Monday Mandarin Market Meltdown
by Phil - August 31st, 2009 8:17 am
The Shanghai Composite fell 6.7% this morning!
I mentioned our love of FXP (ultra-short China) in our August Market Review and the short sale of FXP puts (a bullish play) was our primary cover in the last $100KP since early August for exactly the reason we are seeing play out today. Of course China’s problems were my theme on Friday and on 8/16 we warned that China’s GDP wasn’t real and on 8/7 we pointed out that China’s 2009 growth was nothing more than an accounting trick after my August 6th article in which I pointed out that GS was desperately working to pump China up at the top (likely while they were dumping their own shares on unsuspecting suckers). Do fundamentals matter? Sure they do — evenutally. But we had to roll and DD our August FXP short puts (big winners now) as it always pays to remember the words of John Keynes: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent."
We nailed the move in the Shanghai, which is now down 25% since we turned negative on it but the Hang Seng, which is much easier to manipulate as it’s controlled by foreign IBanks (our beloved gang of 12), has mysteriously flatlined near their August highs, maintaining the myth of the Chinese recovery so Uncle Rupert could run his almost daily articles telling you how great the global economy is on the other side of the world, where you can’t see it. Interestingly, in China he’s running stories telling them how the US economy is leading the way back and in Europe he has total control of the media so whatever he wants to tell them is the truth anyway.
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Ler’s see how rational the markets get as mainland China falls to it’s lowest level since May and let’s keep in mind that "limit down" on the Shanghai is 10% so a 6.7% drop in one day indicates that scores of companies were likely halted at 10% down. It’s going to take some really big plate spinning by GS et al (already attempred by GS last night with this idiotic release calling China a "bright spot" and raising outlook 50%) to get this one back on track. As I keep saying - the one thing "THEY" can’t fight is a volume sell-off, that is just beyond their physical ability to manipulate so we’ll be keeping a close eye on market…
Wild Weekly Wrap-Up - August in Retrospect
by Phil - August 29th, 2009 8:28 am
It has been a crazy few weeks!
I went back over our Long Shots list from August 9th, thinking all our picks must be doing great but really only C, with a 67% gain, is really outperforming. Long spreads on UYG and BHI are on target for nice gains but haven’t moved much. Looking at our original picks in Pharmboys Phavorites from the same week, GSK is on track and up nicely already, our AZN cover is up 45% and MRK flew up 19% already. On the riskier Biotech side, ARIA’s stock is up 16% and our spreads are all performing well, ONTY has been flat, OGXI is up 33% and the Jan $17.50s are up a rockin’ 63% with that "cautious" spread up a surprising 75% already.
SPPI had a wild ride (as we predicted with TSCM’s failed assassination attempt) and the buy/write is already up 24%, the Feb vertical is up 50% and the naked Jan put sale is up 27% and our Feb hedge play is right on track so all good there and a fine example of how following Cramer and his lackeys and and doing the opposite of what they say can be very profitable! Congrats to Pharmboy for a very fine set of picks, proving once again that there is room for research and fundamentals - not a single loser in the bunch in a choppy market! It was very timely as I had mentioned just that week in my interview with AOL Finance that XLV was my favorite sector and our IHI pick of 8/10 is up 28% on the naked Feb $45 put sale while the Feb $45 calls have already jumped 16%. It was a great call as IHI outperformed XLV and all our major indexes.
So our energy service pick (BHI) and overall financial pick (UYG) have not done much in 3 weeks and those were our leading sectors into my call to cash out our exposed long calls on Aug 13th, ahead of expirations. The Dow was at 9,400 on that day and now, a bit more than 2 weeks later, we’ve gained another 144 points but to listen to the MSM, you would think you are missing the rally of the century the past couple of weeks. This is one of the reasons I’ve gotten a bit more cynical about the rally - there is so much hype and so little actual progress, something must be wrong.

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Back on Thursday, Aug 6th,…












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
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