MikeBobulinski (< 20)

Every now and then...

April 04, 2009 – Comments (3) | RELATED TICKERS: JAVA.DL , IBM

There are a couple of old sayings that came to mind a couple of weeks ago.  The first "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while" and second "Even a broken clock is correct two times a day."  Then I got this e-mail from TMF regarding "The Stock that Got Away"...which caused me to laugh.  So why am I so jovial?  Well this blind squirrel managed to find a nut.  That nut was Sun Microsystems.

I have been buying Sun for some time.  Built what I would call a reasonable position.  Trust me, it is nothing I can retire off of, but for this novice, it was a decent win after some not so decent losses last Fall.  I'd like to say that I knew something good was going to happen, but that would be less than the truth.  I honestly was building a position in Sun looking forward to when the economy would rebound and Tech would take off again.  Sun, while not stellar, has a fairly reasonable history and would have, I believed, gone up in a decent fashion.

Enter IBM.  IBM did me a favor that I thought only time would.  In less than 24 hours, my position in Sun doubled its value and made me a happy trader.  For me, my cost per share averaged out to about $4.17.  After IBM made the news with a rumored buy out offer of better than $9.50 a share, I managed to exit my position at $9.25 a share.  Why'd I exit?  First, because I got my double.  Second, there was no real degree of certainty in the rumor at the time, and I did not want to chance losing my double to the potential drop in price should the rumor not pan out.

As it stands, the rumor has some basis in truth, and now it looks like IBM is going forward at around $9.55 a share. While owning a chunk of IBM is not a bad thing, I decided to take my profit and invest it in something else and see what the rally that has been going on for the past four weeks might turn up.  So far, I'm not disappointed.  BUT like the broken clock that has a chance to be right twice a day, I already hit my one correct time...and I look forward to the next.  For me, Sun was not the one that got away.  For me, Sun made up for my earlier lesson of bailing on winners vice taking the loss I should have...

As usual, the education continues.