Twas the Day After Christmas – and All thru the House:
This will be an abbreviated letter – due to the holiday. But wow – it’s holidays like Christmas that allow you to appreciate friends and family – thanks to all for a great holiday! But our ‘beat’ is ‘The Street’ and tomorrow the lunacy will begin again. We’re going to hear about more European downgrades, and more tensions in Korea. But often we use this week to reflect and see what’s worked and what hasn’t. We make a bad trade now and then (it happens ☺ ) and the key is to cut them off and move into something that's going in the proper direction. So how did we do this year? Well our trading account is up 40.4% on the year! We were bolstered by thinking that Obama and Bernanke would destroy our currency, and hence allowed to get into materials and metals very early SLW at $3 – ending the year at $39.
In fact – here’s a quote from last year’s newsletter – January 4th, 2010 – “As the dollar continues to crumble – and we think it will – ‘stuff’ becomes more expensive, and the world needs ‘stuff’. While it's true that in the short term they might leave the material guys for something more sexy, the fact is that the dollar will fall again, and when it does, the materials and metals should go higher once again. We can't ever ignore them.”
But we also had Amazon at $120 and it hit $183, Apple at $267 and it hit $323, and Salesforce at $75 that just hit $150. Now did we get all of those gains – absolutely not – why – because we generally get out of a stock a bit ‘before’ the top. Investing is a discipline and ‘in my world’ there’s no problem taking profits.
It’s been a good year – and next week’s letter will have my thoughts and predictions for 2011!
The Market:
Okay one week left and it’s not "common" for them to do a rug pull during the last week between Christmas and New Years, but it's not unheard of either so we need to continue to be cautious. We didn’t do much last week – again due to the holidays and potentially won’t do a whole lot this week either – again same reason. This market is being propped up on very low volumes, and I don't want to get trapped. It's my guess we limp sideways into the year end. Unlike last week where the market closed for Friday, this is going to be a full week.
Tips:
Let’s review our holdings:
We really don’t have anything in the short term holds account – and it may be doubtful that we do much at all this week as well (honestly).
This past week we were stopped out of EXK with a loss - ugh. It is possible the materials guys come roaring back – naturally we’ll have to watch the dollar, but it's sure possible.
Our Long Term Holds look like:
SLV at 25.81
NG at 6.825
AAU at 3.02
DNN at 2.71
AVARF at 4.00
USSIF at 0.61
If you’d like to view my actual stock trades - feel free to sign up as a twitter follower – “taylorpamm” is my nickname on Twitter – fyi.
If you’d like to see me in action – teaching people about investing – please feel free to view the TED talk that I gave a 4 months or so ago now:
Remember the Blog:
Until next week – be safe.
R.F. Culbertson
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