DARK HORSE HEDGE – Sitting on the Dock of the Bay
by Sabrient - August 22nd, 2010 11:58 pm
DARK HORSE HEDGE - Sitting on the Dock of the Bay
By Scott at Sabrient and Ilene at Phil’s Stock World
So I’m just gonna sit on the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away
Ooo, I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay
Wastin’ timeBy Otis Redding and Steve Cropper, On the Dock of the Bay
Heading into the week of August 23, 2010, the market is digesting another week of worse than expected data. The Philly Fed figure of -7.7 versus the expected +8 on Thursday, against a backdrop of 500,000 pink slips being handed out, was brutal. The data added fuel to the fire on our Road to Nowhere. When the dust settled on Friday after August options expired, the S&P 500 was sitting at 1071 and our market trend indicators were all pointing south. The MACD 12-26-9 has clearly crossed the bearish signal line at -3.3 and the RSI 14 day is back under 50 at 48.38 (chart below).
We covered many of the DHH Long positions by writing call options, which provided an advance net SHORT tilt in anticipation of the recent downward move in the market. Currently, our virtual DHH virtual portfolio is holding 8 SHORT positions (7.5% each) and 9 LONG (7.5% each). We covered our 9th Short position, HUSA, on Friday. After shorting a new stock on Monday morning, we will have the same number of Long and Short positions. The long positions are leveraged against the short positions which provides additional cash into our virtual equities account. Although we will have the same number of Longs and Shorts, we are tilted short because we sold calls against seven of the long positions. We also sold puts against three of these hedged Long positions, which makes them more bullish than bearish. However, we have the advantage of having sold premium for both the calls and puts.
At the open on Monday morning, we will add another SHORT position to replace HUSA.
Sell SHORT ComScore, Inc. (SCOR) at the open Monday, August 23, 2010
ComScore, Inc. (SCOR) provides a digital marketing intelligence platform that enables customers to make informed business decisions and implement digital business strategies. SCOR ranks #11 at the bottom of the Sabrient VCU rankings and it has a strong sell rating. The closing price on Friday of…
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Swing trading virtual portfolio – week of August 23rd, 2010
by Optrader - August 22nd, 2010 11:11 pm
This post is for live trades and daily comments. PLease click on "comments" below to follow our live discussion. All of our current trades are listed in the spreadsheet below, with entry price (1/2 in and All in), and exit prices (1/3 out, 2/3 out, and All out).
We also indicate our stop, which is most of the time the "5 day moving average". All trades, unless indicated, are front-month ATM options.
Please feel free to participate in the discussion and ask any questions you might have about this virtual portfolio, by clicking on the "comments" link right below.
To learn more about the swing trading virtual portfolio (strategy, performance, FAQ, etc.), please click here
Optrader
Swing trading virtual portfolio
One trade virtual portfolio
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Israel Knesset Member Declares “We Are Preparing For War”
by Zero Hedge - August 22nd, 2010 9:55 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
In an interview by Likud Knesset Member Danny Danon, speaking with WND senior reporter Aaron Klein, who hosts an investigative program on New York’s WABC 770 AM Radio, the Israeli said that “Israel is preparing for a time of war…We are ready for all scenarios, and we are able to defend our civilian population. I cannot tell you how long we can wait more. But we prefer to wait and see if the international bodies are acting, or [whether] it will be only the burden of Israel, like it was in the early ’80s, when the great leader, Menachem Begin, [made] the great decision to bomb the nuclear reactor in Iraq.” He concluded: “We don’t want this to be a war of Jews against Muslims. It should be a war of Western civilization [against] Iran.” Good luck explaining that to 1.5 billion Muslims around the world.
From 77WABC Radio, specifically WND’s Jerusalem Bureau:
While Israel is hoping for a peaceful resolution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Jewish state is also preparing for “a time of war,” declared a Knesset member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party.
“We are prepared for all risks,” said Likud Knesset Member Danny Danon. “And I think our enemies should know that even though we are speaking of peace, we are getting ready for a time of war, as well.”
Danon, the deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, was speaking in a radio interview with WND senior reporter Aaron Klein, who hosts an investigative program on New York’s WABC 770 AM Radio.
Danon hinted that Israel may take action if the world does not stop the Iranian nuclear threat, recalling Israel’s lone strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981.
Stated Danon: “We are ready for all scenarios, and we are able to defend our civilian population. I cannot tell you how long we can wait more. But we prefer to wait and see if the international bodies are acting, or [whether] it will be only the burden of Israel, like it was in the early ’80s, when the great leader, Menachem Begin, [made] the great decision to bomb the nuclear reactor in Iraq.”
