Buy List – Time for a Fresh Batch? (Members Only)
by phil - April 15th, 2010 5:50 am
I am one reluctant bull!
I am still trying to be bullish, I am trying to get enthusiastic about this rally and it's been 3 weeks since I went to mainly cash rather than leave the majority of our Buy List on the table. The Dow was at 10,850 that day and I didn't think we'd see the top of 11,000 for more than a day but now we've been up here for 2 weeks and yesterday we had strong(ish) volume on a strong up day and I'm still having trouble believing it BUT – believe it we must as long as our upside levels hold.
Those levels are now: Dow 11,000, S&P 1,200, Nas 2,500, NYSE 7,700 and Russell 720.
We had a nice, relaxing holiday but now we have hard work ahead as I think the investing environment is littered with land mines – ready to blow up in our face if we take any mis-steps. This bull has horns and we were gored by daring to go bearish in our $100K Virtual Portfolio but our Buy List is all bull and, hopefully, no crap as we try to make safe plays out of the finest companies.
Ideally, our Buy List plays are about finding bargains. We may love AAPL, but they are not on sale. Earning season will hopefully be a great time to do some bargain hunting so this list will be a work in progress but for today we're just going to review our remaining open plays from the last list and also I would like Members to please use the comment section on this post to suggest companies we should be looking at. Who do you think is trading way too cheaply? We especially love dividend payers, of course and I'll be looking for companies that service the top 10%, not the bottom 90% – who still look pretty screwed to me and, from yesterday's news, it seems like the top 10% is down to the top 8% but it doesn't seem to bother the markets so we won't dwell on the implications until we're below 5% and, of course, our goal is to be in the top 5% when it all hits the fan…
After having really good timing on our Feb 8th entries, March 18th seemed like a good time to take the money and run and we shut down 2/3 of our Buy List postions. Let's do a…
Bye Bye Buy List!
by phil - March 18th, 2010 6:15 pm
Oh, I have tried!
I have tried to be bullish, I have tried to get enthusiastic about this rally but I have been reviewing these picks for a few days and looking at the market, the charts, the sentiment, reading the news and studying the fundamentals and I'm OUT! Oh, I'll be back, we'll set up a new, aggressive $100K Virtual Portfolio next week for some fun shorter-terrm plays (still keeping the conservative one for the full year) to take full advantage of this insanity but it's going to be mainly cash through the end of the month as I do not trust this rally one bit and it will be so nice to head into the easter holiday with lots of cash on the sidelines.
We hit a perfect entry on Feb 8th, in our last round, and the market is up almost 9% since that day and I'm not expecting another 9% in the next 6 weeks so it's a very good time to take a break. We were able to roll and enjoy these trades since Christmas and we will be revisiting some, maybe even keeping a few but, on the whole, I want to do what I often counsel members to do, which is follow our simple two-step process to maximizing your profits in a market rally:
- Step 1) Take Money
- Step 2) Run
There – isn't that simple? Keep in mind that we LOVE all of these stocks so we'll be back in them if they go on sale and, perhaps, even if they don't and the market looks stronger through April earnings. Meanwhile, keep in mind that these are 6-week profits so 20% is A LOT for generally conservative plays. Not much else to talk about – let's just see how many of these suckers are worth keeping (noted in green):
AET (12/21 – $34.04, 1/9 – $32.70, 1/31 – $29.97, 3/18 – $33.24) They could not have done better for us, staying right in range and giving us 4 excellent sales but health care is passing this weekend and that's too wild for us to stick with. Our last batch is right on target:
- Apr $33 calls sold for $2.40, now .40 – up 83%
- Apr $30 puts sold for $1.50, now .02 - up 99%
- 2012 $25/35 bull call
The Buy List – Q1 2010 (Members Only)
by phil - January 9th, 2010 7:26 am
Well we finally hit our levels!
Fundamentally, I still don't buy this rally but, technically, we could go up and up from here. We discussed in chat yesterday how we may be in a pattern similar to 2003-7 where we came out of the dot com crash and 9/11, which took the market lower than it should have and then government stimulus took us higher than we should have been. Sure it all ended badly but there was a really good ride up in between. HOWERVER, 2004, which is about where we would be now, was a choppy and downtrending year. That is not a problem for our buy/write strategy as long as we keep our heads and scale into our positions.
Obviously we can't rely on patterns to simply keep repeating themselves. We could have another terrorist attack, we could have more stimulus or maybe both in our future but, until we see the patten broken, we can play for a similar move. Our buy/write strategy is ideal for this as it's a conservative play that gives us 15-20% downside protection. Combine this with our usual strategy to scale into positons along with some sensible disaster hedges and we can build a nice, bullish virtual portfolio for 2010. Keep in mind we don't fear the upside with buy/writes as our "worst case" there is we get called away with a nice profit.
I put up our latest Watch List on Dec 22nd, following through from our bullish lists of September 6th, October 8th and Nov 24th. These are the bullish plays that form the bulk of our virtual portfolios and that sometimes gets lost in our weekly short-term trading. It was a lot like shooting fish in a barrel, picking winners since September (we had our last Buy List on July 11th our first since the bottom in March, which was followed by the more conservatively mixed $100K Virtual Portfolio that we used from April through July, when we were worried the market would be choppy (it was). As always, our active lists are found under the Virtual Portfolio Tab near the top of our pages - always check there for recent updates.