UPS

There are winners and there are champions in every walk of life. The difference is subtle, but very real. A champion is driven for success and will not let anything stand in its way. Some dividend stocks can be classified as champions.

A doozy of a recession may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean stocks are out of the woods. Creeping inflation, high unemployment, sluggish consumer demand and still-unsettled credit markets are only a few of the concerns that remain.

This morning there was news out in the premarket that Warren Buffet's firm Birkshire Hathaway was going to buy Burlington Northern(BNI) for a $25 dollar premium above the previous day's closing share price. BNI is a leading stock in the railroad and transportation industry. This should cause a rally in the entire transportation sector.

In my blog post Monday I listed a few stocks which I would be willing to go long by selling the puts right before the stock reported earnings. If you missed it you can view the details here. As indicated I took positions on Apple (AAPL), Caterpillar (CAT), Texas Instruments (TXN), SanDisk (SNDK), Walter Energy (WLT), and Yahoo!

In my blog post Monday I listed a few stocks which I would be willing to go long by selling the puts right before the stock reported earnings. If you missed it you can view the details here. As indicated I took positions on Apple (AAPL), Caterpillar (CAT), Texas Instruments (TXN), SanDisk (SNDK), Walter Energy (WLT), and Yahoo!

In my blog post Monday I listed a few stocks which I would be willing to go long by selling the puts right before the stock reported earnings. If you missed it you can view the details here. As indicated I took positions on Apple (AAPL), Caterpillar (CAT), Texas Instruments (TXN), SanDisk (SNDK), Walter Energy (WLT), and Yahoo!

In this post is a fresh list of 25 bullish stocks to watch for the week of September 14, 2009. I will be keeping my eye on all of these stocks this week, but chose only one to write a detailed option trade about this week. All of these stocks demonstrated tremendous strength during Friday's trade breaking out to the upside on huge volume.

Analysis, graphs and valuation of each of Buffett's stock holdings except financials.
* U.S. Bancorp (USB)
* USG Corporation (USG)
* Union Pacific Corp (UNP)
* United Parcel Service (UPS)
* United Health (UNH)
* Wabco Holdings (WBC) - Not enough data
* Wal-Mart (WMT)
* Washington Post (WPO)
* Wells Fargo (WFC)
* Wellpoint (WLP)

As previously stated on my blog, this rally could continue through August; but what if it doesn't? What is the market sells off?

Thursday was another great day for the bulls on Wall Street, and another great opportunity to get short for me, as I believe this market is well overbought on the short term. The market sold off a bit going into the close, my guess is because some were taking profits before the GDP numbers.

Thursday was another great day for the bulls on Wall Street, and another great opportunity to get short for me, as I believe this market is well overbought on the short term. The market sold off a bit going into the close, my guess is because some were taking profits before the GDP numbers.

I am going to do an analysis on the top 15 Financial stocks in the S&P 500. I will be analyzing these stocks by selling below the current share price put options to see which of them give the lowest adjusted share price. Below is a list of the S&P 500 stocks ranked in order from greatest to least market cap and their sectors.

As promised in Alternate Short Strategy: Purchasing Put Protection for Less, I will be continuing my list of alternate ways to hedge your portfolio without shorting the stock. In this post (part 2) I will be covering the stocks from 21 to 35 on the list of 50 (ranked by market cap).

As recently posted on my blog I believe the market is due for a pull back, so it may be a good time to purchase protection on some of your long positions. I decided to write about the 50 largest stocks (by market cap) in the S&P 500 and give a put protection strategy for each of them.