MIPS Technologies (MIPS)

Company. MIPS Technologies "designs industry-standard, high-performance, low-power, 32- and 64-bit RISC (reduced instruction-set computing) microprocessor architectures and cores for embedded systems." (company website) MIPS does not manufacturer processors, but licenses their intellectual property to such manufacturers.

Buy. I first bought MIPS last September after it had broken through the $5 barrier. This proved to be bad timing: the market took a general breather at the end of September again at the end of October.

In November, however, the MIPS chart began to look as if it were forming a triangle formation, and I purchased additional shares in December and again in January.

Sell.

General comment. Yesterday's announcement by the Fed triggered a general sell-off in the market. The Nasdaq continued the downward trend through the first six hours of today's session. Fearing that this might be the beginning of a substantial Nasdaq correction, I decided to sell several Nasdaq stocks to preserve whatever gains were still left, even though the stocks had been doing well before yesterday's slide.

I think the pull-back over the past two days was just normal profit taking; the volumes weren't all that heavy compared to the huge volumes on the big up-days at the beginning of January. However, since there are now three consecutive down-days with reasonable volume, it's hard to predict if MIPS will go lower or by how much. It seemed prudent to lock in the profits and await further developments with cash in hand.