Las Vegas Sands (LVS) is our one truly speculative fare in the portfolio - after sitting on the precipice of potential default banks swooped in (Apr 22, 2009: Wynn Resorts, Las Vegas Sands Amend Credit Terms) and helped both LVS and MGM Mirage (MGM) live despite yawning debt loads.  Las Vegas casinos was actually a group I was targeting 2 years ago as one of our canary in the coal mines when CNBC pundits and government officials were denying a recession was possible - while we were saying the house ATM driven, conspicuous consumption era was about to hit the wall.  (Oct 3, 2007: A Top in Casino Names? Wynn and Las Vegas Sands)  Unfortunately at that time we could not short individual equities so we could only watch from afar as many of these names fell 90%+ versus October 07.

But now it's a new day and almost every large corporation is deemed too big to fail.  (Small business?  No one cares about you)  So we have to invest with the central planning commission government; amazingly banks who themselves were on the cliff of failing found it in their hearts to adjust loan terms to keep these big casinos alive. (Sep 3, 2009: Las Vegas Sands - Too Big to Fail?)  At this point we only have about a 1% exposure in LVS since  the day to day volatility is immense and the stock temporarily broke support.  This is not really a name you can have very good risk controls over since the daily fluctuations will ruin almost any strategy.  The chart is a bit misleading because after yesterday's 12% gains, the stock added quite a bit more in after hours once earnings came out mostly on the back of CEO Sheldon Adelson's comments about "bottoming" business activity.  The fact that CEO phrases like this are still moving stocks 10% at a time is... well, says a lot about the market nowadays.