This Week in Episodic Pivots: September 26, 2023

Late Edition

Sorry to leave you all hanging. I took a little vacation and forgot to mention it. My apologies for the late issue.

On that note, I don’t want to add anything to the portfolio right now. The market appears to finally be getting the message that the Fed is keeping rates higher for longer. We’ve long anticipated that here at Barbell Alpha. But now the market is repricing itself with higher rates. And that could mean lower prices ahead. So we’re going to tread carefully.

And last week we closed out two profitable trades. Both Medspace ( MEDP 0.00%↑ ) and Patterson-UTI ($PTEN) closed below their trailing stops. And we are booking quick gains of 24% and 10% on these trades.

In exciting news, our recent addition Splunk ( SPLK 0.00%↑ ) received a buyout offer last week for $157 a share from the networking giant Cisco. Any company buying Splunk now is getting a heckuva a deal. Splunk is about to start gushing cash.

And this acquisition will give us a quick 24% gain in less than a month. We could try to squeeze a little more out of the shares as they still trade 8% below the takeover price, but that’s not what we do here. So let’s book the gain and look to put the capital back to work when the market finds a bottom.