Despite his assertion that Jerusalem is preparing to act alone, Danon stressed that Iran is an international concern. He called on the Western world to
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After Finally Covering The Massive Retail Outflows, The NYT Also “Discloses” The Nanex Crop Circle Mystery
by Zero Hedge - August 22nd, 2010 9:18 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Reading the NYT these days sure is enlightening: first, one gets news about some odd phenomenon, previously unheard of, that for 15 straight weeks retail investors have been pulling money out of retail funds (hmm, where has one seen this before), and now, with much fanfare, the NYT brings the Nanex Crop Circles to the center stage. At least unlike the former story’s 15 week delay, it took the NYT a mere 3 weeks to rehash what Zero Hedge readers had known since July (how is that whole “value added content” paywall idea going?). Nonetheless, it is satisfying that the criminal stock churning activity reported on first by us, has finally gone mainstream. Of course, the NYT conclusion is typical: “The idea that shadowy computer masterminds were trying to disrupt the nation’s stock trading struck many people as ridiculous. Wall Street experts generally characterize it as a conspiracy theory with little basis in fact.” Interesting: yet a mere 4 minutes ago we pointed out that Finra is starting to ferret out illicit HFT trading practices… Maybe the NYT can put two and two together (in real-time this time).
More from the article:
The stock market mysteriously plunges 600 points — and then, more mysteriously, recovers within minutes. Over the next few weeks, analysts at Nanex, an obscure data company in the suburbs of Chicago, examine trading charts from the day and are stunned to find some oddly compelling shapes and patterns in the data.
To the Nanex analysts, these are crop circles of the financial kind, containing clues to the mystery of what happened in the markets on May 6 and what might have caused the still-unexplained flash crash.
The charts — which are visual representations of bid prices, ask prices, order sizes and other trading activity — are inspiring many theories on Wall Street, some of them based on hard-nosed financial analysis and others of the black-helicopter variety.
To some people, like Eric Scott Hunsader, the founder of Nanex, they suggest that the specialized computers responsible for so much of today’s stock trading simply overloaded the exchanges.
He and others are tempted to go further, hypothesizing that the bizarre patterns might have been the result of a Wall Street version of cyberwarfare. They say high-speed traders could have been trying to
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Clampdown On Market Abuse By High Frequency Churners, Er, Traders Begins
by Zero Hedge - August 22nd, 2010 8:52 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of pirates. After a year-long campaign by Zero Hedge warning about the ongoing threat to market structure by the HFT plague, culminating in a the May 6 crash, whose incipient conditions exist to this day, the FT reports that the even more worthless regulator, FINRA, is beginning a clampdown on broker dealers who allowed high-frequency traders to have access to the markets without undertaking proper checks. As this means all of them, there is about to be a huge change in market structure as arguably more than half of the market “participants” are suddenly excluded from constant daily churning activity. What the outcome of this will be is anyone’s guess, but definitely expect strange things if this is truly a first step towards reverting to some form of normalcy.
The FT reports:
The Financial Industry Regulatory Association is undertaking a “sweep” of broker-dealers that offer market access to high-frequency traders to find out if they allowed these firms to run computerised trading programs – algorithms – without undertaking proper risk-management controls.
“We’re looking to find out if the brokers understood what was being done with the algorithm and whether the high-frequency trader had thought through how it would work under big market changes,” Richard Ketchum, chairman and chief executive of Finra, told the Financial Times.
Brokers also face scrutiny of their checks on the ownership of the firms they allow – directly or through sponsorship arrangements – to access the markets.
“The brokers should be satisfied they know who’s really operating these systems,” Richard Ketchum, chairman and chief executive of Finra, told the Financial Times. “The sub-custodian chain can bury the identity of high-frequency traders in Eastern Europe and elsewhere who raise serious regulatory concerns.”
And you thought those pesky Eastern European were only responsible for reverse engineering any softward that ever came out and movie piracy – guess what: it turns out they now can just as easily hack the entire market too. And now please put back all your capital in stocks.
Nonetheless, this is a market test run by a US regulator: an entity better known for being the most corrupt organization in the history of the world. As such some may be skeptical.
The probe
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At £4.8 Trillion In Total Debt Including Unfunded Liabilities, UK Debt Is Six Times More Than The Official Number
by Zero Hedge - August 22nd, 2010 6:40 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
Everyone knows that the total US debt is over $120 trillion when accounting for such underfunded liabilities as Medicare and Social Security. Well, it appears that the bankrupt US welfare state is not alone. According to the UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the country’s national debt is £4.8 trillion once state and public sector pension liabilities are included, or £78,000 for every person in the UK. This number translates to about 330% of UK’s GDP. Which of course is nothing compared to the total US adjusted debt-to-GDP number which when accounting for all off balance sheet items is roughly 10x the US GDP of $13.6 trillion, a number which is Rosenberg and Bridgewater are correct, may decline quite soon.
