March 2015 Performance

It’s been a challenging month with the market volatility. Overall my portfolio held up relatively well with a loss of 0.33% for the month.

So what worked and didn’t work? I took a stab at a pre deal play with LifeTime Fitness (Ticker: LTM). The Wall Street Journal was all over LifeTime Fitness and I liked the odds of a deal occurring. I continued to play Salix Pharmaceuticals (Ticker: SLXP) via short Puts and this deal just closed today. Finally, I did some bottom fishing with Veeva Systems (Ticker: VEEV) by catching a falling knife and managed to have all of my fingers still intact.

And now what didn’t work… Vertex Pharmaceuticals (Ticker: VRTX) slumped a bit on so so results from their clinical trial for Cystic Fibrosis. Gilead Sciences (Ticker: GILD) also continued to decline on concerns of continued competition for their Hepatitis C drug.

I’m fairy cautious right now and have actually raised some cash. Still searching for some good special situations / arb plays.

2015 Performance Year to Date = +10.30% with the running monthly returns as follows:

January +3.4%
February +7.03%

March -0.33%