not afraid to admit it: when I saw the news, I put up a limit sell at 13 and executed it. i took a big loss on this stock, but i did buy a bunch in the 11s that I was able to cover some of my losses on, and I used the rest to cover taxes on gains in my taxable portfolio from trades I made on feb 8.
half the spike was gone by close.
this experiment was mostly 10 months of dead money for me. I had good timing on at least some of the market, and my portfolio return for the year is only trailing the indexes by around 2%, so I can live with it.
but also a really painful look into the way corporate priorities tend to swing strongly to the short term. Flannery spent his entire term finding and cleaning up other people's messes, and he took the blame for it. He righted the ship, and any success for it will go to Culp. Any failure? Around his neck. That's how they are rewarding his 30 years at the company.
I really liked Flannery, so this is extra raw for me: I invested because I believed in his vision to right the ship and thought investors would reward a prioritization on actual long term profitability, and not just what's happening in the next quarter.
The fact that the stock went up sharp on the news of "we fired the bald nerd and hired the big name with the good hair whose experience is totally unrelated to our company" is particularly galling to me. It was said in the same breath as "We're not making guidance and taking more big losses."
But GE has been doing these bear rallies for a while: sharp spike up as people believe the bottom is in, cooloff, then new lows. They're very tradable, at least until they aren't. Who knows? At the least, I sold at the same price I could have 6 months ago.
GE are greedy fucks.
Companies are also like little kids. They dont like being told to eat their veggies and brush their teeth, so they fire that nanny in order to hire the one that lets them eat candies for lunch and play video games until midnight (in this analogy, they dont like having their house in order, so once this CEO cleaned up their mess they hired the frat boy asshole who is a bro and will let them do again the kind of crazy shit that got them in trouble to start with)