Follow up on a couple of ideas

In addition to BKI and ROC from last week, readers might want to take a look at Darling International symbol DAR.  DAR is in what most people would say is a pretty ugly business.  It operates in some segments that most of us don't want to think about.  Rendering, recycling, and recovery for the food services industry.  Rendering accounts for about 75% of the sales and recovery the rest.  The fundamentals of the stock look pretty good while the technical's look higher.  DAR has a market cap of about 1.7 billion, is trading at about $15.20 a share, does not pay a dividend, has grown revenue at about 14.3% per year over the last ten years and has averaged a net profit margin of almost 5.0% over this same time frame.  With a  beta of around 1.76 it is not for the faint of heart but, it could produce a decent return.  Buy the stock in this price range wait for an up-tick in the price and look to sell a June or July call contract against it.   Now here is a stock that has a great deal of upward price momentum  Ariad Pharmaceutical ticker ARIA.  This is a bio tech company that must have some good news in the pipeline.  First, some facts on ARIA.  They do not make money.  They do have what appears to be some good news on drug therapy for soft tissue cancers.  The stock has gone from the $6.00 per share range to the low 9's.  There are some  announcement's on these various therapies coming out in late June.  If current market action in this stock is any indication it looks like the news will be good.  Even with about 11% short interest of the daily float ARIA has managed to go up.  Here is a decent way to play the June FDA/Ariad announcement buy a June 10 for about .40c and sell the June 11.00 for about .15c.  As long as ARIA gets and stays above 10.25 you are in the money.

Correlation.... what's an investor to do?

"The only thing that goes up in a bear market is correlation".  Wiser words have never been spoken.     During this last market melt down, that was the result of the financial crisis, it was pretty darn hard to find any investment that was not headed south.  Traditional asset classes that in the past several years had performed quite differently, suddenly became married and turned downward.  The decline may have been at different rates, but they all went down.  Today, it looks like all asset classes are again correlated.  Only this time in the opposite direction.  If you look at the TLT (the 20+ year treasury index) you see a bit of the dreaded double top back in the late summer of last year.  Then that index started a downward trend, hit a low in February of 2011 (so far) and has started moving up in price.  (Don't forget if it is moving up in price then yields on similar treasuries are getting lower.)  While this drama has been  playing out in the debt markets the stock market has continued its climb upward, closing Friday at over 12,700.   This thing is getting pretty close to its pre-financial crisis levels and it is getting there without that much help from the financial services or bank stock sectors.  As the crisis was just getting started Citigroup was in the 50's,  Bank of America was in the high 40's, and there was even a Merrill Lynch.  Think for a second about Bank of America....the stock was in the high 40's before it acquired Merrill Lynch and now after the acquisition the price is in the low teens.  Can you imagine what that loan portfolio must really look like?   But, Merrill probably brought some crap to the table too (sold to them by Goldman no doubt).   Sorry for the rant.  My point, keep a sharp eye on the asset classes you are invested in.  Either the economy is slow enough that even the slightest upward movement in interest rates will put us back into recession.  Or, things are picking up enough that this upward trek in the stock market is the pre cursor to an economy that is set to take off.   Now if that is the case why are long treasury bonds yielding so little?   Maybe it is part two of the Greenspan years.  Keep those interest rates low no matter what.  After all it only hurts the saver, and in America there aren't that many of them.