Jim (cont'd):     

Now, these were always intended as short term bets, I said that over and over again…. okay… and since they are all up substantially…. it is time to put them all on the sell block… do you have to take everything off the table?…. I probably would… but you don’t… now you have to promise me that you will sell enough … so that you are only playing with the houses money… mi casa su casa… meaning that the money that you should have invested in these stocks… should just be the profit from the original trade… why did this field bet work… and why do I recommend that you sell them now… I recommended most of these stocks December 12th… NASDAQ 100 hit bottom hitting its 52 week low… just a couple of weeks earlier, November 21st, it was 1018.… since then the NASDAQ has seen a 200 point bounce… but compared to the NASDAQ 100 our speculative stocks did much better… NDX up 3.8% since December 12th… while Ciena, Skyworks, Tellabs have really zoomed…

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While this is obviously a challenging environment for techs … Telco carriers are healthier than they were in 2002... network capacity is right size… companies are maintaining tighter inventories… a lot of these are Telco stocks… vendors are more focused… but the tech stocks in our basket had some 2002, 2003 tech bottom levels… if you don’t believe me… and don’t realize how robust things are… I want you to check with Cramer fav, tail gunner Ivan… on his fabulous Verizon talk the other day at Citigroup conference… these stocks were also trading very close to their cash… so there really wasn’t much lower that they could go… and even though we are in a recession… people still want high definition content… faster data services.. better broadband networks… better texting… and new smart phone. They were all part of the thesis… AMD, Ciena, Skyworks, Tellabs all went higher… as most of the bad news had been baked into the expectations already…and over the past month the downward pressure from tax law selling…. which gave you a chance to buy these stocks on the cheap has now gone away.

Both Tellabs and Ciena were just upgraded by Barclay’s… which boosted their stock nicely… Barclay’s I think that is where my sister in Philadelphia… now it is an investment house, not bad… AMD the underperformer in the group took a hit yesterday courtesy of Intel’s profit warning in the Sad Cam fiasco… holy cow… in addition to that… Taiwan’s biggest maker of dynamic random access memory or Cram…. power chip semiconductor… has said that it will try to trim costs and sell off non core assets… to survive the chips sector worst ever downturn… we liked AMD because of its restructuring… not because we think the semis are any good…. but since then we’ve gotten a fair size gain… come on let’s ring the register on this one… as for Skyworks Solutions they make high performance circuits and semi conductors… just smash open a mobile phone it will have stuff that will spill out of it… particularly power amplifiers… they boost the smart phones… they are in the I-phone… they are in the Blackberry… 20.4% gain… everybody told me that this one would never go up… it came in spite of the fact that at the end of December… channel checks reported that I-phone production was down 53% sequentially… worse than November… now at the same time the Blackberry storm was a huge success… thank you president Obama… Skyworks is in both… they report earnings next week… I would rather take profits now ahead of the quarter… at least enough so that you are still playing with the houses money… then take my chances with the companies earnings… no thank you…. and no offense at all, by the way, to David Alters, the companies fine CEO… and a Mad Money fan… but we are about the money not the favoritism…

Although, how about Cramer pal, buddy friend Eddie Lambert… who smoked the bears in Sears (SHLD) today… with a sweet single day gain of 9 points… or 23%... Eddie the doubters are roaring.

Bottom line…

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The Bottom Line!:     Our field bet in beaten down tech names worked… given you a 22.5% gain if you bought all 4 stocks in this basket… but it was a speculative trade… the trade is now a sell, sell, sell… at least, until you are only playing with the houses money.

The Trade Worked, But Now I Think It’s Time To Take Profits in CIENA Corp. (CIEN), Tellabs Inc. (TLAB), Skyworks Solutions Inc. (SWKS) & Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).  My spec field bet worked… but we are not greedy… we are ringing the register… and sell, sell, selling… so we can put new money to work in speculative names… as 2009 goes on.