Taking Advantage of a Day Off

A day off from US markets is a great opportunity. With the world being what it is markets are not entirely driven by internal factors. Use your day off today to read international business news.  This news can certainly give you a heads up as to what you should expect from the markets in the next day.  This trick helped me immensely during the early days of the credit crunch.  Bad news would break crashing out European and Asian markets while US markets were closed for holidays- guessing what the US market would do the following day?


Today is a good day to look closely at the Google vs. China story. While China’s business accounts for very little of Google’s bottom line, as the story evolves we have certainly seen market fluctuations. Maybe today is a good day to setup a buy if you have been looking for some weakness, or maybe if you think the market will overreact to Google leaving China (if stories today point that way), and today is a good time to plan your exit from Google. Your call read the news and see what you think.

When Greed Interferes: Puget Power (PSD)

On Friday February 7th Puget Power announced the closing of the sale of its core business at $30 per share. Regular readers of my blog will recall that I recommended a purchase of PSD in November of last year at $18. If one includes the $.25 dividend payment from Jan 16th, and the pro rata dividend of $.04 this transaction returns $30.29, or a profit of an impressive 68%.

While I am very happy to have a 68% win on a 3 month investment (and hope several of you are also counting your fortunes this weekend) I think this is a good time to turn around and look at the trade again to see if it was a wise trade or a bit of wisdom and a bit of luck.
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