First off, I’m actually going to close several trades this morning! I will be closing:

Long eBay (EBAY)/Short Demand Media (DMD) +30,70%
Long Priceline (PCLN)/Short AOL (AOL) -29.56%
Long Yelp (YELP)/Short Trulia (TRLA) -31,32%

For reference, these are the trades that will remain live for now:

Long Apple (AAPL)/Short Blue Nile (NILE) +16,04%
Long Tripadvisor (TRIP)/Short Travelzoo (TZOO) +12,57%
Long LinkedIn (LNKD)/Short Zillow (Z) +27,54%

Just for those who did not know, you can always see my live trades and returns here!

http://www.intelligentspeculator.net/livetrades

As you can see, my long & short stock picks have been fairly volatile but overall are off to a great start as the average trade this year has returned over 4%. I would personally say that anything above 1% is ok and 2% is great in my opinion. We’ll see how things keep up though.. last year had started off very well also.

A Few Thoughts

–Blackberry (BBRY): I remain very negative about the stock long term and it is down quite a bit from its highs. I’d be increasingly scared to short though for one reason. The company still has a ton of users which are all looking forward to upgrading their older phones.. this could end up meaning huge sales numbers upfront and a lot of talk about the company coming back from the dead. It’ll be a tough stock to trade for a long time in my opinion… I still think it’s going (way) down over the long term but it could be a bumpy ride.

–AOL (AOL): After a terrible year trading the stock in 2012, I’m off to another poor one with my first trade. I still have not gone through the earnings call to figure out what caused the big increase but I think it’s safe to say that I’ll probably take a break from trading AOL for now.. are any of you long AOL? If so, please explain your rationale, especially if you’ve been long for 12-18 months and made a killing.. could learn a thing or two from you:)

–Trulia (TRLA) and Zillow (Z): Both announced decent but far from great results but it seems like expectations were so low that the stocks actually jumped significantly.

–Apple (AAPL): The stock is seeing a rebound for a few reasons. Some think the iWatch might turn out to be a big deal, others such as Goldman Sachs say that Apple has tremendous upside which is also something that I really believe in.

Do you have any thoughts on these stocks? Or any questions?