Lesson Learned - Seizing opportunities

This is sure to be the first of many lessons I will need to write up.. Seize opportunities..

About a month ago, I saw a mining company called Eurozinc (ezm) pop up on the IBD Top stocks under $10 list. After digging around and listening to a conference call, I found out this company is mining copper (hot commodity) and will start mining zinc later this year (EVEN hotter if projected shortage holds for 07). From that, I traded and held holdings from under $2 to $2.1.

On 5/11, Jim Cramer on his Mad Money show featured this company but for a rather shady reason, that since RTI just signed a contract to sell Titanium to Airbus and Eurozinc is one of RTI's supplier, that Eurozinc will receive some "pin action" (which I think is bogus because they call copper/zinc a commodity for a reason: it doesn't matter who dug them out of the ground). To add on to the suspicion, he featured the stock on the day where Eurozinc announced rather disappointing earnings at .03/share (one analyst had it at .08/share) and the stock has dropped from its yesterday's close of $2.98 to $2.66, but he stated that this would be a good opportunity to buy on the dips.

After he featured the stock, it received a crazy Cramer spike of 20% to trade to a high of $3.22 afterhours, an all-time high for the stock. Alarm bells did go off in my head and I proceeded to sell ~40% of my holdings in afterhours. While this is a good decision, I believe I still made a mistake in not seizing the opportunity and selling more/all of it. From Kitcometals, Thomson projected it will earn 27 cent for 06 and 32 cent for 07. With the earnings miss, I should have seen that this stock was trading close to its future valulation (balanced with the potential future miss), take profit, and buy back on the dip.

Well, one week later, compounded with the commodity correction that took place, it went to as low as $1.85 before bouncing back to $2.16 at Friday's close.

Lesson learned here, seize opportunities. In my opinion, a 50% pop in initial investment would have set off bells of an experienced investor that it's time to take the money off the table. If that alarm wasn't loud enough, a Cramer pop of 20% should have smash the alarm over my head.. I am now setting firm stop and sell points for my stocks and will only move them if something is really, truly moving the fundamentals of the company.