Buy Western Digital up to $82.

[from the 7/7/2015 edition of Smart Tech 50 Weekly Movers]

Although we do not advocate trading the stock market on a short term basis (which we define as a holding period of less than one year), sometimes our model is so accurate in predicting the near term direction of certain stocks that we can’t resist taking advantage of it.

Case in point is disk drive manufacturer Western Digital (WDC), which was one of our original recommendations in the STI Investments Portfolio in December of 2013 (see page 2). At that time WDC was trading near $80, but quickly escalated above $100 by August of the following year.

So, on August 21st we sold our position in WDC for a 25% gain in only eight months because we felt the stock price had run up a little too fast. Our fear was confirmed less than two months later when WDC dropped below $85 during the so-called “Ebola crash” in October of 2014. At that time we issued a new buy Alert with a limit price of $80, which WDC never reached so it remained out of our portfolio as its price once again reached $100 in April of this year.

However, recent concerns over PC sales have driven the price of WDC back down below $80, so we are adding it today to our Investments portfolio with a buy limit of $82. That means we don’t want you to chase the stock, but buy it on dips as the stock market convulses over the Greek debt crisis. Quite frankly, we don’t think the situation in Greece will have much impact on tech stocks, but when the entire stock market is taking a dive it will pull down everything with it in the near term.

We still like the long term outlook for WDC, and with an STR of 8.3 (5th highest score of all the tech stocks we rate) would not be at all surprised to see it crest above $100 within a year. In fact, earlier today a respected tech analyst at Needham “slashed” his price target for WDC down to $101 (from $124), which still amounts to a 25% gain from current prices. We’ll write more about it in an upcoming edition of STI, but in the meantime feel free to add WDC back to your portfolios if you do not already own it.

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