Did you see the news about that incredible double arm transplantation at Johns Hopkins for a U.S. vet?
I’m so proud of Dr. Jaimie Shores, originally from Truth or Consequences, N.M., who helped perform that procedure. It was fascinating listening to my veterinarian father grill Jaimie about the details of the procedure as we waited to go out together for my wedding last weekend. Dr. Shores was one of my best men, and so was my dad.
Jaimie’s been one of the most influential and important people in my life since I met him. We first met in 1991 when he tried to cover me while I was breaking my high school basketball single-game scoring record. Well, it was a couple years later at The University of New Mexico where we become inseparable best friends. But, look at him now!
There’s a revolution going on in medicine and Dr. Shores reminded me last night about how much I’ve learned from him on the Medical Revolution over the years.
Dr. Shores is an inspirational person in his own right and the lives he’s changing by helping develop these new medical miracles inspire everybody who learns about it. He asked me last night if I remembered when he used to explain to me that the concept of what we call “plastic surgery” today will someday be looked back upon as a crude concept like leeching.
Stay tuned for some analysis on this sector in coming months and years.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s up big after another strong quarterly report, proving our long-held thesis that the company at some point can and will turn on the gross margin and earnings machine in its model.
Facebook’s reporting tonight. Feet to fire I’d rather be long than short into the report, as indeed I am. Gulp, as always.
I’m not changing my stance on Apple AAPL -0.31% . I’m holding onto a large common stock position with huge gains that I’ve owned for years and I’m sitting on losses from the recent call options I’d scaled into. I do expect that Apple can and will deliver nearly $60 in earnings this year, and I expect that the market will pay 10X those earnings, plus net cash, which would put the stock up near $750 or $800. And I still expect that we’ll see a $1,000 price in AAPL sometime in 2014 or 2015. There are no sure things though, and that’s why we diversify and clearly our other longs have been huge winners of late even as Apple’s own shareholders have relentlessly sold the stock down here that they loved at $700.
The broader markets are at all-time highs once again, which validates our having stayed steadily bullish and long once again. But, clearly the near-term markets are overbought, and I’m also, as you guys know, increasingly cautious on the global economies.
We added a couple new tech shorts before I left, with IBM and EWY (a Korean exchange-traded fund that’s 1/4 comprised of Samsung) and I had also been actively trimming down the call options after the big runs we’ve had in the Amazon, Facebook, Sandisk, Linsday, Baidu and others in this new year, having bought those calls on weakness when the markets were panicking over the … what was it again, oh yea, the fiscal cliff. Which means I’m less aggressively long than I you’ve probably become accustomed to. With Apple’s hit and so many of these other call options having kicked in, I’ve got more notional exposure to several of these positions than usual too.
I’m going to sell more calls that I’ve got big profits in, in all of the above mentioned stocks today and let my common stock portfolio do the heavy lifting for the near-term.
Cody Willard writes Revolution Investing for MarketWatch and posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com, which is not affiliated with MarketWatch. At time of publication, Cody was net long Facebook, Sandisk, Lindsay, Baidu, Amazon, Apple and Google and net short IBM and EWY. Follow Cody on Twitter at twitter.com/codywillard.
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