To the Moon Tuesday – Damn the Torpedoes!

Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!

When Admiral Farragut was in Mobile Bay (Gulf of Mexico) in the last great naval battle of the civil war, he faced a harbor full of mines and his lead ship, the Tecumseh hit a mine (called a torpedoe at the time) and sank.  Other ships began to turn back but Farragut was lashed to the rigging on the perch of his own command ship and gave the order for the fleet to ignore the danger and blitz the harbor – leading the North to a decisive victory in an act of guts and faith.  

There are many men who would have turned back facing a mined harbor and the war would have waged on and maybe the North wins anyway and maybe they lose – we'll never know.  There are also many men who bravely face the odds and "go for it" – and most of them are as dead as Custer – BUT, the ones who make it are heroes, aren't they?  

"He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day" is a more relevant quote for stock market investing as the heroes are few and far between and the path is littered with the bodies of men who have "gone for it" before you.  

Andy Zaky is one of those bodies and we were discussing his fate in Member Chat last night and this morning as his AAPL fund has gone belly up and it's no secret that our own AAPL positions are also hurting with the stock at $420.  Had AAPL turned up this month, Zaky would have been a hero and everyone would know his name and sing his praises for the next 100 years (like John Paulson's day in the sun shorting housing at the right time – since then, not so much) but it didn't and the fund had to be liquidated.  

In our case, we rolled our "so far, so wrong" AAPL positions out in time and down in strike as we do still like AAPL but, unlike Zaky, we are willing to give them more time to turn around, rather than making a series of shorter and more aggressive bets.  We had pursued the same strategy in the Fall and our AAPL bets were back to even in January, prompting me…