What I did during this tumultuous week?
First, What was I thinking? I didn’t think the Greece crisis and the Chinese stock market running up ridiculously and then retracing half the rise was going to be the end of the world. To put it into perspective, just Apple’s yearly earnings would be a very substantial chunk of Greece’s debt. That’s not their market cap I’m talking about, just their earnings. And the US markets were certainly not frothy. The S&P was up maybe 1% since the start of the year at the start of the week. That wasn’t a lot of froth to sell off.
So, how did I do on the week? I started the week at +35.0% on the year. At the bottom, when my big position in SWKS was way down, and my small position in SEDG was way, waaay, down, I was down 3.6% to +30.1%. (The calculation for that is 130.1 divided by 135.0 = 0.964 = down 3.6%. The key is that, figuring results for the week your starting point is 135). At that point the S&P had slipped into negative territory for the year at about down a half percent.
I finished the week at +34.5% on the year, down 0.4% on the week.
What did I do during the week? I started the week taking a little position in ABMD. I sold my little position in FB for that, figuring that FB was slowing (for 2015 anyway) down while ABMD was accelerating. I like FB, which is why I had a little position in the first place, but I figured they weren’t going far up or down anytime in the near future. (I sold FB at roughly $86.7 and bought ABMD at roughly $65.5. If you are interested, they finished the week at $87.9 and $68.0).
Later in the week I sold my small position in SYNA at about $82.3, and mostly added to my SWKS at $95.6 (staying in chips, but in SWKS, which was down, and in which I had lots of confidence), and I bought a little more ABMD. (SYNA closed at $84.3 and SWKS at $100.2).
Then I sold a little of my small position in CELG, which hadn’t fallen much (at $116.6), and added more SWKS.
SEDG had fallen 24% during the week from $36.1 to $27.5 (and probably more intraday), but as far as I could tell it wasn’t company specific. All the news was good, they signed another big company, etc. It was falling because oil prices were falling and this made all solar stocks fall. I thought this was nonsense. I decided to hold, and it finished at $31.9, up 16% from the bottom, but not back to where it had started the week.
On the other hand, SWIR just seems to be relentlessly falling. I like it for all the reasons that Andy pointed out in post #10139, but it seems to be falling for some reason that I just don’t understand. It’s down from $48 in December to $23 now. I started buying it six weeks ago at $30.5 and bought down to $26.5. I really don’t understand why it’s falling, but I decided to switch some of the funds I had in this small position to some other stocks with a more positive direction. I didn’t sell all of it, maybe slightly more than half. I used the funds to buy a little more ABMD, and added to my small position in ANET. It turns out that SWIR was my only company that had fallen all week that didn’t rebound on Friday, in fact, it fell another 2.5%, on the day that SEDG bounced back 15%, SWKS bounced 6%, etc.
Reflections on what I did during the week? First of all keep in mind that these were small changes, not portfolio-altering changes. The positions I sold out of were small, try-out positions. I didn’t sell anything from my top eight positions that make up probably 85% of my portfolio. In fact I added a little to SWKS.
I had to reflect on how I knew to stay with SEDG which had dropped a lot before rebounding 15% on Friday, but sold over half my SWIR, which kept falling on Friday. The only reason I could come up with is that all the solar stocks had taken a hit (not as big as SEDG, of course), while SWIR seemed to be doing it’s own thing.
I personally still see no reason for SWIR’s continued extreme weakness, and will probably hold my remaining 1.4% position and see what happens (I currently have 15 positions, so an “average position” is 6.7%, and my position in SWIR is just a fifth of an average position).
I can’t remember whether I mentioned it previously, but as you see, I’ve finally taken a small position in ANET.
Hope you’ve found this rambling interesting.
Saul
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