Ok that is not how the song goes, but today we had enough people on the sidelines of the market, , , wait one minute, , ,  We can't talk about the market yet.  Millions of you are waiting for the daily does of drivel from yours truly.  Ok not millions, but thousands, well a few hundred, OK there are now 38 on the list and 52% of you open the darn e-mail.  Yes 38, we cut some readers who are not actively enjoying our daily drivel and we brought back a prodigal reader Mike, welcome back Mike. 

 Ameel Real Estate

Did ya miss me yesterday.  We were obligated to attend a charity golf outing for man child's (Jack's) new high school.  It was a good turn out, great weather, good exposure for the Cronin's and PADI, but a long day.  By the time we got home and spent time with Mrs. Cronin and Man Child, we only had time to crunch some numbers on a little company in Redmond WA called Microsoft MSFT.  One of our readers replied to my volunteering to kick the tires on our new value oriented spreadsheet.  More on that later.

Anyhow by the time we got that done we had a little while to read before I realized the sun, wine, and two shots of Maker's Mark during the day, had sucked the life out of me.

We can't really say it was a normal day because we don't usually get to go play golf during the week.  It was nice to wake up, go for a swim, take care of the dogs and be done.  No lunch to make, and had the pleasure of watching Devin and Jack sleep in until I got to the office before the tournament. 

Today was even more normal.  Went for a swim, took care of the dogs, had breakfast and was in office at 7:37, the earliest in a very long time.  We cleaned up about 211 e-mails.  Then it was into a three way video conference with our buddies in Bristol, England and Hettlingen, Switzerland.  Had a great lunch with two great execs from our company and spent the afternoon cleaning up e-mails and rebuilding my to do list.  Butch you would be proud.

Today the market finally had a couple of things to celebrate.  Now we nailed Monday we said and I quote: z z z z z z z z z z z and we were spot on.  The market went up one point.  NOT ONE PERCENT, but one point.

We did not do so well with today's calls.  Retail was down, but not as much as we or the analysts expected.  PPI came in a little hotter than we had guessed.  We did call for business inventories to be down and they were, but not as much as we thought.  BBY did beat as we suggested and it gave a big boost to the market.  Remember we told you Best Buy is a good litmus for retail at large and the electronics sector.  We will have to read the earnings call before we open the champagne. 

On top of the fairly positive news, we had some good production numbers out of China.  The cheap cheap cheap dollar sent commodities up so the energy sector also helped this one day rally. 

We took a page out of Cramer's "Getting Back To Even" book and on Monday morning bought a deep in the money November call for AAPL.  As we mentioned, we stopped out of AAPL and was looking for a $325 entrance point.  We chose not to tie up that much cash and went into an "in the money" call option at the opening.  We were rewarded handsomely on that bet as AAPL took off this morning and so did our call.  We cashed out at lunch with a 37% gain.

The First of our Value Tests

One of our regular readers who I believe will be reading this on some nice quiet beach today (Tomorrow) asked to try out the spreadsheet with MSFT.  The results were very promising indicating an annual return of between 19% to 50%.  We remind everyone that these numbers need to be reviewed every quarter and completely rerun every year. 

On one hand we all know what a cash cow MSFT can be, and they have some interesting projects like voice recognition, AZURE (their cloud project), and some secret technology stuff they

are doing with their Kinect system, but AAPL is plucking the feather off the Window's Golden Goose. 

We looked at a few long term call option on MSFT and until we see some direction, the best play is a slow buy into the stock over time.  Let's say you want to have 3% of your portfolio in MSFT, buy 1% now, wait a few weeks and buy another 1% until you get where you want.  MSFT has been a channeling stock for about 5 years.  It has spent most of its time in the 22-25 range with one trip to 37 in 07 and one trip to 16 in 09.  Eventually this stock can move, you just have to be patient.

Please send me any stocks you want me to run though the Buffet Value Crunching Machine.  Be happy to do it.