Wednesday Ramblings – Things that Make You go Hmmmm…

We had an interesting Chat session this morning so I think I'll share.  

As it's sort of the anniversary of the big crash, we were discussing my historic bottom call when I was on TV doing LiveStock with Tim Sykes that afternoon and we ended up making 13 bullish calls that were up 469% AVERAGE just 6 months later.  Not that it took a genius to pick the stocks (GE, DIS, XLF, AMZN…), that was like fishing in a barrel using a nuke – everything was going to go up – the real trick is pulling the trigger – that's the hard part.  

It doesn't happen very often but this is why we like to stay around half cash in our main portfolios – you never know when a huge opportunity will present itself.  It's also why it's so valuable to have those downside hedges. 

Like currently, we have just 50 DIA puts as a hedge in our Income Portfolio but that's because it's new and it's well-hedged and we are mostly in cash and we don't have a lot of profits to protect at the moment and, if the market begins to crash – we'd be happy to take small losses and get back to cash or DD into better positions (as we initiate 1/4 positions in general anyway).  But, back in Jan of 2008, we were at the top of a massive run and back then, in that Long-Term Portfolio, we had 250 DIA puts protecting our positions.  We had started with 50 DIA puts but the market kept going up so we rolled them and doubled them and rolled them and doubled them and THEN there was a big crash and the puts saved our assets.  

That post evolved into "How to Solve the Housing Crisis Tomorrow" on April 16th of 2008 so yes, we at Philstockworld considered it a crisis long before the MSM did.  In fact, I sold my real estate data business at the end of 2004 – that's how early I called it!  Anyway, a year later, still nothing was done and I wrote "For Timmy G: How to Solve the Housing Crisis TOMORROW" and props to Mr. G for inviting me and a few other bloggers to meet in Washington where, as noted by Steve Walman:  

Phil Davis, who made clear

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