dive on the earnings announcement. Though recovering, those positions are still way under water.
I also bought a decent chunk of GOOG calls after their earnings fiasco and they've failed to regain traction leaving me in the red there too.
I shorted AMZN with OTM puts thinking the mini iPad competition would destabilize their forecasts and their forward P/E for next year, which will have improved to 128, wouldn't be good enough. Sometimes I'm not so much wrong as early.
Closed this Week
This week I closed out puts on MNST, BBY, GNRC, and LOGM, all winners. I wanted to reposition my OTM $13 BBY put (trading at $15) and give the optimists a chance to run the stock up a few days before I go with a deep ITM put for a later put spread conversion. I need to get back in before they disappoint on the 20th. +58% on BBY.
GNRC and LOGM were sold when they hit my profit targets (via limit orders) yielding +13% and +15.5% after two days.
I bought calls on OCN and sold them the next day. +23% works there.
Next Week
Since 50% of the voters are more optimistic than I am, I'm not holding my puts, other than for coal stocks ACI and ANR which had a good run when proponents went long on Romney.
I'm hoping PCLN can hold $620 for my Nov $500/$620 call spread.
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Opps, I deleted the blank comment which took out FellowTrader's comments and speculation on MSFT, DELL, NVDA, GLW, & IDTI, and my superbly crafted reply. Grrr.
ReplyDeleteJohn,
ReplyDeleteMy comment was so dangerous it had to be deleted :)
On a similar note to my previous comment:
The movement to force the Republicans to cave-in on taxing the rich is growing. Bill Kristol today commented that it would not kill us to raise taxes on millionaires. Talking heads on CNBC and CNN are publically calling the politians out saying they should quit playing games with the country's enconomy and settle this now. I believe a frame work will be done in the next 2 weeks with details taking up to a year to nail down. But with frame work in hand they will kick the can for another year to work out the details and the market will be thrilled. The last uncertainty will be "semi" resolved. This will be just in time for a Santa Claus ralley. MSFT is by far my favorite, 3% divy, $60 billion cash and a chance of selling more Windows 8 things than expected.
I wish there was a power button on Congress. We could hold it for 4 seconds and (re)boot the whole lot out. They're elected to work on our behalf, not exclusively theirs.
ReplyDeleteMSFT seems fairly valued to me, but institutional trades have a 36% bias to the buy side, and 2400 institutions only hold 67% of the float. That's bullish.
Dell's sub-6 P/E seems like a value trap with falling revenue, downwardly revised earnings estimates, 30% of institutional trades have a 30% bias to the sell side, and a 5% net margin.
I *like* the NVDA call with double and triple-digit earnings grow, sales nudging upward, institutional trades have a 51% bias to the buy side (holding 71% of float), earnings estimates holding (mostly) steady, and a double bounce off of $12.
The desktop PC is not dead, but simply a commodity for business use. Do they really need Window 8 for the same basic hardware platform?
On the consumer side, customers stand in line to buy Apple's products because they *want* them. It's been a long time since MSFT had a product that compelling.