Mad Money Machine

Two of three filled so far…

I’ve made the trades to the portfolio as promised. We sold 814 Votorantim Celulose VCP at $15.21 for $12,380.94. That’s a gain of $2376.88 on our $10,004.06 investment or 23.8% in two months. Fantastic!

Next we sold 347 Bancolombia CIB (or as Jim Cramer likes to say, “Banko-Columbia”) for $12,002.73. That’s a gain of $1,998.72 on our 10,004.01 investment or 20% in two months. Fantastic!

Finally, we sold 500 Seagate Technologies STX at $27.86 for 13,930. That’s a gain of $3,935 on our $9,995 investment or a whopping 39.4% in two months. FANTASTIC!

We took our proceeds of $38,346.20 and divided it by three to buy our replacement stocks. First up, OptionsXpress OXPS which we bought at market at 10:00 for $31.11 and 410 shares. Then we did get filled on iRobot IRBT at our bid $28.42 as it did dip down to that level at 10:14 for us.

Now what are we going to do about Southern Copper PCU? Are we going to be patient and wait for a pullback to our $81.81 bid. Or do we chase and get in at any price ’cause we gotta have it!

We wait! And if we don’t get it in a week or so, we re-evaluate.

Before I leave you, lemme point out a little problemo now…

These short-term capital gains have resulted in a pretty large extra-tax hit of $1,684 to the portfolio. You’ll see it on the Portfolios page. So while the top-line gain of the Cramer Portfolio is 8.8%, the after-extra-tax portfolio net gain is only 7.1%!!! (The ETF portfolio, by comparison, is at 6.6%. We can’t let it get this close now can we?)

We may have to re-think our holding onto the losers in order to help wash out some of the short-term gains. That is, we may sell Sara Lee SLE and Crocs CROX and swap into some other retailer and speculative plays. Even then, though, we’re only talking about $1,270 in losses. And that would only bump up the net gain to 7.3%.

Wow, I HATE taxes! Let’s make a push for friction-free capitalism, huh?