FULL DISCLOSURE
Sold the Citigroup written up at 25.90 last month for 35.77 yesterday. Nothing against Citigroup, but any time I can make 38% on a blue chip in less than a month – i.e., never – I’ll grab it. And I do worry there could be a chance to buy it cheaper again.
Yes, selling flies in the face of the buy-and-hold strategy that generally works best (although it was in a retirement account, so there was no tax hit).
And yes, if it were a speculative stock bought for a home run, it could also be a mistake to sell. (If one always sold with a 38% gain, the risk versus reward of taking big risks would change dramatically: from, say, ‘heads, I make 1,000%, tails I lose 100% to ‘heads I make 38%; tails I lose 100%.’) But Citigroup is no nutty little biotech.
The other stocks we bought that lucky day were: EPN (up 43% from $24.75 to $35.52, and still sporting a good yield); MRK (up 29% from $39.10 to $50.64), JNJ (up 24% from $44.16 to $54.90), CSPLF (up slightly from $2.60 to $2.80) and the long-suffering ‘stock that will surely be zero,’ oft chronicled here, BOREF (more or less unchanged at around $3).
PRESS, BATHE, FLUSH
Alan: ‘Forty-nine states have some degree of drought (severe in my state of NC). Do not use a half hour of water to unwrinkle a suit.’
☞ I kept the stopper in, so that the light steamy spray would collect. Later, with a tub half full of water, I took a bath. Then I shut off the water to the toilet temporarily, refilling the tank with cupfuls of water from the tub.*
*Or will, thanks to your admonishment, next time.
JEB’S FURTHER APPOINTMENTS
Following up on yesterday‘s disclosures, here’s a column from the Miami Herald. If you’re a separation-of-church-and-state kind of gal or guy, you might fund it vaguely troubling. As you might, also, Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s 1985 dissenting opinion in Wallace v. Jaffree, where he wrote: ‘The ‘wall of separation between church and State’ is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.’
