News today

* "Sell in May..." could be a self-fulfilled prophecy - do not fight the herd. I prefer Sell in April 1 and come back in Oct. 15 to avoid the herd. I prefer April 1 over April 15, the day we have to give our hard-earned money to Uncle Sam.

* Election year is the second best year after the year before it.Statistics never lie. Of course, all markets are different. Today's market is quite risky and inflated by FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google) stocks and that could be the reason the pick losers did not do good if they do not have FANG.

* FB could be the only major successful IPO in 2012 among many losers from my recent memory. As a group they're not doing good in 2015. You should lose money if you bet on them evenly on the first day of their IPO last year.

* When we buy a stock, we're riding on the risk of the management's bet . VRX is most likely not a fraud but a wrong bet by the management.

* The Apple flu is still spreading the Wall Street.

Trade Apple with fundamentals. They do have even better fundamentals after yesterday's plunge. In general and by my rough estimate, Apple's P/E is about 10 while most high tech companies trade at around 20 (while the S&P is at 15 historically). So, it is value. However, we should not judge a stock by P/E alone.

I wrote on Xiaomi a year or two ago when no one knew the company or spelled it correctly (me too). Xiaomi cannot land in the US and EU markets for a while. There are too many hurdles. The biggest one is facing Apple's lawyers as their screen design is quite similar to Apple. Apple is the first one in smart phone and they've a lot of patents from the first generation that the greedy lawyers of Apple will challenge. Apple is not in the same market as Xiaomi in price but Xiaomi has features similar to Apple for half of the price.