DARK HORSE HEDGE – What I Like About You, VECO
by ilene - October 10th, 2010 10:51 pm
DARK HORSE HEDGE – What I Like About You, VECO
By Scott Brown at Sabrient, and Ilene, at Phil’s Stock World
When you go up, down, jump around,
That’s what I like about you
Never wanna’ let you go, know you make me feel alright, yeah
Veeco Instruments Inc. (Veeco) (VECO) designs, manufactures, markets and services enabling solutions for customers in the high brightness light emitting diode (HB LED), solar, data storage, scientific research, semiconductor and industrial markets. In its LED and Solar segment, Veeco designs and manufactures metal organic chemical vapor deposition systems that are used to make HB LEDs or solar cells made of III-V compound semiconductors. In its Data Storage segment, Veeco designs and manufactures equipment used in the production of thin film magnetic heads that read and write data on hard disk drives. In its Metrology segment, the Company designs and manufactures atomic force microscopes, scanning probe microscopes, stylus profilers and fast three-dimensional (3D) optical microscopes… (Sabrient’s Ratings Report)
Sabrient rates VECO a Strong Buy for its superior value and growth profiles, which indicates a stock that should outperform the market.
Read Sabrient’s full report here.
We liked a lot about VECO when we added it to the Dark Horse Hedge virtual portfolio at $31.93 on August 25, 2010. Using Phil Davis’s Buy/Write strategy, we bought half a position in the stock and sold October $32 calls and puts against it (1 put and 1 call per 100 shares of stock).
With option expirations on Friday, October 15, it’s time to decide if we "never wanna let you go," for now, or if we want to close the trade and take profits.
VECO closed at $36.51 yesteday. We could keep the $6.20 option premium and let VECO get called away for $32. But why do that when there is so much to like about…
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DARK HORSE HEDGE’S BALANCING ACT II
by ilene - July 26th, 2010 3:37 pm
DARK HORSE HEDGE’S BALANCING ACT II
By Scott Brown at Sabrient and Ilene at Phil’s Stock World
How do we explain our shift towards Long/Short balance when the economic news appears so discouraging? There’s an interesting article in TIME discussing why multinational companies may be doing well their worldly operations, even though our U.S. economic appears terminally ill. As Zachary Karabell writes in "With Stocks, It’s Not the Economy:
Stocks are no longer mirrors of national economies; they are not — as is so commonly said — magical forecasting mechanisms. They are small slices of ownership in specific companies, and today, those companies have less connection to any one national economy than ever before.
As a result, stocks are not proxies for the U.S. economy, or that of the European Union or China, and markets are deeply unreliable gauges of anything but the underlying strength of the companies they represent and the schizophrenic mind-set of the traders who buy and sell the shares. There has always been a question about just how much of a forecasting mechanism markets are. Hence the saying that stocks have correctly predicted 15 of the past nine recessions. At times, stocks soar as the economy sours (in 1975, for instance) or sour when the economy soars (as with China’s stock market, the Shanghai stock exchange, in the past year).
Decoupling, of course is a matter of degree. In the long run, the world economy is affected by the economies of all the nations that make up the world, and businesses do not conduct themselves in a vacuum. Some special cases may thrive in the worst of conditions, but most companies probably will not, and eventually the world’s economies will have some impact on the multinational corporations. Thus, we have not changed our tepid view of the U.S. economy and the stock market’s prospects for the longer term. As David Rosenberg writes in his market thoughts earlier today, at Zero Hedge, "Ever Wondered How You Know You Are In A Depression?":
Everyone seems to be basing their view on the economic outlook from what the stock market is telling them – so one week it is a return to recession, and now that the market is surging, we must be in some sort of boom. Coincident indicators out of Europe has everyone convinced that the
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.