Monday, October 06, 2014

GTAT Files For Chapter 11

Wow. GTAT filed for chapter 11 this morning. They have had so much trouble getting their act together that they could not even manage to file that before the opening of the markets!

As my #2 holding, I am feeling the pain. That will take me down about 8% on the day, so I was up 4% on the year on Friday and am now down 4%. I am sorry for anyone who followed me on this trade. Reading twitter, you would think only idiots were here. But MS owned 5%, Piper Jaffey upgraded to buy in August, GS had it as a buy.

As hindsight is always 20/20, I should have just sold everything after the AAPL announcement. But I still believed that management was not out and out lying about eps in 2014 and future. Naive in retrospect.

Wile it is not fun to lose 8% in a day (and to be clear, that is 8% of what I track here, maybe about 1.5% of my net worth), it is not the end of the world (as we know it). It is a reminder not to be too overweight single positions. It is also a reminder why not to use margin (I can on,y imagine the pain for people who bought GTAT on margin) and I think I will swear off the options game (though for GTAT my options transactions actually netted me a solid gain).

So now, some work to do to try and battle back to break even for 2014. I am probably too far behind benchmark to win that battle.

2 comments:

Eugene said...

What are you going to do now with your GTAT?

Marsh_Gerda said...

Eugene, I have sold it. Maybe I will use proceeds to buy a cup of coffee and a donut.