Latest Buy - GE and Qualcomm

What a great leveler the stock market is. This is a delayed buy update on two stock purchases i made over the last 3 months.

The market overall continues to be frothy, every time you think a correction is due - the market turns around and makes new highs. That is not to say that this won't change tomorrow or next week or next month, but to be honest i have been surprised at this bull run.

In September i purchased a small position in Qualcomm Inc. It has been going down while the whole market has been going in the opposite direction. Some of the reasons seem to be their never ending fight with Apple and their delayed acquisition of NXP. All these factors seemed to be temporary, but i was skeptical so i initialized a really small position at $50 a share for a nice yield on cost of about 4.56%. A few weeks ago, Broadcomm (AVGO) bid to buy out Qualcomm, and the share price shot up into the mid 60's and continues to be in that range. While i am happy about the price bump, i also regret not opening a larger position.



In early October, after seeing this big time industrial stock fall over 20% over a few months i finally opened an initial position in General Electric (GE) at what i thought was a definite bottom. While not a very large position, it was bigger (in dollar amount) than the one in QCOM. I purchased shares at $23.47 a piece at a nice yield on cost of about 4.08%. Not bad i thought, GE obviously announced a dividend cut and the stock has been in free fall to the upper teens, where it is sitting at currently. Not only was my yield on cost cut in half to 2.04%, my loss on paper is about 24% in about 6 weeks and counting . Yikes.

So there you go, one stock i thought was undervalued but didn't have a great chance of capital appreciation shot up 25% while another industrial behemoth which seemed like a no brainer lost 25%. You can never tell or predict what happens in the market, it will always humble you :)

I intend to hold on to both of these, not selling QCOM on any merger news, and not selling GE unless they eliminate the dividend completely.

What have you been buying? Any bargains or winners out there ?