It has been a crazy few weeks!
I went back over our Long Shots list from August 9th, thinking all our picks must be doing great but really only C, with a 67% gain, is really outperforming. Long spreads on UYG and BHI are on target for nice gains but haven’t moved much. Looking at our orignal picks in Pharmboys Phavorites from the same week, GSK is on track and up nicely already, our AZN cover is up 45% andMRK flew up 19% already. On the riskier Biotech side, ARIA’s stockis up 16% and our spreads are all performing well,ONTY has been flat, OGXI is up 33% and the Jan $17.50s are up a rockin’ 63% with that “cautious” spread up a surprising 75% already.
SPPI had a wild ride (as we predicted with TSCM’s failed assassination attempt) and the buy/write is already up 24%, the Feb vertical is up 50% and the naked Jan put sale is up 27% and our Feb hedge play is right on trackso all good there and a fine example of how following Cramer and his lackeys and and doing the opposite of what they say can be very profitable! Congrats to Pharmboy for a very fine set of picks,proving once again that there is room for research and fundamentals- not a single loser in the bunch in a choppy market! It was very timely as I had mentioned just that week in my interview with AOL Finance that XLV was my favorite sector and our IHI pick of 8/10 is up 28% on the naked Feb $45 put sale while the Feb $45 calls have already jumped 16%. It was a great call as IHI outperformed XLV and all our major indexes.
So our energy service pick (BHI)and overall financial pick (UYG) have not done much in 3 weeks and those were our leading sectors into my call tocash out our exposed long calls on Aug 13th, ahead of expirations. The Dow was at 9,400 on that day and now, a bit more than 2 weeks later, we’ve gained another 144 points but to listen to the MSM, you would think you are missing the rally of the century the past couple of weeks. This is one of the reasons I’ve gotten a bit more cynical about the rally – there is so much hype and so little actual progress, something must be wrong.
Back on Thursday, Aug 6th,…
