All right guys, I’m going to do some repositioning trades today. Here’s what’s up.
All right guys, I’m going to do some repositioning trades today. Here’s what’s up.
We’ve had an absolutely mindboggling run here in our portfolios in the last few weeks (and, relative to the broader markets, the last few months!) and it’s time to step off the gas pedal. As I’d noted in a post the other day, it’s been a very profitable strategy to buy the crashes/panics about (almost meaningless) macro economic events and then to sell the relief rallies. Well, this ongoing relief rally is like Rolaids or something. How do you spell relief? 1250 o-n t-h-e S-&-P after being at 1100 three short weeks ago is one way to spell it.
I’m not bearish, don’t get me wrong. But as you subscribers know, I have been very aggressive in my purchase strategies of late, using almost always call options. And a lot of those options are now up 200%, 300% or more, as many of you have noted in our chats lately. Let’s not be greedy. Cramer would tell us once again that bulls make money and bears make money but that pigs get slaughtered. I love Miss Piggy, but I wouldn’t want to be Kermit. (Have I carried my symbolism way too far this morning yet? No?)
So anyway, what I’m doing is selling down some of my call positions. If you don’t have as many call positions, I’d still look at trimming down the portfolio right now by selling maybe 1/3 of some of your biggest gainers/positions. And if you only have one set of call dates/strikes in a particular position, you can always sell those and replace it with some common stock in their place.
I’m selling some of my Sandisk calls that were out of the money but are now nicely in the money. I’m not replacing those because I still have some more Sandisk calls that used to be far out of the money when I bought them but are now just barely in the money and those will give me lots of continued upside exposure/leverage in Sandisk and will serve as automatic stop-losses if Sandisk were to fall below their strikes again.
I’m selling some of those Riverbed calls we were buying back when it was near $20. Still holding some Riverbed calls, and am focusing on keeping most of the higher-priced Riverbed calls in the same way I just described for Sandisk.
I’m selling some Cisco calls that are now also nicely profitable and that were out of the money when it was near $15 and we were buying more of them but that are now also in the money.
And finally, I’m selling some Nuance calls that obviously have had some huge returns for us and have made this an increasingly large position in our portfolio. Just taking some profits.