Visa Inc. is updated and rated Weak Buy at $184. (essentially a hold) This is a fantastic company. However its price has already risen spectacularly over the past few years and it now appears expensive and is pricing in a lot of growth. If I still owned it I would be tempted to sell half of what I owned or not to have a huge position in it. But a small position would be okay.
We first rated Visa on this site as Buy at $58.24 on April 15, 2009. This was near the bottom of the 2008 2009 crash when everything looked cheap but felt risky. Since then I mentioned many times that it had monopolistic characteristics. Most of the time since it was added to the site it has been rated Buy, it was rated (lower) Strong Buy in May 2011 at $79.41 and at one point prior to that was rated Weak Buy. Also at one point it was temporarily removed from the list for a time as the report had gotten very far out of date. Personally I bought on several occasions but then sold too soon.
On Friday most of our stock picks were up. Most notably Toll Brothers was up 2.8%.
I am sitting with something like a third of my portfolio in cash. I have been missing out on some recent gins because of that but that is okay. I don’t need to swing for the fences. And it seems like we seldom go a whole year without something throwing stocks into a bit (or more than a bit) of a panic so most likely there will be opportunities that way at some point. Having cash at that point will be advantageous. But I don’t advocate being out of the market altogether just because it might fall. It always might fall, but over time it rises more than it falls. And if there is not some general panic at some point, there are ALWAYS individual bargains out there to re-deploy cash at some point..