Scorecard For The Week Ended 6/13/08

It was a rough week on the street and the tape was printing conflicting signals throughout. I was temped on Tuesday to short the USO EFT thinking the run couldn’t be sustained and beginning to believe that the oil bubble was going to pop. Not that there wasn’t money made by day trades but the big trend hasn’t changed much. That might end after this week’s G8 confab but we haven’t seen it yet. And, as much as I want to believe I’m a genius, I’m not. If I had a perfect crystal ball I’d be on the floor of the NY Merc bringin home money by the bucket.

So, I returned to more surefooted fundamental analysis that I learned as a banker and did OK. Here are the positions I took for my clients and what the outcome is as of today’s closing.

Bought

Russian Telecom company named Mobile Telesystems OJSC (MBT) on the strength of their growth and strong balance sheet.

Oil tanker master limited partnership (MLP) named TeeKay Tankers LTD. (TNK) on value and the fact that it’s kicking off a 13% dividend yield

Natural Gas MLP named Targa Resources Partners LP (NGLS) on my beleif that natural gas is a good long term investment as well as the nice dividend and financial fundamentals.

Here are the returns:

Not bad on an annualized basis. If I could earn 2% a week- every week – my clients would kiss me full on the lips. But I can’t. Still, not bad when a years worth of money market pays about 2% these days. I may pull the trigger on any of these if I start seeing them fade and in this market my downside sell discipline says that I should put in stops at 5% down. But I’ll be happy living on schnitzels until I feel a tectonic move in the underlying fundamentals.

The goal of reporting all of this is to lay out how I’m doing using my new tools. If I screw up I’ll report it and there are sure to be some times when I’m net negative simply because I think that some stocks may be worth buying more of if the price goes down (it’s hard to give up on a 13% dividend yield.)

This coming week will be interesting. The Standard & Poor’s proprietary oscillator is -7 which tells us that the market is temporarily oversold. We will likely see a short rally in the early days of the week. Of course that may not come true if the Monday morning Lehman Bros. conference call has some surprises in it and it sends the financials down again. I’m hoping it doesn’t and we see a good 3% – 5% pop in the market by mid week. Then we can go short the financial ETFs if the SKF gets to about 115 and go long gold (GLD).

It’s a full time time job. And, just so you know, it took me reviewing about 300 stocks to come up with the three I bought. We’ll see what the week brings.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Investing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.