I invest ... not in a big way but I do pick my own stocks, etc ...
Ideally, you invest in things
you know because that way you often have what comes close to "insider information" ... although perfectly legal.
With all the hooplah over Crees when they first came out, I
should have invested at least some money in CREE. I thought of this about a month too late. It was very earlier in the year when CREE took off.
It had been hanging around $16-$18 per share for the first few months of this year but shot up to over $25 in the summer and peaked recently at nearly $35 per share.
If it drops back below $20 per share, I may get some. It's not the type of stock I like to have in any quantity, though. It doesn't pay a dividend and I generally hold stocks for many months ... even years. You have to watch stocks like this and be prepared to sell on a moment's notice ... and that's just not the type of investor I am.
Yes, I looked for Lumileds briefly ... but it's part of Phillips, a much larger compan which makes it more difficult. It also makes the performance of generations of emitters harder to tie to the stock's price. Of course, Phillips is probably a much more stable stock to own in the long run.
Cree:
http://wachovia.mworld.com/m/m.w?lp=S&s=1&qv=34861&Type=Graph&P=1&GRT=0