It was a choppy week so we made no free picks.

Nonetheless our Free Pick Portfolio had another great week, gaining $4,400 pretty much just sitting around doing nothing despite the market gyrations.

This was the portfolio we initiated in May with just $25,000, now $70,694 as an adjunct to our newsletter contest to give prospective readers an idea of what we do on the member site.  We left it well balanced enough that it was able to make money even as we walked away from it and our biggest change of the week was buying back our GOOG $520 caller, which turned out to be unnecessary.

Sometimes it is good to give your portfolio a rest while you go out and get some fresh air yourself.  A lot of people tinker far too much with their positions and succeed only in making their brokers rich.  In 2 months (60 days) we opened 44 positions, closed 26 of them generally committing no more than 10% of our cash to any new position.  This is about right for a casually managed, small portfolio as we discussed in our series on "Smart Portfolio Management."

Since we initiated this portfolio, ZMan and I have begun to also give out free samples to our national audience on …

We had a fantastic May and made a lot of good picks and had tremendous returns on our members site.

We closed 263 positions during the month with a 186% average gain and a gain on capital of 299% - that’s what we call a great month!

Our members already know what a great job we do and support the site.  Now I would like to ask those of you who read us for free to do me a favor:  This site is supported by advertising and advertising is supported by people like you coming to www.philstockworld.com and reading our site or signing up for the FREE EMail Subscription through FeedBurner, at the top right-hand corner of the free site.  Those of you who do subscribe already know that we never give out your names or Emails to anyone and we don’t even ask you to join - I’m not asking you to join now - what I am asking for is for you to help us move this site up to the next level.

We will be closing to new subscribers shortly for the summer as we revamp the site, add some features and launch our first paid newsletter service.  Those of you who are FeedBurner subscribers will get a mailing when we reopen the site, as memberships will be limited, and will get an opportunity to receive the newsletter at a discount.  Right now though, I’m asking for your help in bringing some more people over to the free site so, if you enjoy reading my daily commentary and find the information useful, please do me the small favor of sending this invitation to subscribe along to 5 friends or family members (hopefully not mutually exclusive!) who you think would find this …

What a spectacular week!

It’s a good thing Sage told us how to manage a $1M Portfolio last weekend because if we have another few weeks like that, our $10K Portfolio could end up at $1M!

This week we closed 61 positions with a crazy average gain of 366% but that includes a few ridiculous gains from BEAV (13,900%), PTR (800%) and TIE (1,525%) as we had sold positions against them and reduced the basis followed by huge gains.  Taking those out lowers the average gain to "just" 109% but the cash gain on these positions was a very healthy 214% so I’m very proud of that.   Our average hold time this week was a healthy 24 days but the remaining positions have been open   days, indicating they are getting a little long in the tooth.

Let’s remember that this started out as a week I was trying to get out of.  We tossed 17 positions on Monday alone but, in the end, we finished the week with 80 open positions in our Short-Term Portfolio as new plays just kept popping up!  Tight stops all week are the reason we closed so many big winners and there …

Well that was a pretty good week!

Thanks to BIDU and Google our $10,000 Portfolio is now worth $17,051 just 34 days after we opened it.  While you could say this was, to some extent, just fortunate timing - we did make a lot of really good adjustments to get to where we are today!

The 95 remaining open positions in our Short-Term Porfolo have an average open gain of 115% but the more important gain on cash is 29% and we closed 53 positions this week with an average gain of 121%, our best of the year so far.  Because we sold a lot of positions the gain on cash was over 100% as well, which means we deployed no additional capital to make our 121% return - this is why you MUST use a broker that lets you do spreads, it is a night and day difference in your risk management.

…

What an amazing week that was!

Happy and I were talking and we are both very pleased with the charts - more on that tomorrow…

Last weekend I told you that the market could indeed exist in a metaphysical bullish or bearish state indefinitely and it would be up to the observers to decide which it was going to be.  You don’t have to believe in Santa Clause to sit on a fat guy’s lap and we were like kids in a candy store this week, grabbing up calls and making hay while the sun shines (while keeping our trusty umbrellas under the mattress!).

Our mattress plays seemed almost silly this week but they sure made us feel good on Thursday morning and we still haven’t gotten past stage one as the market posted gain after gain all week.  There was little economic news of note and earnings have been coming in better than expected with 66% of the reporting companies beating expectations and only 17% missing so far.  Of course Google was the beat of the week but there was plenty of cheer to spread around with C (got WM), KO (got ‘em), INTC (got ‘em), JNJ (got ‘em), JPM (not int.), MOT (got ‘em), GOOG (got a gaggle) and NOK (got MOT) all getting lots of good attention. 

GE (got ‘em) was great too but pinned at $35 while IBM (got ‘em) got beaten down (maybe pinned) despite a pretty good report.  EBAY (got ‘em) also seemed to go the wrong way, finishing right in between the $32.50 and $35 options.  BAC was iffy but shook it off while MRK (had puts 8-() and PFE took off despite aging pipelines.  In short, things looked pre…

That was not a bad week!

I ended up bullish last weekend and, other than a quick cover on Wednesday, we had little reason to change our stance for the week.  Of course changing my stance and selling the TSO puts on Monday accounted for 3/4 of the week’s spectacular gains but that is the whole purpose behind the portioning strategy we use and I have decided to try to rewrite a more in-depth section, with more examples for the member section.

Sage put in a couple of hedged trades for the $10K Portfolio in our educational post and the up and down consolidating movement of the market made it a perfect week for them.  DNDN pulled back off it’s highs (as predicted) and there were many opportunities to work in but we stuck with the position we already had.  OXPS was entered as an naked leap with the Jan ‘08 $30s opening at $1.30 and finishing the week up 17%.  NYX went down a little more than we wanted, opening at $97 and dropping to $93.50 by Friday as we sold the May $100s for $3.75 (now $2.50) against our June $100s at $5.50 (now $4).

These plays take patience but we need that now as our impatient attempt to make money on the oil plays went badly as did our MRK cover play.  This leaves the $10K Portfolio with just $2,945 in cash and $6,813 in positions, dropping us down to $9,758 and we will have to get lucky to…

How did I end up so bullish?

One great thing about writing a daily column like this is it forces me to be introspective and I highly recommend all of you take time to review your thinking once in a while as learning to be critical of your own Thought process can stop you from making all sorts of mistakes while learning to trust yourself can help you to make all sorts of money!

On 2/20, when the market was at it’s dead top and our pals at the WSJ headlined: "The markets are moving into a sweet spot" and that "the mood is downright bullish."  This caused me to say: "While I’d love to go gung-ho bullish here, we are at an inflection point and we need to break out right here, right now to make a real rally of it.  We’ll be looking to pick up our weekend plays but this is no time to be rushing into anything until we get some better signals.  Be very careful out there!"

Just 14 days later, on March 6th, the Dow had dropped 700 points and I was in a very contrarian mood saying:  "I’m not a contrarian by nature but I am usually ahead of the curve, when the curve catches up to us it’s often time to change trains (that sentence is sponsored by Metaphor Mixers, Inc.).  So today I’m feeling much better about my bul…