Today was a mixed bag for me, but I'm betting quite a few of you did well thanks to an interesting phenomenon in the last 15 minutes today. Several of our value stocks- Steelcase, Varian Medical, Midway, USEC, Borders Group and others- jumped rather immensely and unexpectedly to finish off the day. Funny thing is it didn't start with the Fed announcement, but was rather delayed a little over an hour and then all happened in a few minutes. Never seen anything so broad in number and compacted in time before.
FWIW, I did take a position in Washington Mutual, an S&L which has grown rather well over the past decade, but spent the last few years in acquisitions and bloating the balance sheet. It recently announced it was going to temper some of its activities in order to squeeze more efficiencies out of its sizable assets rather than bloating them some more. Banks have been under some pressure. WAMU just moved into my neighborhood and made me take notice. Interestingly, there is less interest rate risk to WAMU than one would think.
Today I also added more Champion, trimmed Oracle (on a valuation basis) and eliminated LaSalle (on a valuation basis).
Mike |
