It seems like as soon as people find out you're involved in the stock market they want to start giving you advice. Uncle Marty has an "inside scoop" or Aunt Matilda has owned a single stock since 1938 so she says that's the way to go.

When I have incoming advice like this I normally just nod and smile. It's kind of like religion and politics – you're not going to change anyone's mind, so why argue about it. However, if the investing advice seems like it might have some valid foundation, I'll go back later and throw some analysis on it and see how it looks.

I broke my own rule a couple of weeks ago when I bought into some insight delivered by my investing mentor on a conference call. He had outlined a bull call spread on Apple Computer (AAPL) that was going to pay 14:1 when the share price went above $210. I went ahead with the trade on blind faith since I know that John has made a bunch on money on AAPL in the past and he knows the stock well.

The next it seemed to be going in the right direction and I was pretty happy with it. The day after that, however, it started down again and has not really looked back to going up. In hindsight I should have done my analysis and really taken a look at the trend. Yes, AAPL was near what could have been considered a support line, but I should have waited for confirmation.

The options I purchased don't expire until April, so there's time for it to go back up, but it doesn't look as certain as it once did.

Here's the video version: