Friday, May 2, 2008

Calling It Quits on Gold, Platinum...Go Financials!



Well, the trend is your friend and the trend I've been seeing is a bubble deflating in some commodities, especially gold and platinum. After continued weekly declines in my 2X Gold ETF DGP and the Stillwater Mining (SWC), which derives a substantial portion of revenues from platinum, I decided to throw in the towel. I do believe that we are in a long term trend upward for several commodities - oil, gold, soft and hard, but I think some of them have gone so far so fast, that there's more downside than upside in the short term. I still hold SU, a Canadian tar sands company and I will likely buy back in on a dip on a 1x basis, but the leveraged 2x funds should really be for trading, not long term investing, given the added pain they can bring on the way down.

A few weeks back, I entered into some synthetic options plays on oil and I started to get nervous as it approached $120 per barrel that I was going to get toasted, but at $112, oil's actually below the price where I started the position ($113), so things are moving in the right direction there.

To capture some gains, I sold a few shares of Google after a nice runup and my oil play banking on a downward move has payed off.

Financials continue to perform well. My only regret is that I didn't buy more. UYG, the 2X sector ETF was up another 8% today to previous highs. AFN in the self-directed IRA is holding up as well. Citi preferred shares would have been nice, but I didn't make the move in time.

Next up...High Yield Munis. Deal of a lifetime in some of these. Some of the ones I posted on recently have payed off nicely already but I think there's still room to catch the runup, plus the tax free 6% yield to boot. I will likely be buying some in the coming weeks, that nice stimulus check and tax rebate will be time just right.

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