I’ll be looking to scale into some more common in…

After yesterday’s steep fade into the close with the markets closing on their lows of the day, it’s not surprising to see the bears and shorts feel emboldened and working the sell orders today.  And it’s not surprising to see the weakhanded bulls working their own sell orders today too.

As for the portfolio positions, the big mover and catalyst today will be Ciena, which reported a soft quarter missing consensus estimates and guided next quarter 3-5% lower than expectations were.   Ciena’s softness is catalyzing weakness in our other networking stocks like Adtran and Celestica for today.

If you’ve not built up positions in the Adtran’s and Celestica’s and Riverbed’s I’d used today’s weakness to do so.  I’ll be looking to scale into some more common in all of those today.

As for Ciena, the company’s recent acquisition of Nortel’s optical business for pennies on the dollar out of bankruptcy is coming along though the integration and selling of those products is just now getting fully about to kick in for the company, but it’s the finishing up of that integration of Nortel that will also help drive the stock in future quarters.  Here’s what the CEO said about it:

“”Having successfully completed all of our critical integration  milestones, we now have a strong foundation to optimize the business and  gain additional operating leverage as we drive toward sustained  profitability.”

That, and the fact that the company’s selling to carriers around the world that just found out yesterday that they’ll have to be able to support Apple’s iCloud and will need lots more capacity to do so in coming quarters and years…and Ciena will benefit from that trend.

I won’t add to Ciena today, as I don’t like to buy stocks on a hit like this until they’ve settled in a little bit, but I will be looking to add to my Ciena in coming days and weeks.