Safety Dance

I started chopping-back early today, since the action in the overall market was none so hot. This was a good thing too, since the action remains pretty poor and things are getting pretty thin out there now (in terms of liquidity), and I had a lot on my sell-list today.

I'm not selling today because of anything so ugly on these respective charts. I don't like holding much of anything going into a new year and I especially don't need a dozen+ names to babysit while I suss-out the new action in the new year.

In a nutshell (case), the new year brings changes and is (more) difficult to speculate on. My feeling remains that I think January will be live for getting long aggressive growth names, but I would like the market to spell it out for me first - let someone else make the money in the meantime. When the money is on the floor, on the other side of the room, I'll get up and go pick it up. Until then it's safety-first (I'll be strapping myself safely inside my iron lung and watching the Rockford Files marathon-reruns).

I will hold a couple of bio's here; likely holding the ONXX and GENZ into '08. I can dump them easily enough on Wednesday if they go hell-bound out of the gate.

I will be selling the remainder of JASO today, however. I don't want a single share long of the previous year's biggest group (solars in the case of '07) for the first few days of trading in the new year. The winners tend to see profit-taking and the losers tend to get bid-up a bit. There are exceptions, but I can't predict the exceptions ahead of time.

For this reason I am also selling all of AAPL before the day closes.

I expect to then short AAPL and at least one other big winner in '07, for the above reasons, as a quick trade (covering the first or second trading day of '08).

In the loser camp, I may take a quick-stab long with SBUX, COH and maybe something else; first things first. I'll do my work on this in a moment and I'll place those orders in the last hour (maybe the final minutes, depending) today.


I have sold most of the JASO (early) and all of the MR, PCLN, TNH(!) and YGE (another Chinese solar). I still have to sell LOGI, AAPL and the remaining JASO. I'll hold the Shanghai postion, CAF, into the new year as well.