The Telegraph has more:
The IEA raised its concerns after the latest public finances data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this week, which showed that the total debt, excluding bank bail-outs, is £816bn – itself a record high. However, the figures strip out the state’s pension liabilities in a contravention of standard accounting practices.
Mark Littlewood, the IEA’s director-general, said: “The latest official national debt figure is seriously misleading. Looming in the background are pension liabilities. These should be moved to the forefront.
“The ONS should include these liabilities in their calculations. It is shocking enough to see official figures revealing a jump in national debt over the last year from the equivalent of 48pc of GDP to 56pc, but the grave reality is that our real national debt stands at 333pc of GDP.”
Nick Silver, an IEA research fellow, said the full figure, including the £1.2 trillion public sector pension liability and £2.7 trillion state pension liability, should be published either monthly or annually alongside the net debt data for reasons of transparency.
The ONS has already begun to assemble the data, publishing the full list of Britain’s debts and liabilities for the first time in July, which came to a total of between £3.68 trillion and £4.84 trillion.
The ONS numbers included a £1 trillion to £1.5 trillion liability for the Government’s stakes in the part-nationalised banks, equivalent to the relevant portion of their total liabilities, £1.35 trillion for state pension liabilities, and £1.2 trillion for public sector pensions.
At this point these statistics are just that-
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The Complete Q2 Hedge Fund Holdings Update (In Which We Discover That 181 HFs Hold Apple Stock)
by Zero Hedge - August 22nd, 2010 5:47 pm
Courtesy of Tyler Durden
The quarterly Goldman Hedge Fund Trend Monitor, aka the HF groupthink update, is released, chock full of HF holding trivia, such as that should Apple ever miss its priced to absolute perfection business model, a whopping 181 hedge funds are going to suffer, and 75 HFs, who have Apple as a top 10 holding, are going to get crushed. Also, we uncover the latest top 10 hedge funds ranked by equity assets (DE Shaw, RenTec and Paulson are the new top 3, although with 2,048 and 2,669 holdings for the first two, they are now receiving 2 and 20 for their quant models which as the NYT highlighted recently no longer work). On the other end of the quant spectrum, are the traditional hedge funds, and as of Q2, the typical fund had an average of 63% of its long-equity assets invested in its 10 largest positions, compared to 30% for a typical large-cap mutual fund, 17% for a small-cap mutual fund, 19% for the S&P and just 2% for the Russell 2000. The top 5 most concentrated hedge fund holdings are AutoNation (46% of market cap held by HFs), Sears (45%), AutoZone (32%), Pactiv (28%) and Novell (27%). Also hilarious perpetual LBO candidate Radioshack has hedge funds make up 24% of its market cap. In other words, any bad news here will kill the stock price faster than a HFT can frontrun the exponential pulling of bids. On the other side, or the names most hated by hedge funds, is Brown Forman, where only 0.2% of HFs make up its market cap, followed by Roper Industries, Stericycle, Hormel, and Praxair. From a surprise upside potential perspective, Goldman estimates that the most HF-shorted names is Crown Media, which has a 99 day short interest ratiom followed by Lifeway Foods, Isramco, K-Fed Bancorp, First South Bancorp, and Costar Group. Shorts Squeezes in these names could be violent. Looking at ETFs, the biggest gross long ETF held by HFs is GLD with $8 billion in long ownership, while the most shorted is SPY with $27.6 billion in shorts, indicating that funds are now “hedging” using this proxy for the entire market. Lastly, in confirmation that hedge funds are for the most part worthless “groupthink” contraptions which merely ride a leveraged beta wave, and suck out management fees, Goldman highlights that the “Most Concentrated” basket of…
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Welcome to the Wolf Market?
by ilene - August 22nd, 2010 5:36 pm
Courtesy of Leo Kolivakis
A couple of interesting articles appeared this Sunday. Graham Bowley of the NYT reports, In Striking Shift, Small Investors Flee Stock Market:
Renewed economic uncertainty is testing Americans’ generation-long love affair with the stock market.
Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.
If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.
Small investors are “losing their appetite for risk,” a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.
One of the phenomena of the last several decades has been the rise of the individual investor. As Americans have become more responsible for their own retirement, they have poured money into stocks with such faith that half of the country’s households now own shares directly or through mutual funds, which are by far the most popular way Americans invest in stocks. So the turnabout is striking.
