Mattu's Tax Loss Picks

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

Haven't been trading much lately. I did get out of GOOG nicely. Have been slowly ditching a little ELN here and there to put the money elsewhere, but still have half my core position and will soon have all of it.

I'm in a kind of "swinging for the fences" mode right now because my portfolio eroded so much from ignoring it. And capping off my ELN beating by buying AMZN and some Mar50 calls on it right before they announced. I'm still waiting for Yahoo's "Analyst Estimates" page to get updated to show that what really happened was a major upside surprise. But that got buried under the bad news of them missing by a little bit on the top line and them being down year-over-year, like was expected, but nowhere near as badly as expected.

I've got a bunch of AMZN March calls with strikes ranging from $37.50 to $50 and nearly every stop in between. The $50's are toast. But I'm up on the rest. I think the only ones I don't have are 47.5's.

Also have SANM Apr5 calls, CIEN Mar5 and Apr5, and a bunch of ELN Feb17.5's that aren't looking very promising right now. Fortunately (or maybe this time next week I'll be thinking "unfortunately" as I have in previous months?), I've whittled that position down from 250 contracts to 100.

Was telling Matt and Dave last week that I was gonna load up on MSFT puts if it got into the 28's. Turned my back on the market too long and didn't notice it'd happened. Would've been some mighty fine money on the 27.5's, I'm sure.