Hormel (HRL), Hawaiian Airlines (HA)

Hold on HRL for 2 Weeks & Plans to Buy HA This Coming Week (March 7, 2016)

Being employed in a company, I cannot really trade stocks full time. I do not have the time to be nimble and act on last minute changes. For the past 2 weeks, the indexes have rallied up and generally during this period any stock should be ok to buy. I decided to buy HRL because of it’s stable fundamentals and it’s prices continues to trend upward month after month, year after year. It appears to be a relatively safe stock to invest in and if I don’t have the time to monitor it well, I feel confident my stocks should be safe here.

Last week was a busy week for me, where I work in the search marketing industry, and was a speaker at the Search Marketing Expo and that went well. So there was not much time to really actively trade for me being busy the whole week for this conference. But I trusted in HRL and briefly had some doubts since I bought HRL on the 26th, and it started trending downward on that day.

HRL the past 2 weeks, had a brief downward trend.

But I trusted in my analysis, and even didn’t have any stops set and knew it would go back up. I am now back in positive territory, but I believe there are better opportunities on others that seem to currently be performing better and this is where I am eyeing on going long on HA. Month over month, year after year, seems to perform good also. But it’s momentum to rise up in the past few days and weeks appear to be better than HRL. So my plan this week is to move out some funds from HRL to HA.

This movement of stocks, is another lesson I’ve learned in the past which turns into one of my rules today.

With limited funds, and want to move my stocks from one company to another, where both are trending upward well, I do not completely close out my position in the stock I currently own since I do not have a margin account, and will have to wait for my funds to settle after 3 days. Instead I sell a portion of my shares, so while they are still getting settled, the remaining stocks are still increasing it’s portfolio value. And once the funds are settled, I will now buy the new stock I wanted to buy. If both still tend to trend up and if I want to move all funds completely, then that is the time I will close out the position in the older company since I already have a position in the new one, thus having no dead time waiting for funds to settle.

Having said that, my plans for this week is to sell off some shares of HRL and leave a good number of shares of HRL that should be divisible by 100. I am still learning how to do option trading and will not take the plunge yet, but I will also start to try to get used to trading stocks in multiples of 100 since each option contract represents 100 shares.

I will sell some of my HRL on the uptrend of the day, after a day low is met and apply a 1% trailing stop to sell, depending how the day rolls out. Since I have some small amount of cash, I will buy some HA stocks already, and buy more once my funds from my HRL sell has settled.

As I have mentioned a few days ago, I have been in Hari Swaminathan’s Options trading course on Udemy, but also at the same time, I have been reading The Options Playbook by Brian Overby
and he has 3 beginner’s options trades which I might try out soon once I get to understand it a bit more.

Once I have my positions in HRL and HA, I will backtrack historically how 5% trailing stops worked with them in the past. And will probably use that or some other percent setting to setup my trailing stops with them.

Whatever extra cash I may still have, or maybe at least 10% to 20% of my stock portfolio, I will use on more aggressive trades later on.

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