So is the timing. After past recessions, ordinary investors have typically regained their enthusiasm for stocks, hoping to profit as the economy recovered. This time, even as corporate earnings have improved, Americans have become more guarded with their investments.
“At this stage in the economic cycle, $10 to $20 billion would normally be flowing into domestic equity funds” rather than the billions that are flowing out, said Brian K. Reid, chief economist of the investment institute. He added, “This is very unusual.”
The notion that stocks tend to be safe and profitable investments over time seems to have been dented in much the same way that a decline in home values and in job stability the last few years has altered Americans’ sense of financial security.
It may take many years before it is clear whether this becomes a long-term shift in psychology. After technology and dot-com shares crashed in the early 2000s, for example, investors were quick to re-enter
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Welcome to the “Wolf” Market?
by Zero Hedge - August 22nd, 2010 5:36 pm
Courtesy of Leo Kolivakis
A couple of interesting articles appeared this Sunday. Graham Bowley of the NYT reports, In Striking Shift, Small Investors Flee Stock Market:
Renewed economic uncertainty is testing Americans’ generation-long love affair with the stock market.
Investors withdrew a staggering $33.12 billion from domestic stock market mutual funds in the first seven months of this year, according to the Investment Company Institute, the mutual fund industry trade group. Now many are choosing investments they deem safer, like bonds.
If that pace continues, more money will be pulled out of these mutual funds in 2010 than in any year since the 1980s, with the exception of 2008, when the global financial crisis peaked.
Small investors are “losing their appetite for risk,” a Credit Suisse analyst, Doug Cliggott, said in a report to investors on Friday.
One of the phenomena of the last several decades has been the rise of the individual investor. As Americans have become more responsible for their own retirement, they have poured money into stocks with such faith that half of the country’s households now own shares directly or through mutual funds, which are by far the most popular way Americans invest in stocks. So the turnabout is striking.
So is the timing. After past recessions, ordinary investors have typically regained their enthusiasm for stocks, hoping to profit as the economy recovered. This time, even as corporate earnings have improved, Americans have become more guarded with their investments.
“At this stage in the economic cycle, $10 to $20 billion would normally be flowing into domestic equity funds” rather than the billions that are flowing out, said Brian K. Reid, chief economist of the investment institute. He added, “This is very unusual.”
The notion that stocks tend to be safe and profitable investments over time seems to have been dented in much the same way that a decline in home values and in job stability the last few years has altered Americans’ sense of financial security.
It may take many years before it is clear whether this becomes a long-term
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Market Collapse of Epic Proportions
by Chart School - August 22nd, 2010 5:35 pm
Market Collapse of Epic Proportions
Courtesy of Allan
Let’s make the case with our biggest picture time frame, the SPX_Monthly Trend Model. This trend model reversed SHORT with the April-June decline in the market. Note also that these monthly signals measure in years, not days, not weeks. The implications are for a heck of a ride down in the months and perhaps years ahead.
There are two Elliott Wave counts embedded on this chart. The first one (blue) is automatically applied by my Advanced GET software. I have been using this software since 1994. It works more often then it doesn’t, I give it a lot of weight. It represents the most bullish of the two EW counts, yet still projects a move to below 600 on the SPX, as is suggested by the horizontal blue support line in the lower right corner of the chart.
The second wave count (black) is from Robert Prechter, the controversial EW analyst that EW wannabes love to disparage because of his missing calls in the past. They ignore his body of work which is staggering in its prescient analysis and observations of not just the stock market, not just the economy, but in particular social mood as the driving engine of all things financial, in the evolution of society to some extent the rise and fall civilization itself.
A little too sweeping? Only if you believe the ignorant, snide snippets of opinion of him so rampant on the Internet. Not if you read is seminal works, Elliott Wave Principle: Key To Market Behavior and especially, the most important publication of last twenty years, Socionomics: The Science of History and Social Prediction. There is no better Elliottician alive today. Agree with him or not, I think his opinion is always worth paying attention to.
All that said, I’ve placed Prechter’s Cycle degree wave count on the above monthly SPX chart, a completed Wave 1 (early 2009), a completed Wave 2 (April, 2010) and now the beginning of Wave 3 down. From Prechter’s January, 2010, Elliott Wave Theorist:
The very center of the wave structure-the most volatile point in an impulse-should occur in 2010 when the market reaches wave iii of III of 3 of (3) of 3. In a bull market, this point in the wave structure marks the time at which investors in the aggregate stop worrying about the downside risk and
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
(