BAS swung around today, down more than 8%. I just adore 10% price swings up and down, like a buzz saw for the knees of the weak. It’s insanity, there is no reason for this sort of price action. Even when it’s making me rich, I kind of hate it.

The positions I had that were offsetting the losses softened into the close, with HCLP and CCJ coming in neutral. My biggest gainer today isn’t a full position, by a long shot, and is thus not much worth talking about. UEC was up 10% today, but it’s just a few percent – an ancillary position to CCJ.

The biggest real gain I had today was probably silver. You can understand why I’m not leaping around for joy.

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AEC is the latest stock I own to go bananas on nothing. It’s up over 10%, shrugging off the indices.

BAS is the only notable correction I’m experiencing. NRP and silver are both down a bit, but nothing really leading a charge lower.

TSLA meanwhile is rolling over hard, as a multitude of technicians knife one another in an attempt to call the next bounce point. If I had to put my money on one of them, it would be our own ChessNWine.

If TSLA can dip below $100, there is a strong likelihood that I will sell my $100 puts (reserving final judgment for such time) and use the gains to zero out the cost of my other puts (expiring between 2014 and 2015 with strikes around $35-45). That would give me essentially free options to make huge gains out of nothing.

Like a modern day Rumpelstiltskin, I adore spinning gold out of straw more than almost anything else – unless it’s the blood of your firstborn.

For the moment, the TSLA position is still a money loser. But at just 3-4% of my account, how can you pretend that I care?

In summary, the Tesla fanatics are getting quiet, and many a junior in college is starting to sweat.

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I had purchased additional shares of BAS in late July through early August, between $11.55 and $12.40. Those shares were up 30-40%, so I sold off half of them. The remainder is added to my permanent position.

I love the name, but having followed it for quite some time, it’s normal deviations are in the 20-30% range. I’m happy to see it breaking out to new highs, as that jives well with my own expectations. While buying the initial stake in BAS, I called for a price target of $18 at the time, and feel this company is well positioned to experience above average growth for the next 5-10 years.

However, back to the wild price swings, I don’t trust this stock at all. So taking a bit of money off the table makes sense. If I can’t buy back in lower, I still make a fat spread on a major position. But in all likelihood, the stock craters back to $14, and I load up all over again.

My current positions are CCJ, BAS, HCLP, AEC, MAA, NRP, RMCF, TSLA puts, and physical silver.

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Just felt you should know HCLP is continuing its run this morning…

Not much else happening though. Silver just took a second blow to the knee, and CCJ is circling the drain.

The CCJ melancholy is a three year recurring melodrama of such bad performance, I’d get up and leave my box if I didn’t own the theatre.

This is a part of the dance, which plays itself out over and over and over again.

Dispair at the state of nuclear power mixed with cowardly shareholders causes a thirty percent flush out, from which data releases eventually overcome and show to be unfounded, until optimism for a resolution of the nuclear energy concerns pushes us back to the top of the range from where the whole, trashy show can get started again.

Burlesque variety of performances have better plot lines than this…

The last round of CCJ earningst that were released showed that realized prices for CCJ’s uranium actually increased year over year, at the same time “market prices” plunged from $50 per lb to the $36 price they command today.

Until I see some data suggesting that Cameco is actually being affected by the doldrums of the rest of the nuclear energy sector, I have no reason to take any of this seriously.

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Welcome, and I hope I find you well.

I’m coming into the afternoon with strong rallying across my portfolio. AEC and CLP are both up over 100 points. CCJ, RGR, and BAS are all pushing 200. The euro cracked this morning, and EUO is now up 150. Silver is enjoying a relief rally, but it’s down so much inside of this year, it seems stupid to talk about.

The only place I’m losing money today are the TSLA puts. And since they’re puts at 2-3% of the account, I really don’t care.

I’m actually looking to add to the Tesla put position, this time targeting the 2015 expiries. A $70 strike price should do nice – maybe as low as $50.

I believe TSLA is the new NFLX; sans the recovery.

All in all, I’m still up over a percent so far, with a 30% cash position to boot. But if I were to be honest, I would say I still expect the summer to end dreadfully.

Have a great day.

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Every now and again, I like to look back over where I’ve been to see what I should have done. Sometimes I find I was exactly right. Sometimes I see the errors (hopefully not relevant). And sometime, much to my frustration, I see I was exactly where I should have been but then decided to wander off just before the party got started.

Utilities more or less sum up those frustrations.

I called the utility move about 2 years ago. My reasoning was essentially that a utility is equivalent to a publicly insured bond (a company with a legal monopoly and appropriate guarantees), and that since these bonds have (had) a nice yield, they would become the de facto target if bonds held low prices. But even if bonds somehow fell, they were good enough value to warrant the buy at the time.

Then I picked through and found my favorite utility – AWK (water).

I bought AWK in the low $20’s, road it up to $30, and then…I just sort of wandered off.

So much money got left on the table. Did I leave the utility play because I thought the move was done? No, I mostly left because I thought we were going to sell off and wanted to trade both ways. So I raised cash.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve overplayed my hand like this, trying to nail the inflection like an ace. And what I’ve witnessed, in hindsight, is that I’m a much better stock picker than I am a market timer.

Which brings us to oil.

I just sacrificed some more money on the alter of oil. But this time, instead of shorting more like a beast, obsessed with “being right”, I’m taking my drubbings and walking off. I’ve been almost perfectly hedged the past few months (excluding silver, which I treat as almost an off balance sheet position at times). And I refuse to let the SCO “hedge” (read, loser) sink my year, which has been very profitable. EUO is doing well, I have a healthy cash position, and BAS, CCJ, AEC, CLP, and RGR will all prove winners. Of this I am confident. The only other thing is the TSLA puts, which are low single digits of assets and will cause as much fluctuation in my portfolio as the month of June, should they burn out.

Or they make my year.

The message here is flexibility. Learn to have it – don’t waste away your hard labors on the rash emotions of the moment.

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