On the 6th I sold off a bit of Funko for a few hundred dollar gain. I picked up a bit of AT&T on the 6th which I sold on the 7th for a few hundred dollar gain.
On the 15th of November I put a bit into various muni bonds like MYD, IIM, NAD & NVG. I sold those on the 6th for about a grand of profit. On the 6th I also made a couple hundred on quick flips of PETS & OZK.
I am still holding a bit of Funko & Google, but exited some other positions I entered today or recently. The Funko I am still holding is off about $800 while the Google is stinking badly as they seem to keep coming into regulatory blowback. They are making the right moves in emerging markets like India even if developed markets like the EU & Australia are pushing back on them.
Part of my ongoing belief in Google is I think YouTube is vastly undervalued. As many different companies try to do paid streaming offerings they’ll end up saturating the field to where a greater share of content will end up being ad supported. They’ll perhaps push Netflix to adopt ads, which will eventually make Netflix less differentiated. When people have to choose between Neflix, Disney, Hulu, WarnerMedia, Amazon Prime, Roku, whatever Comcast offers & others, many will choose whatever is free. And almost nobody doing ad-supported deals will be able to sign meaningful exclusives that are ad-supported.
With Funko (FNKO) I perhaps over-bought into the hype of the Wal-Mart & Target shelving space increases. Luckily I was happy repeatedly taking small gains as it lost about half of its value, so I went in and out many times and did decent while the stock stunk up the joint. One of the things I saw while walking the streets of San Francisco with my wife recently was a giant eBay billboard which had limited content on it – only a couple pictures of Funko Pop! vinyl and the eBay logo. I sold out a bit of my remaining Funko position today on today’s gains, though am still holding 75% of the position I recently established.
Funko is hard to put any serious size on though because the bid ask spreads can sometimes be a half-percent to 2/3 a percent with the bids only being for 100 shares at a time. I imagine if you tried to sell 5,000 shares at market in a single go you would likely move the stock at least a percent against you.
Near the bottom today I bought a bit of Apple (AAPL) & then sold it about 2 hours later for a decent gain. I did the same with AT&T (T) along with exiting a small position I had in 1-800 Petmeds (PETS).
I have a small position in ExxonMobil (XOM) which I haven’t exited yet. It’s only up about $100 so far. Oil may still have much further to slide, but commodities are fairly beaten down. If the Fed does a dovish hike next Wednesday that might exhaust some of the recent Dollar strength and put a bit of a bid under commodities. Some of the gold miners (ABX, AEM, GG, NEM) have been rallying over the past month or so.
On a recent interview I heard Luke Gromen mention a more aggressive way to play commodities would be something like Gazprom (OGZPY) or Rosneft (OJSCY), though I think you have to be really attentive to the market or place your position & ignore the short-term market moves if you go heavy into that stuff. I have gotten a few bruises when someone pushed Yandex low out of its trading range by front running a sanctions announcement that afternoon & another one when Yandex was feared to be a takeover target by Russia’s Sberbank.
I am still mostly in cash for now & will opportunistically dip into the markets when it seems there is a decent set up.