On Friday morning, I sent a note to members of my free email list informing them that I had placed an order to sell the remainder of my position in Ultra Semiconductor at the market close. (To get on the free list, enter your email address at the top of this page.) The order filled at $20.70, for a gain of 14.4%. I have now closed the position. Here’s the final tally:
– 11/11/04: Bought at $18.09
– 06/15/05: Sold half at $19.66
– 08/09/05: Sold one quarter at $21.29
– 08/12/05: Sold one quarter at $20.70
AVG SELL PRICE: $20.33 (+12.38%)
As always, you can see these results recorded on my strategies page.
This is not as well as I’d hoped to do with this position, but gaining 12% in nine months is nothing to complain about. It could even be appreciated when considering that Ultra Semi dropped below $16 in both January and April. We gained more than 27% from those troubling times. I wrote on April 3:
I’m still itching to get out of Ultra Semi at a small profit, but the market is not helping. We had a nice gain mid-week, but then dropped again on Friday and are now down some 4.5%. Light a candle and hope semiconductors suddenly surge upward before tanking over the summer. If they keep creeping down, I’ll have to take the loss at around -9% or so.
We got that surge upward, never had to take a 9% loss, and made more than just a small profit. Who says lighting candles and hoping doesn’t help?
In anticipation of a falling stock market over the summer, I wrote on March 12:
The economy is doing pretty well, it seems, but I expect oil to continue its rise and the dollar to continue its fall. That headline has a way of surfacing just about the time temperatures rise and — voila! — another sinking summer.
I was half right. While oil has continued climbing, the dollar has not continued falling and, in fact, rose since that post. The spirit of the article was correct, however. My thesis was that stock prices would sink over the summer. They are indeed sinking.
It feels good to be out of Ultra Semiconductor. I have more than half of my money in cash, waiting for the lower prices I’ve been wanting for so many months. I think that patience is about to pay off.
