Action to Close March

[Fish2006]

Sometimes, one of the hardest things about stocks is that they are not nearly as exciting as sports. Frankly, my plays right now are still Capex and professional services, so long as they have international exposure.

That all said, for speculative plays, look for blood in the streets - where the most fear is, and start to buy. Right now, the entire housing complex is a bloodbath. Nothing but negative news. Which means - it may be a good time to start dollar cost averaging into homebuilders. In other words, consider buying a diverse collection of good homebuilder stocks (LEN, TOL, KBH) - in 12 equal increments over the next 12 months. The bottom may not be there yet, but it is fairly reasonable to assume that in the next 12 months, you will probably see said bottom.

If you are looking for "stocks under 10" - which is normally something I don't touch, since nominal price rarely indicates anything, I can make an exception if you want to try your luck bottom fishing in the subprime lenders. For one, subprime isn't going away.. it is simply being repriced. It is dropping though, as if, it is going away for good. Buying a basket of subprime stocks may not be a bad idea, if you do the research first. This is just and idea right now - I can't pick names until I do some research... but I would tend towards names based on their loan mix - subprime lenders that have been doing mostly 100 CLTV loans are out, but if the mix is lower LTV with option arms and lots of IO, it may be well worth considering.

Generally, in the market, we are dependent on currency issues (a big move in Yen or Euro will move the market), and to a lesser degree, on the price of oil. None of which, despite what the talking heads on CNBC say, are predictable day to day. You are best off dollar cost averaging into this market and not trying to time this.