April Round Up

Hooray! My starting lineup of stocks soundly beat my bench!


It has been a crazy month, in many ways (I’ll explain either later or in future posts), but suffice it to say the market still maintained its upward momentum.
I did a bit more trading this month than I usually like, but in the long run it turned out OK.

I started out buying MOS which fell flat and I sold after the first 2 weeks for only 3% gain.

I then took a bit of a gamble, though I liked the pattern setup, on CSR. My timing could not have been better. It took off for a 25% gain before I pulled the trigger and sold.

Right about that time, the swine flu pandemic craze was hitting the news and sent all the infectious disease stocks up!

So for the last week of the month, I broke my trading rule(s), and tried to go with the hype. I choose qdel because they are in the business of identifying the flu (product readily available) as opposed to the speculative (in development) vaccine companies.
At the time, Qdel stock had already gone up 13%; but this was nothing compared to the speculative ones that experienced over 100%-200% gains in one week.

Sure enough, those cooled off a bit and actually lost a bit compared to Qdel which rose over 20% in 4 days. So, not being too greedy, ;-), I took my money and said thank you very much!

BTW, CSR did beat Qdel over those last 4 days… But I’m not complaining…

So, in round up…

Starting lineup beat the Bench!
I earned…
3% then 25% then 20% more on each of my 3 trades this month.
All in all, a good month.

- Due to other events this week and weekend, I’m still working on my May watch list which I will try to post as soon as possible.