A Great Week for My Stocks :)

For the 5 trading days this week, I am up about 7.1% overall - an exceptional return for one week (many would be satisfied with this return for a whole year).  The challenge is to pare back holdings of good performing stocks and selling some of them into strength to lock in gains.  Right now, I am over 95% invested in securities (more than I would like, but I follow what the graphs tell me), and it worked out well last week.  I ended last week 78% invested in securities (by securities, I mean stocks and ETF's).


As I mentioned on Monday, this week began with the Goldcorp offer for OSK, and I sold my shares into the offer at the end of day.  I said at the time that I thought the offer would be improved but wanted to deploy the money elsewhere - OSK is a bit higher now than where I sold it at 6.25 but not much.


Another gold stock I hold - AUQ - actually went up MORE since its January 9th close than OSK has (33% vs. 31%) and that is WITHOUT a takeover offer for AUQ.  Due to this rapid increase, I sold half of my position yesterday and half of the remaining shares again today.  I kept some OSK in case it keeps going up, but I wanted to lock in gains.


Note: While I do use the 50-day moving average (MA) line to decide when to buy stocks (and usually when to sell them), if they exceed my target price (especially if done rapidly, on no news), then I have no problem locking in gains.  I didn't sell them outright - I put in tight stop losses on them - but they sold on dips.


Right now, gold securities are doing well, and I bought the ones I did because their price passed upwards through their 50-day MA.  I still hold HGU (gold stock ETF), ZJG (small cap gold stocks ETF), YRI (large producer), and smaller producers SAS and MTO.  The last two are the most speculative but both are current gold producers and MTO, in particular, has been growing their monthly production steadily all last year and they produced over 4,500 oz of gold in December.


I also own some base metal plays, which also hit buy signals recently - FM, LIM, PDN (uranium), TKO, SLW, and S.


A stock I wrote about on Monday - DWI (Dragonwave) - announced earnings this week and also announced a new contract with 'a large US carrier' but did not give a value for the contract.  A couple of days later, DWI not only announced a deal with a company to sell their products to the Chinese market (which is growing out cell networks rapidly and needs lots of hardware), but the first sales under this contract have already been delivered.  Needless to say, DWI jumped on this news and has largely kept the gains throughout the rest of the week.  I sold about 15% of my DWI that I purchased at lower levels to lock in some gains, but still hold the rest.


To round out my holdings, I have EMA, SLF, CR, LTS, L, and MBT,  Of all of the securities I own right now, none are showing sell signals - they are all holds except LIM and LTS that are current buys (I already have some of each so I won't buy more right now).


This fantastic week for me was during a week that the overall stock markets (especially in the US) didn't do that great, but that is largely due to my gold and base metals holdings.  I also saw a story today about how there may be a shortage of physical gold and how this could really drive up gold prices if people start demanding physical delivery of their gold.  While all of this news is good for the gold stocks I hold, it isn't the reason that I bought them in the first place, as I simply follow the moving average.


I could easily give back some of this week's gains once trading resumes this week, but it sure feels good to have such a good week.  I am up 6 days in a row now, and 8 of the last 9.