Like clockwork Diageo goes up for the holidays, down for the hangover and up again for the Super Bowl. The trick is calling the highs and lows (or, realistically, calling the right neighborhood of the high and low). This year I am shooting to sell at $69 and buy back at $62. Follow me here to see how it works out 
Posts Tagged ‘stock’
DEO Holiday Bonus?
Friday, October 30th, 2009News Corp. (NWSA)
Thursday, September 17th, 2009Set an alert at $10 today.
Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. (CBST)
Saturday, September 12th, 2009Good pipeline, fair financials. Looking for it to drop below $20 again.
NEXM
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009Bought three batches of NexMed, Inc (NEXM) shares at an average of 22 cents in Q4 of 2008. Planning to sell one third at 67 cents and ride out the rest.
Foolishly Cheap
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009Motley Fool has a good article about shopping cheap stocks. It is one of those articles that remind me when reading financial articles, always read the whole thing before doing anything about it.
The article starts with a very mechanical approach to finding the cheapest stock of 1999. I love mechanical approaches as they tickle my lazy side. My cheap side has been burnt enough from being too lazy that I’ve learned that mechanics are never enough.
Anyway, while this selection method works great for the first stock, it doesn’t hold consistent down the line. The dart in action once again.
The one thing I don’t like about the article is where they have a table of stocks picked with the mechanical approach that shows an average upside of 107% over 5 years of picks. Firstly, that is way too narrow of a sampling to be reliable, and secondly the star example of the article throws the average so far off that if it wasn’t there, you’d be just as well off with a money market fund. I don’t think it was the author’s intention to promote following the approach blindly, but I think it did merit more comment on why profits may be smaller than they appear.
Missed it by That Much
Monday, June 1st, 2009A frequent utterance by me. This morning, watching the news (which I do at the gym, on torture devices powered by my movement) I thought “I need to but a buy on GM at $0.50″. Then I got home and was distracted by other obligations and didn’t get to my trading account until 11 AM. Had I followed my instinct, I would have got it at the price I wanted. It actuall dropped lower, then bounce back up to hover in the .80 range.
This would have been a long-term holding for me. My rule is, set a price and that’s it, unless different information comes in. Everytime I break that rule, I lose money. I lose it following the rule, too, but less than half the time vs everytime.
TANSTAAFL
Friday, May 29th, 2009me2everyone.com is giving away stock to members who sign up before their full launch. 100 share for joining, and 200 shares for every referral. Supposedly no strings attached, and I haven’t found any yet. I haven’t even seen an increase in spam.
I took the bait, with a reminder in my calendar to check the site weekly since the shares must be registered when they go public to actually receive them.
Definitely something you need to decide for yourself. If you do, please give me credit as referrer by using the links in this blog entry.
BDK
Sunday, May 24th, 2009One of the free newsletters I subscribe to comes from InvestorPlace.com. I would include the specifics of the newsletter, but my host service took two days to get my database running again and I lost the email while waiting for them to figure out that they were not testing the database by accessing the one fyw site that doesn’t use it.
Grousing aside, the newsletter include a link to one of their many “5 x for y” articles.
5 Housing Stocks for a Rebound
The only one I would consider (and have been considering for quite some time) is Black & Decker (BDK). Good products, well run company, and positioned well for the recovery. If stock prices were more equal to the actual value of the company than the quantity of the Wall Street rumor mill, it would be a no-brainer. But, at this point, it will just remain on my watch list along with most stocks that did that huge leap in March.
Google Finance lists BDK in the Consumer Cyclical sector. This is why, despite Cramer’s advice on watching sectors, I don’t take sectors too seriously. I spent enough time in the construction industry to know that professionals use a lot of Black & Decker products, too, which makes this a good play on both an up and down housing market.