Weekend Update

I had a hard time getting myself out of a deep blue funk in order to write this week's "Weekend Update."

No, not because of a gut wrenching week in the market, the week treated me just fine.

For you see, it turned out, as I awoke this morning, that I had not won the $640 Million Mega-Millons Grand Prize.

Forget the fact that I won a $2 voucher at the time of my ticket purchase and chose to cash it in rather than re-invest and forget the fact that I won another $7 by virtue of having 3 of the numbers,

Believe it or not, it was the $640 million that I'd set my sights on.

Sure, the $8 net return on the $1 investment was good, but still a far cry from real triumph.

But, not to let a good thing go to waste, I may pick up a few hundred million shares of Sino-Forest.

This past week, I actually started looking for the coming week's potential plays on Thursday and was hoping certain depressed prices would hold, because I was anxious to re-play some previous positions.

One of those was selling puts in Focus Media again, a distant relative to Sino Forest, although at some point we're likely to find out that the distance was never really terribly great.

Unfortunately, it only offers monthly options. Too much can happen between now and the three weeks until expiration. Equally unfortunately, it's one of those Chinese companies, so you never can really tell what's going on. But that is what helps to explain very enticing premiums.

If you dare.

Click to read more ...

Everyone Needs an Escape Strategy

It's good to have strategies in most aspects of life.

Exit and escape strategies seem to be be especially important and have lots of attention paid to them.

Pre-nuptual agreements and Living Wills come to mind. I have only one of those two, because Sugar Momma wouldn't let me have both. My guess is that if I had pressed hard for the one that I don't have, there'd be no reason for the other.

She would have seen to it that there would be no lingering coma.

Being Monday, I had money in my pocket from stock assignments and as usual had an uncontrollable need to spend that money, just like a big kid in his own version of a candy store.

What made today a little different was that I had a minor procedure scheduled just a bit after noontime, so I felt a need to have that money escape my clutches in a very abbreviated period of time.

No problem with that.

My strategy was to spend money recklessly until the nearly 30% of my portfolio was redeployed.

I could have taken the easy way and escaped the responsibility of actually thinking and just bought some Berkshire Hathaway shares. But the big boy version doesn't have options trading associated with the shares, as if I was really able to pick up a multiple of 100 shares of those.

Click to read more ...