Please sell C and BAC now

On September 11th in a post called My life as a Non Trader, I shared with my blog readers that I hadn´t bought stocks in many years but that I felt that the markets were not valuing assets correctly and that I had chosen to buy shares in Citigroup and Bank of America. I then explained that this purchase was around 5% of my net worth and that it was a long term bet that America would not let it´s largest banks go under. That the financial system was sick but some of the best bank shares were trading as if the financial system as already dead.

Two days ago, when Lehman imploded, I wrote that the US government had to come up with a Brady Plan type solution to the crisis. That instead of going bank after bank and playing God as to who lives and who dies, the US Treasury had to rescue the poor quality mortgages and make everyone proportionately better off. This is what Paulson announced today. But, as the WSJ says, Paulson´s decisions until now have been pretty bad.

So this is how I feel today. Even though I am very happy that my thinking was correct, I still feel it was a mistake to share my investment strategy with the general public. When C and BAC were down over 20% I felt enormous guilt, thinking of a reader out there who may have followed my decision, thinking that I would be infallible, when I knew very well that I could have been wrong. So what I want to accomplish with this post is get rid of my guilt. If you followed my advise and believed like me that the US banking system would survive, enjoy it and take a nice profit now!!!

• Bank of America
• Citigroup
• financial crisis
• inveestments
• stock market