We were mostly buyers during this turbulent week for stocks. Here’s a recap of all our trades
It was a very busy week here at the CNBC Investing Club — no major shakeups to the portfolio, but we still made lots of trades to take advantage of this turbulent market. Bottom line The lingering effects of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s Jackson Hole speech last Friday, Aug. 26, gave us an opportunity to be buyers. As the market got overbought in recent weeks, according to the S & P Oscillator , we raised cash. This week, we deployed some of it as market conditions turned to oversold. To be exact, we were net buyers to the tune of $84,763.21 — that’s how much our cash on hand fell by this week when factoring in what we raised in three small sales against our many purchases. This is consistent with our discipline of putting money to work as the S & P Oscillator becomes oversold. Here’s a recap of all our moves in one place. Monday This was our most active day of the week, making two sales in the oil patch to lighten our energy exposure and six purchases: three in high-quality but beaten-down tech names, two in our newest positions — TJX Companies (TJX) and Starbucks (SBUX) — and one health-care name. We were trying to take advantage of Monday’s broader weakness as Wall Street continued to fret about Powell’s hawkish speech, which proved to be a common theme for most of the week. Early in the session, we made four buys : 95 Amazon (AMZN) shares, 50 shares of Qualcomm (QCOM), 150 Starbucks shares at roughly $83 each and, lastly, 200 shares of TJX, the company behind T.J. Maxx, Marshall’s and HomeGoods. We also upgraded our Amazon rating to a 1 , meaning we’re buyers here, as we feel confident margin improvement is underway. We followed these purchases up by trimming 200 shares of Devon Energy (DVN), registering a roughly 63% gain on stock we bought back in January. With stock trading near its 52-week high Monday and energy outperforming the market, our discipline said we needed to make the DVN move. The reason is we’re trying to ensure our energy hedge does not grow to be too large compared with the rest of the portfolio. Our final moves Monday : scooping up 50 shares of the defensive Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), buying 25 Microsoft (MSFT) shares and lightening up our Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) position by selling 20 shares. The logic behind our trim of PXD mirrored the Devon sale. And like we did with Amazon, we upgraded Microsoft shares to a 1. Tuesday Stocks finished lower Tuesday, bringing Wall Street’s then-losing streak to three days. During the session, we used the selling pressure to keep building out our positions in off-price retailer TJX and Starbucks. Those are the two newest stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust, the portfolio we use for the Club. We added Starbucks on Aug. 22 , followed by TJX on Aug. 24 . We like to start small when buying a new stock, then opportunistically grow the position into weakness, helping us lower our cost basis. We did just that Monday and then again Tuesday. On Tuesday , we added 100 shares of Starbucks and 150 TJX shares. This brought our Starbucks position to 525 shares and our TJX holdings to 700. For reference, when initiated the positions in late August, we started with 275 SBUX shares and 350 TJX shares. Starbucks was called up from our Bullpen watch list. TJX was not in the Bullpen but had been a stock we wrote about prior to our initiation. Wednesday Another down day for the major U.S. stock benchmarks, another day where we put to work some of the cash we raised during the late stages market’s two-month summer rally. Around midday Wednesday , with the market sitting in oversold territory, we bought 25 shares of chip designer Nvidia (NVDA) and 150 more shares of TJX. While Nvidia shares would go on to fall much lower one day later, thanks to unexpected news that the U.S. is restricting some chip sales in China, our strategy to only nibble at Nvidia helped cushion some of the blow. We’re taking a more cautious approach now, as we wait for the dust to settle on these new limits on chip sales in China. Late in Wednesday’s session , we added to our Danaher (DHR) holdings by 35 shares and took advantage of oil’s intraday reversal to the upside by selling 25 shares of Pioneer. Despite the sale, we still ultimately put more money to work in the market than we took out since stocks remained oversold. We also upgraded Danaher to a 1 rating, believing this high-quality, defensive company is at attractive levels after its recent pullback. Thursday A quiet day for us, comparatively speaking, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S & P 500 mounted intraday reversals to snap their then-losing streak of four sessions. The Nasdaq , however, finished in the red to notch its first five-day losing streak since February. Our lone move was buying 75 shares of Starbucks, bringing our total holdings of the coffee chain to 600 shares. We wanted to take advantage of the market remaining in oversold territory, according to S & P Oscillator. However, it wasn’t oversold enough for us to aggressively buy in Thursday’s tape. After the closing bell, Starbucks named a new CEO, which we found encouraging . We’re also looking ahead to Starbucks’ Sept. 13 Investor Meeting . (Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust is long AMZN, PXD, DVN, NVDA, QCOM, MSFT, DHR, TJX, SBUX and JNJ. See here for a full list of the stocks.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.
