This Stock up 40% + Cutting Losses on YOU

Ah, it's all very frustrating - but entirely in keeping with the sort-of bear market we're in these days...

Roughly 98% of the market lives in bear country. The other 2% is singing "Happy Days Are Here Again."

That's very much the case in the goodBUYs portfolio these days.

Everspin Technologies (MRAM), our nextgen memory chip manufacturer, appears to have been swept up in the fever over artificial intelligence (AI) stocks. It's up 40% over the past month!

The gains are nice to see and well-deserved. It remains to be seen whether MRAM can maintain its price or somehow plow higher if and when the white-hot interest in AI dies down and also in the various AI "plays" out there.

Then there's Clear Secure (YOU).  I added this stock earlier this month in anticipation of strong earnings results. And the company delivered - reporting 2% better-than-expected revenue results, quarterly profits of $0.06 a share (and declared a special dividend as well) - yet Wall Street's been unimpressed.

The stock, with its $3.8 billion market cap, appears to be following the rest of the smallcap sector lower.

So I'm going to move YOU from the goodBUYs portfolio for a small loss. The way I think about these things, if the stock can't do better when megacap tech stocks are raging higher - how will it do when the market likely cools off late this summer or early in the fall?

So at current prices, YOU represents a loss of about 7-tenths of a percentage point in portfolio value and an 8% decline in the price of the stock from where I recommended it.

If you're frustrated with the current trading environment, so am I. Lately, I feel like the boxer who's punching at an empty sack and can't land a forceful blow.

But I also know this is just the nature of things in the present market. When 98 out of a 100 stocks are going down (but the other 2 out of 100 get all the purchases and all the headlines )...this kind of situation is to be expected.

There's what we want, what we expect - and what we get. And right now, what we "get" is very little "alpha" (i.e. stocks moving higher in price) and a whole lotta risk unless we're willing to chase the same handful of mega-cap tech stocks as everyone else.

Best of goodBUYs,

Jeff