Monday, June 1, 2009

Lots to Buy - Should I be Concerned?

Looked at a ton of charts this weekend and saw very little to short, and an awful lot to buy. Usually when things seem so obvious, the market goes the other way.

KO, CIEN, SPIL, CY, CL still look great.

The list of top picks is long, but the most upside in the near term are as follows:

IR - $20.23 - target of 40
GES - $25.82 - target of 50
DPZ - $9.06 - target of 15
HAL - $22.93 - target of 40
BA - $44.85 - target of 65
GTLS - $21.23 - target of 44
QCOM - $43.59 - target of 60
WFC - $25.50 - target of 45
PPG - $44.47 - target of 63
DIVX - $5.38 - target of 11
SD - $10.89 - target of 18
CNI - $43.46 - target of 57

Monday, March 2, 2009

Covering JNJ

Covered JNJ today at $48.25, simply taking some profits even though the market looks like it has further to fall.

Friday, December 12, 2008

TBT - Big Mistake - Let's Analyze

Let's talk about TBT - the Ultrashort Treasuries ETF. Fundamentally, the idea that Treasuries would be sold down and be a long term winner makes sense. However, that type of analysis is not what I do and based on the trade results (of being short during a phenomenal long run by Treasuries) we need to take a closer look at what went wrong.

Mistake #1 - Entering a trade because you believe in a good idea. Usually you can get around this fact without any damage but see Mistake #s 2 and 3.

Mistake #2 - Entering a trade without a true plan.

Mistake #3 - Entering a trade without an exit strategy and a stop loss.

Mistake #4 - Letting a short term trade turn into a long term holding. Tell me that has not been painful for people nowadays.

At this moment, the position is down approximately 33%. This type of loss is more than triple the acceptable downside that is a key criteria in the trades that I take. The simple placing of a stop order around the $55 level - a level I thought had no prayer of being breached would have contained the loss to roughly 13%, but I got lazy and thought I was smarter than that.

What to do now:

Quite simply - we will hold the position and look to exit out on an upside bounce toward the $50 level. However, a new stop goes in at $42 to protect against any additional downside.

Live and learn.

It has been a while since any posts were made - let's catch up on the activity

PLXS - stopped out on 11/19 at $14
TIVO - stopped out on 11/19 at $5.75

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

AXYS - Bought 150 @ $67

Looking for a target upside near $90. Stop goes in at $59 for now, but this will get moved up as the chart continues to form.

TBT - Bought 300 @ $63.80

Saturday, November 1, 2008