Cashing in Dot HIll,Cantel Medical, Buying Biotechs

I did not foresee the China mini-crisis. But I watched with fascination. Because I had little cash in my account, on August 12 I raised cash by selling my Cantel Medical (CMN) stock, all of it. Cantel is a great company making infection control devices. When I bought it in December of 2009 for $19.58 per share, after hearing about it at Seeking Alpha, it seemed undervalued to me. Since then it split 3 for 2 twice, and when I sold it I got $54.02 per share. No complaints there, it is just a valuation call.

Before I could reinvest that money, Seagate (STX) announced it would buy Dot Hill (HILL). Rather than wait for the transaction to close I sold my HILL at $9.685 per share on August 19. I first bought HILL in 2004 for $7.18 per share. That sounds less than brilliant, but I became a specialist in HILL, mostly selling high and buying low. It has been a very volatile stock. Most of the stock I sold in the end had been bought at $1.00 to $1.40 per share, though I had bought more at $5.67 as late as July 7.

I generally am a careful buyer, doing my homework before buying. But what a sale we have had! An opportunity to buy stocks I wanted, or wanted more of, at better prices.

So this is what I bought:

Star Bulk (SBLK) at $2.39. This is not a biotech.

Epizyme (EPZM) at $15.60.

Gilead (GILD) at $109.18

Amgen (AMGN) at $151.45

GlycoMimetics (GLYC) at $6.84

Inovio (INO) at $6.71

You can read what I think about each of these stocks by checking out William Meyers at Seeking Alpha.

An even higher level of detail is available at my site, openicon.com.

Unfortunately I missed the super Door Busters sale of the opening minutes of Monday the 24th. It is a sort of vacation like week for me and I thought the market would open low and then drift lower during the day. Oh well. I still have quite a bit of the HILL cash and will try to invest it carefully in biotechs, but before they start shooting up too high again.

Keep diversified!