Pulled the trigger - bought STD, AAPL, PCLN

I was super-impressed with how negative people were this morning about Europe, everywhere else, and even about Apple. So impressed that I decided to pull the trigger and buy some Banco Santander (STD) – the Spanish bank that gets most of its revenue from outside of Spain - at $6.14, some Apple (AAPL) at $561.61, and some Priceline (PCLN) at $688.73.

 

I had been looking at STD for a number of weeks now. I felt that people were overdoing the negativity about Spain. Interestingly, after I made the decision to buy, I checked and noticed that Goldman Sachs has just added them to their "conviction buy" list and JPMorgan upped them to "Overweight." Generally I pay little attention to brokerage ratings on stocks, but I did find it curious that these ratings happened to match my judgment.

 

I am not a fan of Apple, but it felt like people were trying to artificially push the stock down before the quarterly report.

 

And Priceline is the only company whose product/service I can actually "rave" about, and the stock had a nice, buyable dip this morning.

 

I am also implicitly betting that the U.S. is not going to sink into a significant recession over the next six months to a year (and nobody knows what the outlook is beyond that anyway.)

 

I have no idea how these stocks will do in the near-term. Let's see how brilliant/idiotic I look six months and a year from now.

 

I just invested 80% of the cash from my 2011 retirement contribution. I just couldn't bear the dullness of the Fidelity 2025 target data fund I had been investing my retirement contributions in for the past few years. If there is a big dip in the coming months, I am likely to move a chunk of that target date fund to these stocks, or others that look attractive.

-- Jack Krupansky