Revolution Investing and a trading update for Corning

The whole point of Revolution Investing is to help you pinpoint when there really is risk and to avoid panicking when there’s not. I’m again warning readers that the tech stock market bubble that I’d been looking to really take off next year is no longer as likely as it had been. And yes, I know that Facebook’s IPO might finally be coming down the hatch and that they could be looking at raising another $10 billion or more that will trickle into the app-economy. But I will remind you guys that we’ve seen many a company try to come public only to be sent back to their lair as the markets turned “unfriendly”.

A month or two ago, the markets weren’t forcing Italy to pay over 8% on new debt. The stock market was on a tear and there was a chance that the EUcrats could have figured out a new trick to artificially keep this global rally going. Not so much anymore.

We’ll stay focused on the best app and tech stocks on the planet as long-term investments, but for the near-term I continue to recommend treading lightly. On that note, I’m going to go ahead and let go of our Corning investment. I’ve had a long history of making lots of money by catching Corning’s cycles right, including having shorted the stock from the teens and covering when it was less than $2 a share and then catching a big part of their move back into the double digits. And while we did catch some nice trading gains on Corning when it reported its most recent quarter, I’m not happy with how we’ve been doing with this trade/investment and I’m also not happy that the company’s having this hard of a time gauging customer demand. I’ll look to revisit Corning in a quarter or two after we get through the near-term headwinds that the company’s suddenly found itself facing as they try to deal with a big customer order cancellation. Mea culpa on this one.