Written by Pat McCubbin
Exact Stock Picks
Good Afternoon,
What a busy day we had today. Let’s just start with a recap of the action taken in the portfolio today.
We started today with closing our position in Marriot Intl. (MAR). We made a play on this stock just a couple of days ago. We shorted 200 shares and combined that with 2 July calls for protection to the upside. We covered the stock for a profit of $318. If you take the price of the calls into consideration we still cleared a nice $270.
We sold our long put position in Jos.A.Banks (JOSB) to close. This entire trade went against us from the very beginning. We assumed an overall loss on the trade of $440
Our long call on Syntel (SYNT) expired today, giving us a net loss on the trade of $24.
Long calls we held on Nike (NKE) and Cephalon (CEPH) also expired, giving us another loss of $360.
We sold our option positions on Schnitzer Steel (SCHN), Companhia de Saneamento (SBS), and Adtran (ADTN) for a net profit of $200. Each of these positions has had their options replaced with stop loss orders. Please review the “portfolio page†to add stops to these stocks with your broker.
Dril-Quip (DRQ) was the trade that made the last couple of weeks hard to swallow. Our traders set this one up perfectly. This stock was overbought so we put on a short sale play along with buying a long call and long put at the 45 strike price when the price of the stock was $45.89. The stock did exactly as we predicted and sold off to the $43 level. Unfortunately, our target was $42.50 and we never got out of the stock. Consequently, the stock shot through the roof on a seven day market rally and we missed our chance for a great play. If we could have gotten out of the stock at $43 we could have picked up a $275 profit as well as a $150 profit on the call option as the stock soared to $49. A bit of bad luck and a huge rally erased what would have been around a $600 gain. As is stands, we took a loss of $460. This represents a difference of $1000 to the bottom line.
Previous to these trades we had a profit on our play on Annaly Capital Management (NLY)of $276.
Our total results month to date is a loss of $538. This has certainly been a trying month in these markets to make money. If we go back over the last couple of months it looks a lot better. We had a stellar June bringing in profits of $1426. If you take away our losses month to date that is still a profit of $888 going back to June 1st. Based on our average portfolio size of $25,000 that comes out to a positive 3.5%. The S & P 500 going back to that date is down 2.3%.
We have outperformed the overall market by 5.8% over the last 7 weeks. And we still have the better half of July to improve on that.
We want to once again take this opportunity to thank all the new subscribers that came aboard with us this week. We appreciate the trust and confidence you have placed in us and we will continue to do whatever is necessary to bring in profits to your portfolio. Have a great weekend and we’ll see you Monday morning!
TEN Exclusive: Portfolio Update – 7/16/10 is an article from: 
