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Right off the top I should caution you all “don’t try this at home”, because I almost always lose money when I trade the short side of the market or an individual equity.

That said, after my post earlier this week about taking some profits off the table in the face of what seems to be overwhelming complacency and confidence in the stock market, the evidence continues to mount. Read more »

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In the face of soaring complacency and optimism I am lightening up some equity positions and taking profits. To the left we see the VIX at near lowest levels since just prior to the onset of the GFC. With markets challenging their all-time highs, I would feel more comfortable with an ascending VIX, not a descending one.

This tells me that confidence and complacency are high. I am also seeing a lot of scorn directed at those who seem to agree with me, combined with numerous rationalizations on why the markets have nowhere to go but up. For instance, some guy on twitter has deemed this  “crass contrarianism” as “silly”, and people are pretty eager to agree.

So it’s time for me to take some profits off the table, including RIM – thanks for the easiest double+ ever. I once again made my cardinal investing error and wished I had bought more. I also lightened up a few of my Euro indexes and took profits on Portugal Telecom.

I should also mention I sold some of my beloved Tucows. I had a small position in another trading account I decided to liquidate for a tidy gain but I am still long and strong a much larger position within my RRSPs and plan to keep adding there when the circumstances present themselves.

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I got a few comments from my “Tech Pair Trade of the Century” post awhile back along the lines of “Short AAPL? Good luck!” and “Long RIM? Good luck!”.

So it was with interest I noted this week (13F week, when all the “big boys” file their 13-F’s with the SEC) that two very large heavy hitters are calling it quits with AAPL: Read more »

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When I heard about the Mitt Romney debate gaffe on “binders full of women” immediately going viral  (I didn’t watch the debate as the electoral process makes me near suicidal) I just knew that some quick thinking person was going to snag it instantly. That enterprising party was The American Bridge PAC who promptly redirected BinderFullOfWomen.com to their homepage who’s lead off story is “Romney’s Record on Women”

Still, I really wonder how much direct navigation type-in these “flash in the pan” memes can still generate in this era of social media dominance. But at the price of a hand registration, you can’t lose.

[ Update: Looks like TheDomains picked this up moments before I did. ]

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Briefly, RIMM blew out expectations today with 2.9B in revenues and an adjusted net loss narrowed to .27/share. Expectations were for .47/share loss on 2.45B in revenues. Blackberry sales were stronger than expected and the company added 100M in net cash.

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I just received a short report from Citron Research (another financially uber-astute easyDNS client ) which outlines a scathing short thesis for Web 2.0 real estate darling Zillow (Nasdaq: Z).

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So far the only comment on my post about going long RIM is “good luck with that”. So far so good there.

My pet quip about value investing is that your investing thesis looks good if it passes what I call the “double idiot test”. That is, you get called an idiot for buying, and then you get called an idiot again for selling. Read more »

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Actually I’ve been long Research In Motion for a few weeks now, I started writing this post at the time but forgot to publish it until tonight when somebody commented on my earlier “Ultimate Buy Signal for RIM?” post.

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Holy Crap! It’s a real live actual .pro domain!

I think I would have an easier time believing it if I had just seen a UFO or sasquatch, but today I actually saw a real live .PRO domain in the real world. It was weird, you know that feeling you get when your eyes are plainly relaying information to your brain but your mind has extreme difficulty parsing it. It was like “WTF is that?” Being in the business over 15 years, I have an eye for domain names that is probably way past compulsive. Over the course of my day I routinely observe, make note of, memorize and lookup dozens of domains. When it comes to domain names very little goes unnoticed to me, so believe me when I tell you this: Read more »

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I have long since thought that RIM was going through an unprecedented bout of negativity which has had it on my “watch list” for months. Contrarians love this type of stock, John Templeton always tried to “buy at the point of maximum pessimism” (there is a good book by that title, and you may also enjoy reading “Investing The Templeton Way”.)

Sir Templeton earned his wings as a legendary value investor by borrowing $40,000 from his boss during the nadir of the Great Depression and using it to purchase shares of every single company trading under $1. The rest is history.

These days the legends have different names, like Prem Watsa, who already owned a significant stake in RIM and then went ahead and doubled down. Read more »