Equity Trading: Mylan Laboratories, Inc. (MYL)

After my little rant about the FDA and patent extensions, I looked a little more closely at Mylan Laboratories, Inc. as an investment opportunity. In my small short-term trading experiment ($2000, one stock at a time, one trade a day), I accumulated 10% over 3 months of trading in a choppy / down market (December 2002 - April 2003). During that experiment, I often found myself trading support / resistance points and/or trading counter to the trend. Mylan's chart brought back some memories so I couldn't help but play.

Looking at the chart, you can see resistance in April 2003 of $20 and a break through that resistance shortly thereafter. The recent news brought the stock back to that $20 range. I ended up buying early at $21.02, but I'm hopeful that won't matter on a slightly longer-term hold than what I did in my short-term experiments.

News today, though, could kill this investment. I have approximately a 5% stop loss order in place, and it might be triggered Tuesday with negative news of the FDA rejecting Mylan and Teva's request to prevent authorized generics. I usually put stop losses a few cents behind the support point as I've frequently been stopped out by a penny on the NYSE so mine is at $19.95 right now.