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Man-oh-man I hope you've been trading the stock picks we've been issuing to you these past few weeks. Our open trades had a very big day today, with two of the three taking a giant step forward (enough to raise our stops on 'em), while the third one still made some market-beating progress of its own. In fact, our portfolio has been so red hot lately, we're going to go ahead and put a new pick/idea on the table.... to see if we can take advantage of any year-end - and year-beginning - bullishness that'll give us a nice profit cushion.

First things first though. Let's run-down what happened with our three existing trades.

Holy Cow!

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Well well well... looks like Ben Bernanke knew exactly what he was doing after all yesterday, when he announced the Fed was going to start tapering its QE efforts. He said the economy was on pace for decent growth in 2014 (and presumably would need less stimulus), and then today we heard news that 2014's projected solid growth may have gotten an early start. As it turns out, Q3's GDP growth rate ended up being a whopping 4.1%, up from the original guess of 2.8%, and even better than the first revised guess of 3.6%.

Granted, I think the third quarter's big growth was largely the result of a weak number being used as the comparison, but still, it's an encouraging signal. Maybe I should rethink my expectation that 2014 is going to be merely mediocre....

Nah. I'm pretty comfortable with the Fed's forecast for growth of right around 3.0% next year. That'll be good for the market, but not necessarily great.

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What happened to all the bullishness we saw yesterday? Oh yeah... the market recognized there's as much downside to the Fed's tapering as there is an upside. We're not surprised to see traders too afraid to keep putting big money into stocks.

Anyway, since I had to rant yesterday about the Fed's decision to taper (and the amazingly bullish wrapper that news came in) we didn't get a chance to look at the other important news that came out on Wednesday... November's housing starts and permits numbers. Then again, maybe it was best we had to wait, since we got last month's complementary existing-home sales numbers today. Let's hit that data real quickly before we move on to today's main event.

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Well, there ya go. The Fed just gave the market the absolute best possible early Christmas present it could possibly give.

Feeling the need to show it wasn't stuck on auto-pilot, we finally saw a slight variation to the status quo of the Federal Reserve's QE effort. Rather than continue injecting $85 billion per month into the economy (by buying bonds), the amount has been tapered down to $75 billion per month until... well, until further notice. That $10 billion is a pittance, however, and most everyone knows it. Most likely the Fed simply felt it had to show some sort of faith in the economy's progress, but knew it couldn't upset the apple cart too much.

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How's it goin', folks? We hope you all had a good weekend, but with just two weeks before the end one fiscal year and the beginning of another, we can't waste any time. We're going to hit the ground running this week, starting with a new trade. We're also going to take a quick look at one of our two open picks, which decided to get going today ... finally.

As for the new trade, we're naming Silicon Image (SIMG) as an official holding in the totally-unofficial SCN portfolio.