Trade Alert: Nibbling two names as fear rises

Stocks getting hit hard early after a 7% sell-off in China stocks and a broad sell-off throughout Europe and Asia.

Any fear out there? With the DJIA down -400 and the trading year not even 0.001% over*, I think it’s a great time to do our poll. Who’s more scared right now, the bulls or the bears? I think the answer will likely be rather unanimous right now that it’s the bulls. And that is likely a good indication that we should be trying to take advantage of others’ fear and buy into the panicky sell-off here this morning.

We don’t have to be heroes, we don’t have to draw a line in the sand. But we have been following our playbook of buying weakness and fear; selling euphoria and all-time highs; taking profits and cutting losses; reducing the total number of positions and overall long exposure when stock markets were at all-time highs; etc. This is one of the steps we take on our marathon race of maximizing our upside and minimizing risk for our portfolios over the next 10,000 or so days of our lives.

So I’m going to go ahead and put some money to work this morning, nibbling on some of our existing portfolio names and in most cases buying back some of the stock we had trimmed at higher levels.

I’m scaling into some SYNA and AAPL this morning:

Synaptics – I’d trimmed 1/4 of my position in this one back in October when it was near $90 and today with the stock at around $77, I’m going to buy 1/2 the number of shares back that I’d sold then.

Apple – Nibbling another 1/10th-sized smallish tranche here around $103, a second recent tranche adding to the shares I’d nibbled on last week and the much larger core position I’ve owned for many years.

*252 days that the stock market is open times an average of 6.5 hours per day is 1638 trading hours per year, and we aren’t even through the first hour of the first trading day of year as I type.