Mechanical Investing for January 2006

Posted by Michael on December 27th, 2005 filed in Finances

I wanted to do a year-end market wrap-up for the mechanical investing strategy, but I just won’t have the time this year. I’ll do a quick wrap-up as of today and call it the end of the year summary. Not my best year; after all those gyrations I only beat the market by a wee bit. There’s always next year.

Last 4 weeks: +4.9%
Last 3 months: +0.8%
Year to date: +1.0% (Dow is +0.9% ytd from 10,783.75 to 10,883.27)
Last 12 months:+1.0%

Holding for another month:

Ticker	Bought	Now	Months	Return
CLF	$81.4799	$91.63	2	+12.5%	Cleveland-Cliffs, Inc.
CRDN	$46.15	$46.35	1	+0.4%	Ceradyne, Inc.
FHN	$38.75	$39.90	2	+3.0%	First Horizon National Corp
RT	$19.89	$24.31	5	+22.2%	Ryerson Tull Inc.
SNDK	$58.98	$64.43	2	+9.2%	Sandisk Corp, maker of flash memory for cameras and iPods. Wild swings, whee.
WM	$38.54	$44.66	3	+15.9%	Washington Mutual

Selling these:

Ticker	Bought	Sold	Months	Return
BVF	$23.10	$23.781	1	+2.9%	Biovail Corp.
FTO	$32.79	$37.91	4	+15.6%	Frontier Corporation.
HCC	$30.03	$30.00	2	-0.0%	HCC Insurance Holdings, Inc.
HOC	$61.11	$58.3501	1	-4.5%	Holly Corp wasn’t so jolly.
PBR	$63.19	$69.16	2	+9.4%	Petrolio Brasileiro
PSS	$22.49	$25.35	1	+12.7%	Payless Shoesource, Inc.

New stocks for this month:

Ticker	Bought	Sold	Return
CAL	$0.00	$N/A	N/A%	Continental Airlines
DBRN	$0.00	$N/A	N/A%	Dress Barn Inc.
GT	$0.00	$N/A	N/A%	Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.
IM	$0.00	$N/A	N/A%	Ingram Micro Inc.
LMS	$0.00	$N/A	N/A%	Lamson & Sessions Co.
UNTD	$0.00	$N/A	N/A%	United Online Inc.

Current Option Holdings:

Ticker	Bought	Sold	Months	Return
.CHKDG	$3.50	$1.85	2	-47.1%	CHK Apr 2006 35.00 Call, will sell 1st week of February 2006.
.MDREI	$3.50	$2.65	1	-24.3%	MDR May 2006 45.00 Call, will sell 1st week of March 2006.