So Much For Normal

My good friend Douglas sent me a note after yesterday's post and with his Welsh elegant economy of words he said, "Normal is good."  Normality lasted one day.  Up before six and by passed swimming in order to take of the animals and prepare lunch form manchild.  Checked on the Salve Lucrum portfolio and made a couple of small plays today, moved boxes out of the garage AGAIN for the contractor who, for sure was going to show up today.  Then had some pressing issues with family stuff only to realize it would be only 45 minutes before the Audio people would arrive which made going into the office a bit questionable, checked all the messages and e-mails and checked in with the ever reliable Miss Ellen and was assured things would survive with out me. 

 Audio Toyz arrived and completed our install after about 2 and half hours.  There were a few issues with programming the Apple TV.  Left over Greek salad was the bill of fare for lunch.  (Thought it would be wise to start eating greek salads before they go belly up and they are named Agean Salad or something like that.) Missed the closing of the market which hurt because several sold call options were ripe for the pickin. 

Then we were informed the fire sprinkler contract would be there shortly.  An hour later, about 3:50 pm they showed up to tell us they don't make sprinklers like our anymore and they would have to come back and replace all 27 sprinkler heads.  It was fun watching these count the sprinkler heads.  There were three in the family room and two in the kitchen.  When we told them that he looked at us and said, "So that would be a total of four."  Devin and I looked at each other in disbelief.  We said that would be a total of five.  To which he said, "Oh, so we will need 5 for these rooms."  At that point I took over counting the sprinkler heads or we would have had to invite them to dinner.

Ever stop and think about the concept of being born one day earlier than you were?  That means I would have put that in yesterday's post.  (Stole that from comedian Stephen Wright.)  But I digress.

Devin made some killer home made bruschetta and Caesar salad and we enjoyed the company of Mr.  Ben again.  We watched my all time favorite movie Arthur (The original with Dudley Moore.)  After a very unproductive day it was a nice evening.

A Day Late But They Finally Caught Up With Me.

Ok apparently everybody got a round to reading my blog from Monday last night or this morning because the market finally did what I told it to do.  Now we called everything correct on Tuesday but the market did not go down the point it was supposed to go down, in fact it went up a full point. 

How did our calls today go?  Just to remind you here was our guesses. "On Wednesday we will have motor vehicle sales or lack there of.  Demand and supply issues will drive the number down.  (REALLY GOT THAT ONE)  More bad news.  Mortgage applications report on Wednesday and look for a further decline in that number.  (ACTUALLY HORRID NUMBERS.  New Apps and refi apps down 4.7%.)   The ISM survey comes out on Wednesday it to will be down and down below estimates.  (YUCKY TERRIBLE NUMBER)  Then we close the day with construction spending.  Any guesses, yeah not pretty look for this to disappoint as well, making for another down day on wall street. (THIS WAS ALMOST AS BAD AS EXPECTED.  Overall year on year down 9.3%)  Look for another half a point unless the jitter in Europe drive it down lower."

So lets see how we did we were supposed to be a point down yesterday but we were a point up.  We were supposed to be a half a point down today we were actually 2.28% down.  So for a net number we were supposed to be down 1.5% and we are actually 1.28% so far this week.  We'll take as pretty darn close.

Let's do a quick forensic on what happened today.  It was pretty much what we laid out on Monday.  The ISM number and auto sales scared the willies out of everybody.  There were a couple of earnings misses to make maters worse.  Today was a massive sell off on heavy volume.  We finally got to see some conviction from investors and it was on the down side.  Cramer had a rose colored view of the day when he posted "I would prefer to see this as a typical reaction to soft data and nothing more."  That was about an hour before the close so I will cut him a little slack as volume was fairly light when he made the comment.

Pin Action IN the Portfolio

It has been a week or so since we told you what has been going on in the Salve Lucrum Portfolio.  Starting with the 23 of May, we closed out a call option for AAPL for a nice little gain.  We stopped out of our position in ARMH with a 7.7% loss.  It stung a bit because we had quite a few shares.  We are still looking for a new entry point.  (Any suggestions Megan or Jerene.) 

 We closed out a call option on ERTS with a nice gain of 97%.  We got into a strangle option with CBOE, and if we told you the details it would assume that we understood them and we would be lying if we did.  No winner or looser yet.  We closed out a call option on SLV with a decent little profit, about 28%.  We gladly bought out of a WMT call option at the break even.  It had been down about 80% at one time.  We got into another strangle option position with Linked In, too early tell if we did it right.  If the stock is as volatile as I think it will be, it might be a good play.  Over the last few day we have added to our positions in BTN and WY.  We took our own advice and bought more WY on the down grade. 

We were expecting a loss for the month of May in the portfolio, but a few of the options plays must have out weighed the stinky ones.  The portfolio had .17% in gains for the month of May.  That would be realized gains as in money in the bank.  Year To Date we are up a whopping .84% in realized gains.  On the entire portfolio our unrealized gains are -1.12%.  The overall market (S&P 500) is up 4.2% so I am trailing the market. 

Tomorrow I will look at compnaies reporting next week and make some suggestions on who to make a buck or two.  If you want to play along, do it at your won peril and with money you can afford to bet.  These will be quick down and dirty.  Not growth, not value, just get in get out and have some fun.