Cody’s Latest Positions and other notes

Remember the “$RUT is telling us a major pullback is coming” line of thinking from a couple months ago? $RUT is now hitting all-time highs as I type.

The Bubble-Blowing Bull Market continues. We continue to be positioned to benefit but we also continue to look for the next great opportunity as we make sure we we look for the next crash. Who said investing and trading your hard-earned money would be easy?

I trimmed my Facebook down a bit last week, but mostly out of discipline. What do I think about Facebook’s upside potential for the longer-term after the 300% move we’ve had since I made it one of our three largest positions back in the low $20s and teens?

Maybe the best way to think about Facebook’s long-term value is to picture it as its own unique closed Internet. The opportunity to enable people to find each other and build relationships is key to the entire Internet’s success and $FB enables that to be done on an individual basis like nothing else ever has. Leading technology, a wildly sticky platform of more than 1BB people — and say 90% of tech-savvy people are active on Facebook…ten years out revenues are BIG.

Instagram is probably worth tens of billions of dollars as the monetize it over time, but with $FB’s market cap already $220BB Instragram’s ability to drive $FB’s stock price higher is probably limited. The Facebook-Net and their various platforms must maintain their dominance and continue to morph and interconnect and I think they will.

Here’s a list of my latest positions. I’ve broken the list into Longs and Shorts. And from there, I’ve broken down each list into refined categories in order from the largest positions within each category to the smallest.

Finally, I give each stock a current rating from 1 to 10, 1 being “Get out of this position now!” and 10 being “Sell the farm, I’ve found a perfect investment” (there will never be a 10 rating, because there is no such thing as a perfect investment, of course).

Remember: I wouldn’t rush into a full position all at once in any of these stocks or any other position you’ll ever buy. Patience and allowing the market and time to work to your advantage by buying in tranches is key. Maybe 1/3 or 1/5 of whatever you  might consider to be a “full position” in any particular stock. And I wouldn’t ever have more than 5-15% of your portfolio in any one stock position at any given time. The younger you are and/or the higher the trajectory of your career income, the more concentrated and risk-taking you can be with weighting in your portfolio. But spread your purchases and your risk out over time and over a several positions no matter your age or risk-averse level.

Scaling into a position using an approach of buying 1/3 or 1/5 tranches over time is how I build my personal portfolio positions, but there’s no scientific answer for your question. Sometimes you have to pay up for the latest tranche but I try to be patient and wait for a temporary sell-off to add to the existing position.

So here’s the list:

Longs –

• Forever assets and other permanent holdings –
  • Media and other private investment/business holdings (9+ because betting on yourself and running a biz is always a best bet)
  • Real estate, including land and the ranch I live on in NM (8)
  • Physical gold bullion & coins (8)
  • BitCoin (7) *Not a meaningful amount

• Primary stock exposure portfolio
  • Apple (7)
  • Google (8)
  • Facebook (7)
  • Ambarella (6)
  • Intel (8)
  • Sony (7)
  • Whole Foods (8)
  • Sandisk (7)
  • Twitter (8)
  • First Solar (8)
  • Lindsay (8)
  • Stratasys (6)

Shorts –

• Primary short portfolio
  • EWY (8)
  • Barnes & Noble (6)

** NOTE FOR NEW SUBSCRIBERS:
If you’re new to TradingWithCody or if you’ve been a subscriber for a while but haven’t acted on much of my strategies yet and/or if you haven’t been in the markets, but you’re sick of getting 0% on your CDs, Treasuries, savings, checking, etc while the markets have been continually hitting all-time highs this year, what should you do now?

First, step back and catch your breath before moving any money anywhere and make sure you’re not about to make any emotional moves with your money.
If you haven’t yet read “Everything You Need to Know About Investing” then spend a couple hours doing so, please. It’s a quick read but chock-full of important ideas, concepts and strategies that amateurs and pros alike should understand.

Then, take a look at my own personal portfolio’s Latest Positions and slowly start to scale into some of the ones you like best and/or the ones I have rated highest right now. I’d look to start scaling into a few of the many stocks in the Latest Positions that are at all-time highs along with a couple that we’ve recently featured in our Trade Alerts that I’ve personally been scaling into.

You can find an archive of Trade Alerts here – http://tradingwithcody.com/category/trade-alert/.