I feel it's the right to continue tactics of holding mid-term buy positions in Airbus (AIR) stock, even though its share price accelerated upward this month. The European aircraft manufacturer added nearly 13% since late February and also gave me $25 of pure income per share, which I initially bought at €142.50 at the very start of the year following a ripped plug incident on the board of Alaska Airlines' Boeing 737 Max. And, of course, my actual benefit is 5 times bigger, exceeding 85%, due to the effect of margin trading with an 1/5 leverage provided by Metadoro. Now, Airbus is fully sold out until 2030 for single-aisle jets and 2028 for widebodies, as I already noted, while its main rival Boeing suffers from mounting troubles in terms of its image, and probably orders as well.

A suspicious “suicide” of Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, a 62-year-old former employee of the aerospace corporation, is only one of the sad news for Boeing's management. This man was employed as a quality manager for most of his 32-year career. On March 7-8, he provided testimony for a civil case he decided to pursue against Boeing, raising questions about the safety of Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, and later he was found dead in a truck parked in a hotel parking lot, before he appeared to give his third day of testimony. Yet, Barnett’s lawyers challenged the suicide claim by stating that there is no indication of he would take his own life, so that the police "need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public", with "no detail can be left unturned". A Barnett’s family friend told an ABC interviewer before this weekend that Barnett had warned her, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide”.

Assuming all of this was an unfortunate coincidence, of course, the whistleblower scandal could not add Boeing points in the eyes of consumers. Barnett spoke out about Boeing’s allegedly "negligent" practices, describing how Boeing "compromised quality control" in a manner that could be “catastrophic” for passengers, as his overriding goal, according to Barnett himself, was to “make the cash register ring.” He also tried to expose the role of Boeing’s military connections after the company's merger with McDonnell Douglas in 1997 by claiming the motto of a new team members was "we can do anything we want", including "not to document defects" and "to work outside procedures to allow defective material to be installed without being corrected”. Defaulting that all allegations are false, being the figment of a dismissed employee's evil imagination, I could clearly understand that much more new orders are going to come to Boeing's rivals.

Investigation showed four bolts were completely missing from the door plug that was lost in the air, according to the US National Transportation Safety Board. Misfortunes never come alone. Being under this kind of pressure, Boeing is now "weighing up the possibility of selling at least two of its defense businesses", including Boeing's Digital Receiver Technology Inc., Bloomberg said on March 19. Whatever the reasons, people "familiar with the discussions" said to Bloomberg financial advisers working on Boeing's behalf began to reach out to potential buyers long before the January plug incident so that contacts have been underway for about a year. Even if some unprofitable assets were discussed to improve the weakening balance sheet, this is another sign of potential crisis for the world's biggest aircraft maker.

For me, not only more bets in Boeing's rival Airbus group look as a justified approach, but even direct short selling of Boeing's shares is seemingly not the dumbest option, when possible targets from below at least in the range of $140-160 could be kept in mind, as price levels below $120 were detected last time in September 2022. Boeing's shares dipped to 6-month lows at $177.52 at some moment of yesterday's regular session on Wall Street and also tried to decline again on pre-market on March 20.