Live! From Wall Street

Kind of an exciting day for me. I am staying at the corner of Wall Street and Water Street and will get to be in the New York Stock Exchange today. This will be the second time in my life I'll be in the NYSE. I will be part of a group presentation there today, so hopefully I will not make any blunders.

My dividend stocks continue to do ok, but I am under-performing of late. But I am sleeping well at night and have stopped making daily adjustments to my portfolio, so I think net-net it is okay. I am still a fair chunk in cash as I think the recent rally has been over-done. Still too much uncertainty in Europe and too great a chance of a recession in the US for my blood.

As many of you know, I have two mechanical MFI portfolios that add a stock when it is new to the MFI screen in the past 52 weeks and sells a stock when it has been owned for a year. There was a fair amount of movement this weekend.

Top 30 Screen: New stocks include PETS and GTIV.
Top 50 screen: New stocks include NBIX, STRI and SAVE.

PETS seems to be the only one that might qualify for my dividend portfolio. At under $10 they are actually pretty tempting. But I doubt I will buy as I am jittery about the market in total.

SAVE is Spirit airlines and they actually look interesting as they are one of the few airlines I have seen that appears to be in decent financial shape (no debt!).

STRI is a supplier to the Solar industry, which we know is under duress as there is fear of govt subsidies.... er, subsiding. They are in Enfield Ct, which is where I shop at Costco, so we know they can get cheap pizzas for lunch.

GTIV is a home healthcare provider that bought (ill-timed) Odyssey Healthcare last year. That caused them to have a ton of debt (over a billion for a company with a 100m market cap) at a time when margins are under pressure as state govt examine how much they spend on medicare programs. I will not be buying GTIV.

NBIX is your standard biotech company that occasionally appears on the screens. Some have done well, but they need to be evaluated on prospects, not a magic formula.