Thursday, June 14, 2007

Stocks - after a break

A quick check on how the recommendations have done in the last few months:

MRVL 17.0 ( down 7% from 18.36 )
AAPL 119.0 ( up 40% !!! from 84.86)
AMGN 58.0 ( down 22% from 74.8 )
SAY 26.0 ( up 23% from 21.09)

In the same time S&P 500 was up by 11% to 1522 from 1364. In comparison the average return from the above 4 stocks is 8.4%. That says one thing - stock picking is best left to professionals :).
The second thing to learn is we should have got out of AMGN when it dropped down to $65 - we could have minimised the loss. We will close the AMGN position now. It has had more than its share of bad news taking the stock down.

AAPL has benefitted significantly from the Iphone hype. If AAPL could sell 5 million of them this year - they sold around 10 million IPODs last quarter - that could boost their earnings by 10-15%. Looking at the numbers, AAPL could be slightly overvalued. But we will stick with it for the rest of the year.