It's That Time Again...

No, it didn't occur to me to take profit on CENX on Friday before today's tragic retracement of -5.4%, but it did occur to me that it's soon going to be the time of year that I like best. It's time for... Jumping On the Couch Earnings Announcements! Speaking of which, I'm definitely in the market for a new couch. My IKEA one is no longer good enough for pursuits such as... well, you get the drift. I saw one for 50% off and am negotiating for further reductions.

Since it has essentially been a no-fail strategy this year to buy the rumour, sell the news, I reckon my time to sell this time around would actually be either before or after actual earnings get announced. The market, as everyone knows, is never 100% and I have a feeling people will want to shake this up a bit and catch people off-guard. Take this year's Sell in May and Go Away. The selling started in April already and I was definitely not in Military Position then. Now, it's my turn.

So, if there's a lot of selling before the announcement, I'm going to hold and if there's a lot of buying happening, then I might look to take an early profit. Of course, I'm ATNA (all talk no action). Still.

I'm going to have to learn. Mind you, this CENX trade was supposed to be a very quick open relationship type trade. It turned out to be more than a month and still running - though I really don't mind on this one since I've been in profit most of the time, though there were a few days when I was ready to jump ship.

Report Card for the Day, a very sad:

-2.56% on the SBA
-0.90% on the Roth IRA


It also looks like Sultan BCS is running out of steam, but looking back on some of my investments that could-have-been (if and only if I had the cash), I must say I made some pretty good calls:

NGG... +7.26% since 24 August 2010 (with a beautiful dividend yield of over 8% too)
SCHW... +9.7% since 31 August 2010
Gold, though... not that hot. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it rose about 2% since I started pondering about selling it.

And my beautiful CENX... over +20% since I got into the trade on 13 August 2010. So this trade actually was possible because I sold a partial position in C and then bought into CENX. C had been lounging around, doing zip all this time whilst CENX has been running on the treadmill all the way up to levels we haven't seen since the HP Incident back in May.

I shall continue to capitalise on doing my own homework, my dear Professors of Finance!

I won't let you down...