Monday morning markets and Latest Positions

Good morning and welcome back to the show, where the stars aren’t always what you should have your eyes on.

The broader markets are to open soft again this morning, but they are all still up 1-2% from the lows they opened at on Friday when I’d stepped up and finally started getting aggressive on the long side again. Other than the purchases noted on Friday, I didn’t get as far into the buying as I’d expected given that the markets all immediately rallied big time intraday Friday before fading softly into the close. I’ll not be forcing any new purchases today as I’m not convinced that the markets “bottomed” on Friday “for real”. And again, this is where the strategy of buying and selling tranches comes into play — I did a somewhat stronger set of buys on Friday than I’d done in a while, but that doesn’t mean I drew a line in the sand or that I used all my firepower.

Here’s a list of my latest positions in approximate order from largest to smallest. You know the dealio — I give each stock a current rating from 1 to 10, 1 being “Get out of this position now!” and 10 being “Sell the farm, I’ve found a perfect investment” (there will never be a 10 rating, because there is no such thing as a perfect investment, of course). Anyway, here’s the list:

Longs –

• Google (7)
• Apple (8)
• Fusion-IO (8)
• F5 (7)
• Level 3 (7)
• Zinga
• Sandisk (8)
• Seagate (7)
• Cisco (6)
• Autodesk (6)
• Nuance (5)
• Riverbed (6)

Shorts –

• Apollo (6)
• BKS (6)
• GLD (7)
• LPS (6)
• MBI (7)
• WDC (6)
• PNC (5)