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Author: Mike Celeste Editor: Tony Ponzo May Circulation:

Stat Sheet Week Ending May 3rd 2008

ChangesWeeklyAprilYear to Date
IndexesPointsPercentPointsPercentPointsPercent
Dow+166.0+1.3%+557.0+4.5%-207.0-1.6%
S&P+16.0+1.1%+63.0+4.8%-54.0-3.7%
NAS+54.0+2.2%+63.0+4.8%-175.0-6.6%

Highlight of this past week -CMI: really turned on its engines and roared back 46.38 points to our sell price this past week in the Basic System, on top of a good profit last week in the Big Dipper. (And kept going up some more, too, but we don't want to be greedy.)

In this Issue---
SplitMaster Basic System---
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Patience paid off this past week when we sold CMI after holding it quite a while. We always thought it was a good stock and the market recently said the same thing. The stock came back 46.38 points--it was really down low. The price kept going up the rest of the week too, but after being down so far we didn't want to be greedy, so we closed the position. We had another winning month in April and you can see on Past Results (then click on Last Mo Detail) how we did for the month and what the numbers look like year to date, too.

Big Dipper System---
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There isn't much new to report in the Big Dipper. We have one at a profit and one at a loss at this point, but nothing new hit the list. We had one come close, but it is an energy stock and they took a pretty good beating this week. That stock isn't on the list yet, as it wasn't quite close enough to post, but we are watching it closely.

 Options---
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Team members should pay close attention for a possible Alert to write a covered call on one of the splitters---if you have the stock. The last one we wrote at $5.00 is down to $1.85, last sale. That means we received a credit of $500 dollars per contract, originally when we bought the stock and wrote the covered call. Now we can buy that same call back for $185.00 to close the position, if we wanted to- giving us a profit of $315 per contract. At this point we don't want to. This credit of $500 helps form a lower base price for the stock, by 5 points.

 Momentum Plays- This week---
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It is still slow going in this strategy. It's not for lack of potential plays as the season is going strong and there are plenty to choose from. It's more for lack of action in the plays this quarter. There is definitely a change in the market - to the up side or at least to a leveling off period. We thing this is showing up in our plays which are not moving like they did in previous quarters. This is especially evident in stocks that are announcing in-line with expectations. An example of this is GYI. We could have posted it as a potential play but since it met the street's expectations, we thought it would not be a mover. That turned out to be true as the stock had a high/low on announcement day (Friday) of only .24 and that was after it gapped up .17.

The other problem we have had this week is timing the entry point of a play just a little late or being too conservative on the price. That made us miss a few very nice plays. But we did get into two plays one was a very nice winner in about 5 minutes (UTHR) and one losing SPY play. We played a PUT and it was in our favor for a short time but then the market turned up and continued up. The mood was definitely up this week. We'll see what the mood is this coming week. See the next section on our indicators.

 Three Indicators---
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Our indicators are giving us some warning signs about being overbought, so be careful out there.

 The Economy, The Markets & Commentary---
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This is one of those times when you just don't fight momentum. The market just wants to go up, and we should enjoy the ride. There is a mix of positive and negative news in the economy, but the investors seem to zero in on the positive news more than the negative. Maybe it is because we have had such a long stretch of bad news in the housing and finance sectors that we are getting numb to more news. Actually, the finance area seems to have found stability thru the Fed, so the negative news is limited and in some cases better than expected. That is, earnings and write offs come in lower for earnings and more for write-offs, but better than expected. That is getting great reception in the market place.

The political races are centering mostly around the cost of living increases that have hit us so hard. At least there are some proposals being made by the Senators, even tho they don't stand a chance of being made into law. At least they are aware of what is hurting the US consumer. I don't know about your neck of the woods, but when the national news, on a number of stations, talked about the price of bread, they said it was up 12-14% in 1 year. Apples to apples in our area, comparing the same brand of bread, we saw a 28% raise, and that was since October, far less than 1 year. Pasta went up 43% in the last several weeks, for the same brand. Gas hit near or over $4.00/gallon in parts of the country, and President Bush said he was unaware of $4/gallon--as we mentioned last week. Of course, he doesn't pump his own gas, so he probably was sincere in his statement. Politicians live in a different world than we do, that's for sure--but we won't go any further with that. We just hope that some relief can come our way--be it the rebate checks or whatever. Those checks won't go far, as tax increase talk is rearing its ugly head, too.

We were wondering something about the economy. If we the consumers are getting hit with high prices (and we are) and the earnings of major corporations is better than expected, does that mean that the companies are able to pass their cost increases on to us without suffering loss of sales--or the increase is more than enough to offset some loss of sales? Wouldn't it be nice if we consumers could pass on our increase in costs to our employers and they would just pay us more? That's why consumer income doesn't match up as well compared to increased costs, but it is a nice thought.

Today's Thought---
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Trivia to think about---A "jiffy is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.


Mike

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