Trade Alert: $FIT (and a full update on my daughter and family)

I know most and maybe all of of you who are reading this truly care and want to know what’s going on with my family and me during these last few weeks.

My second born daughter, Amaris Leon Willard, is an angel and she’s probably the toughest little baby you’d ever meet. She has a trach tube in her throat that is just 3mm wide and it gets goop in it and we have to change it out for a sterilized clean one every three or four days. Because of the trach, she can’t get a bottle and swallow like most babies do, though she does take a few cc’s of mother’s milk from a bottle a couple times a day on good days. So we have to feed her most of her calories through a gastrointestinal tube, through which she gets fed 4 times a day and then a slow continuous feed every night.

Though most Trisomy 13 babies have central apnea problems, which means their brains/lungs aren’t communicating well enough to breath on their own, Amaris has terrific central control and breathing. The main and probably only reason we had to put the trach tube in is because her neck and throat muscles weren’t quite strong enough when she was born. Her neck is now strong enough that she turns her own head and looks up and down on her own, especially when she’s kicking and stretching her arms out.

She was born a large cutis aplasia on her head, which meant that there was a large area and two smaller spots on the back of it where there was no skin and you could see much more of the inside of her head than you’d ever want to see in a baby. But we’ve diligently kept those areas moist and covered and the skin area has fully healed and grown to close itself. The doctors were also worried when they saw the size of her cutis aplasia because her skull itself wasn’t fully formed and closed, but all the experts who have seen her lately say that the skull is growing itself and closing too.

She has an underdeveloped left eye, an extra hanging digit on both hands and some concern about her lower spine/vertebrae, none of which are life-threatening.

Six months ago during an ultrasound the doctors were worried that her heart wasn’t developed and that her insides were flipped opposite and not all connected and that’s why they had us do the genetic testing for Trisomy. Miraculously, her heart, her insides and internals were all normal and healthy by the time she was born.

That’s the best way to put it — we are watching this miraculous, brave and tough little girl grow and heal and improve every day. We get very little sleep and we have family and friends who stay with us in a rental house here in Albuquerque, three hours from where our home is, without whom we couldn’t do this. The only reason we’re in Albuquerque right now is because we have several more doctor appointments next week and we don’t want Amaris to have to travel back and forth the 180 miles from our hometown to here in Albuquerque. But if all goes as planned, we are going to take her to my wife’s parents house which is but 20 miles from our own home (and 2000 feet lower in elevation) but will enable my wife and I to get back to working from our respective offices and back to a more normal routine.

Like Han Solo says — don’t ever tell me the odds! I’ve spent my life beating the odds and my career beating the odds on Wall Street. Amaris is beating all the odds and blowing the minds of every doctor and nurse and expert who meets her. Our 19 month old daughter, Lyncoln, is a rock — she’s so healthy, strong and happy every day. My wife is handling all of this with such grace that she inspires me to be stronger and healthier every day too.

Now onto work with a trade alert —

I’m nibbling on a second tranche of Fitbit, maybe a 1/4-sized position, keeping it small but taking advantage of the recent sell-off in the name last week when two reports hit the stock.

• Apple gaining ground on FitBit
• The numbers are in: Apple is No. 2 in wearables
• Apple moved a lot more watches than Wall Street thought, IDC says

I’m sure that Fitbit will lose marketshare in the wearables market, as thewearables marketplace explodes from a few million wearable devices being sold each year to a hundred million or even billions being sold each in the next five or seven years. Think about it this way — According to the reports I link to above there, the worldwide wearables market grew 223.2% in the second quarter of 2015, as measured by total shipment volume across all vendors. That figure: 18.1 million units, up from 5.6 million unit in Q2 2014. I’m not expecting Fitbit to grow as fast as the overall wearables market as other competitors come into it. Notice in the estimates for FitBit below that they continue to rise and that’s what we wanted when we started building our position in it a few weeks ago.

So, as usual, we follow our playbook and don’t get all greedy or scaredy based on the price movements of our stocks. I do have a very different new name I want to add this week too, so stay tuned for that in the next few days.