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After dinner last night at Hannah's, I was tired and I just wanted to drop in a few photos for the blog and send it and call it a night or two nights or what ever it was. (I just remembered I forgot to help Devin take the dogs out last night as I laid across the bed at 9:00 and woke up at 5 am. Sorry dear. I did bring you back that elephant hair bracelet and gathered the elephant hair directly from the wild beast. Well, Ok, I bought at a waterfront bazaar for 850. Well Ok it was 850 Rand which is about like 12 dollars US , but it was the thought that counts.) However, they have changed the posting protocol at Constant Contact and I kept getting an error every time I tried to send. I struggled with it for about 40 minutes and asked the Good Lord for patience and inspiration and he said,
"Quit whining and got to bed." At least I think that's what he said, or that might have been Devin or Jack, like I said I was tired. Who ever said it, I did.
My PADI IT folk will appreciate this as I called support at Constant Contact and this lovely lady named Leslie took my call and when she asked for my User name, she told me that I was the PADI guy. I said yes and I asked how she knew, and she said my blog is quite popular in the halls of Constant Contact. That was flattering and a bit scary at the same time.
Any enough about me, let's talk about me. I told her the error I was getting and she said they had that error during beta testing but fixed it. When I offered to send her a screen shot of the error she got a next level tech on the line and he ran through the process of my attempted post last night, and without saying it, I could hear him say ((^*&%*%##%#%^*&&((&$#) as they had some more code to write. (That's the part my PADI IT folk will like. Just when you got the bugs figured out. . . . . ) Anyway she provided a work around for me until they patch this bug and that is why you received last night's post this morning. |
Getting Back On The Bike
We had a week off and it did take a little while to get back in the mindset of looking at all the portfolios. We checked all of our core (XOM, CELG, MSFT, UNFI, GWW, NUAN, MGRC, CATM, USB, and GLD) holdings to see what the IBD ratings were and what had changed. Of notes was XOM which reports tomorrow. Analysts have been dropping their expectation for the quarter since the middle of December. That makes it hard to read how the actual earnings might come in. If we was a gambling guy, we would have said that Oil was trading in the 85-95 range through most of the year, but dropped into the 75-90 range for most of the 4th quarter. That should bring down revenue for the big guy. IBD has dropped its rating from 83 to 81 over the last week, but we think that has more to do with the disappointing numbers from CVX reported last week. Remember, one segment of the IBD rating is sector performance. We are going out on a limb and SELLING some Feb 18 $80.00 call options (a bearish move) at $4.81 a share and will buy them back tomorrow after they report. Our thinking is they will slightly miss earnings and the C suite will give cautious guidance for the rest of the year. The bad news should cut the call value about in half and we will buy them back for about $2.50-3.00 an option. If I am wrong, then we have not risked that much to make a nice gain. Our down side will be limited to 30%. For some of the other less risk adverse portfolios we deal in, we are adding to positions in XOM as they are off 1% today (Another tell that they might miss tomorrows earnings) and we are still in a nice buying range for a 12-18 month investment.
Hey that almost sounds like I know what I am doing. One of the worst things a trader can say.
So what was that wild a whacky ride we took today. I was up early to take Jack to Basketball practice, but he is exhibiting flu symptoms and decided to stay home. We checked Bloomberg (I missed my Bloomberg and my dogs. Oh yeah I missed my wife and son and daughter and son in law.) bright and early and futures were down and market came out of the shoot about 110 points down. That came from the news that OMG the on again off again on again off again on again off again on again off again on again off again on again off again on again off again on again off again on again off again on again Greek Bailout was off again or at an impasse. That made some European bond rates bloom and our market was off to a nasty start. By midday, we saw some good M&A activity that helped the market recover and with now unexpected news out of Brussels and no significant economic news, the market almost made it back to even. We should see the IBD say a confirmed uptrend. Ya see the good news is that even with the Euro head fake today, the casino bosses (hedge fund and MF managers) did not buy into the drop or should we say sell into the drop. Volume appeared light today.
I have a sizable report for my real job I have to finish reading tonight so I will let you off the hook and hope the work around let's me get this thing out a bit early tonight.
Salve Lucrum
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BAGAKOAA;
I am not a professional investment advisor. Anybody reading my blog and investing accordingly must be out of their minds. I have made more money than I have lost. There are many more qualified people than I to actually tell you how to invest your money.
BAGAKOAA=Boys And Girls And Kids Of All Ages
Salve Lucrum=Latin for Hurrah for Profit.
2012 Year Ending
Dow 13,073
S&P 500 1,358 |
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