Catch the shopping fever now

What is the best shopping season in the US? I guess it is a no-brainer question: the 4th quarter of a year. The Black Friday after the Thanksgiving Day, followed by the Cyber Monday that is the online shopping day after the Black Friday, and then followed by the X'mas seasonal shopping craziness, becomes the most euphorigenic period for the retailer business. People don't care if they have job, have money, or have debt, they just want to spend. They have credit cards anyway, right? Of course, this is not the topic I'm interested in. As an investor, what I want to know is which company may be best positioned to catch this seasonal shopping frenzy. I think I have found one for your consideration.

For sure you can consider Google or Yahoo since they are the overlords in the online advertising business. But I don't think this kind of seasonality will have too much impact on their stock price given their scale. I'm more interested in a much smaller company, for which a good season could mean a lot for its earnings. I think ValueClick (VCLK) is such a stock. By name, I guess you can easily understand that VCLK is an online advertiser. I'm not interested in its long term performance as it is a tough business in competing with Google or Yahoo. However, if you simply buy the stock for this special season, you may be rewarded handsomely. Look at its chart from 2001 up to now. Do you notice that VCLK tends to go up around the year end and drop in the first quarter? I think we can play with this seasonality game by buying VCLK now (before Thanksgiving) and hold it through the 1Q and then sell it in early Apr 2013 before its earning report. There is a good chance that we may see something like 20-30% appreciation of the stock price. If you know how to play with call options, the risk can be much lower with a much greater profit margin.