Trade Alert: Gold miner trim and two nibbles

Markets don’t go straight up. Pullbacks happen. Fear builds. Panic selling starts. And feeds on itself. And then we put in a bottom.

Stocks can fall farther. Traders who bought yesterday looking for a bounce that never came are selling today. Investors who have had big gains but now have smaller gains will want to protect what they’ve got left, so they too might be selling today. Permabears who have been burned every time they’ve gotten short for the last few years are ready to try their luck again as the markets have tanked and they too are probably selling into this downturn.

We’ve been following our playbook and have raised money repeatedly when stocks were near all-time highs. Now we have our plan for this sell-off. Time to nibble a little bit. No sense in trying to be a hero by nailing the bottom or trying to catch the next little pop. But I do think we’ve got some values here I’d like to step in and take some advantage of.

I closed my tech hedge fund, sold almost all my stocks, and took a job as a TV Anchor in 2007 because I thought (right it turned out) that the markets were done rallying and were about to crash/pullback hard. I don’t think we are anywhere near that kind of bear market/crash/pullback potential right here right now in 2015.

I don’t think this Bubble Blowing Bull Market is quite over yet and I expect we’ll look back this time next year and see higher prices than today’s quotes.

Here’s what I’m doing today:

First, I’m selling another little bit of my GDX call options that are now up more than double what we paid for them, selling about 1/5 or less of them.

Second, I’m going to nibble on some SPLK common stock and SNE common stock. I might add to Synaptics and Ambarella next.

I’ll be back later with more if the panic in the markets give us opportunity to do so.