Global Plunge

I know, I know… not a very enjoyable day. James Stewart had made a comment last week that we had not had a 2% decline in the S&P 500 since July 2006. That was an exceedingly long streak. I almost didn’t buy my new stocks yesterday as I felt it was about “that” time. But MFI doesn’t say much about timing the market, so I decided to be faithful and stay fully invested (except for the HW component, which I still actually own).

Thankfully, I had sold 60% of my sidecar portfolio (wish I had sold the other 40% as RAIL and OVTI both got hammered by 5%+). I did use the early morning drop to buy SHOO for my sidecar, I had mentioned I had my eye on it. They report earnings in a couple of days. SHOO held up quite well today, I am hoping that is a bullish sign about their earnings. I’ll think about how and when to invest the rest.

The good news (if there is good news) is that my MFI portfolio didn’t much lose ground to the benchmarks (my non MFI portfolio did as it is overweight in International stocks, which were slaughtered). I will say that I do not expect this to be a one day correction, but rather the start of a month or two. Perhaps in total about 10%. Greenspan did say the other day that he felt it was more likely than not that the US will still have a recession later in 2007.

I still have a ways to go until I hit my worst MFI week. The week ending June 9^th I was down $21K. A week in mid-July I was down $18K (I think my posting had a picture of the Red Sea).

Wow, the dust has cleared. The Dow was off over 400 points. I only had two stocks in the green, SHOO (do I know how to pick ‘em?) and PVD (strange). In my non-MFI portfolio, IBN was my big loser. It has dropped 19% in the past week (ouch).

VPHM: -7.3%

OVTI: -6.5%

ORCT: -6.3%

EZEN: -6.7% and

DLX: -6.1% were my big MFI losers.

Stock News – Lost in all the noise of the day was earnings by 2 of my companies:

PNCL – They made a ton of $, but much of it was from getting $ they had written off from NWA. When you stripped out everything, it looked to me like they made 60 cents a share (Pinnacle Air profit climbs, helped by Northwest settlement). Pretty good for a $19 stock.

FTO – they made 47 cents a share vs. 55 cents a year (Frontier Oil earnings, revenue decline).It makes you realize how much the hurricanes of 2005 impacted many MFI stocks. FTO had lower earnings because in 2005 there were fewer refineries up and going because of Rita and Katrina. THO also had big sales in 2005 as people who lost their homes bought RVs. For a long time there was some roofing company on the lists as they had such good earnings post the storms.

OK, enough blogging today. I am going to go and cry in my beer.