Trade Alert: Taking big profits on SYNA, TWTR (and random thoughts)

Have a great weekend, everybody!

• Well, I blew it on the Intuit. Main reason that $INTU is up today despite the ugly earnings report and lowered guidance — I think we weren’t the only ones betting against the company thinking that the earnings and guidance would be even worse apparently. It’s why I called the trade we made “gambling.” Total revs came in $808MM (vs. the St $786MM). EPS was (0.06) vs. the St (0.13). For FQ3 they see revs $2.075-2.15B (vs. the St $2.225B) and EPS 2.70-2.75 (vs. the St 2.88). My puts are pretty much worthless so I’m gonna move on from the $INTU. Better and bigger fish to fry out there. 🙂

On the other hand, we’ve had some big winners of late and it’s time to take some more profits on most of the remaining call options I’ve got in the portfolio.

• We bought Synaptics SYNA call options before its earnings report and the stock has blown past our $75 strike prices and I’m going to take the rest of the profits on those call options now, leaving me with my common stock SYNA position.

And

• We had bought our Twitter call options back in December when the stock was in the $30s. It’s now near $50 and I’m going to take the profits on all of our call options here too and let my TWTR common stock position do its work for me.

Other notes:

• Stop what you’re doing and watch this video of @KianaDanial giving an easy-to-understand overview of the dynamics, reasons and ramifications of the world’s #CurrencyWars. Great job, Kiana!

• Terrific insight from a TradingWithCody subscriber: “I am concerned about this qtr for restaurants and retail. My two restaurants sales are down 33% in each of the last 5 weeks due to the weather in the Northeast. And we have been busier than others. Some of these places are in trouble as the weather looks crummy for two more weeks. It will impact earnings. Highend especially.” Your thoughts @ScottRothbort @RobertMarcin @JeffMiller et al?

• I’ve never been a permabull on $gold — in fact, here’s me getting short gold and sliver back in 2011 when gold was at $1700 an ounce and $silver was in the $40s. “Profiting from the popping of the gold and silver bubbles” May 5, 2011 EThttp://blogs.marketwatch.com/c…
  Fast-forward to today, and I’m more bullish on gold — I think building up some forever-holding physical gold coins investment is a key for most retail investors.

• On the “healthy” eating trend topic:
  “The trend is clearly a challenge for artificial flavoring and additive companies such as International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. $IFFand Givaudan $GIVN…More than 250 products and 10 brands, including Crunch, Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Skinny Cow and other chocolate brands will be free of artificial flavors by the end of 2015, the company said Tuesday.” http://goo.gl/5OJ5fv

• $FB trying to break out and yes, I’d highlighted it as a favorite set-up in my recent write-up
  http://www.scutify.com/article… In some sense, $FB‘s getting “cheap” as it stays here while earnings grow and estimates on the out years go higher. Still hasn’t broken out of the $70s yet though.

Just did some math — Scutify is about to cross the 2 million visitors and 15 million page views marks. 40% of our traffic comes from apps, another 20% from mobile/tablet site visitors and the rest from old fashioned computers. Just thought all our friends of the Scutify community would want to know. (And everybody knows that #MobileIsWhereTheGrowthIs so we might be doing something right around here, thanks @KheangLy) Thank you all! Check out the pic of the old site.