Smart Virtual Portfolio Management I – The $10,000 Virtual Portfolio
by Phil - May 1st, 2010 8:29 am
Options Sage submits:
“Never risk what you do have and do need on what you don’t have and don’t need”
Smart virtual portfolio management is a world apart from conventional virtual portfolio management. While conventional virtual portfolio management offers generic guidelines to diversify capital, smart virtual portfolio management is tailored to your personal circumstances. With that in mind this article has been divided into a three-part series. The first discusses a $10K virtual portfolio while the second will offer suggestions for a $100K virtual portfolio and the final article will discuss $1M virtual portfolios.
Although this first article in the series addresses prudent strategies for a $10K virtual portfolio, many conservative investors are likely to find the strategies addressed throughout suitable for their own virtual portfolios – though the % allocations will differ as we will see in the future articles. No matter what your risk tolerance, a virtual portfolio comprising some relatively conservative trades is always prudent!
Phil once commented that, when trading a $10,000 virtual portfolio, “every $100 counts”!
Capital should be allocated judiciously in a $10K virtual portfolio. NEVER allocate a majority of your capital to any single trade. Dedicating 20% of your virtual portfolio to relatively conservative trades (shown below) is appropriate but exceeding 30% is far too risky when dealing with limited capital. With a $10K virtual portfolio, it becomes increasingly imperative to be right first time. Financial constraints limit your ability to scale into trades at different threshold levels and that makes timing critical unless….
Unless you figure out how to trade without requiring perfect timing of the market! Those of you trading along with Phil’s earnings spreads have already seen some of the ways we take advantage of stock movement, whether they go up, stay flat or even drop to some degree…
Strategy A: The Covered Call – With a Twist – Making 15% in Just 7 Weeks
Instead of placing the short call out-of-the-money in the conventional format, the short call is actually placed in-the-money.
C closed on Friday at $4.37. Since the C has had come down a lot , we’re a lot more comfortable establishing a position. Rather than spending $4.47 a share for the stock and covering it, we can leverage $500 and buy…
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DiggWeekly Wrap-Up – Why Does This Rally Give Me the Creeps?
by Phil - April 25th, 2010 8:29 am
I’m sorry, I am trying so hard to get bullish but it’s not working…
My only solution is to, as we often joke, switch off my brain and stop reading the news (listening to it is great as everything is coming up roses in TV-land) and ignore the now-exposed shenanigans on Wall Street (why should I worry about my investments just because the people running the game are up on fraud charges?) and for goodness sakes don’t even look at something as depressing as "The Economic Elite vs. the People of the United States of America," neither Parts 1-3 or Parts 4-6 because that can lead to thinking and thinking makes it REALLY hard to go to sleep at night with your money riding on the top of an 80% market while gold is trading at $1,150 an ounce because of overwhelming global instability and a total lack of faith in the global financial markets.
Yep, if we don’t think about all that stuff and focus on the good stuff, like the fact that Unemployment is only 3% for those of us who earn $150,000 a year (for the poor it’s 31%), and 93% of our virtually fully-employed analysts predict the S&P will finish the year even higher (although not too much higher) with only Andrew Garhwaite of Credit Suisse in need of an "attitude adjustment" with his puny target of 1,175, which is 32 points lower than Friday’s close. Fortunately, enlightened analysts like Deutsche Bank’s Binky Chad think we can still squeeze another 100 points out of this rally (about 10%) although Goldman Sachs is wimping out at 1,250, their partner in "whatever you want to call it", JP Morgan is up at 1,300. So it’s BUYBUYBUY from the gang of 12 and we’ll be whipping Andrew into shape by the next report or he may find himself the fall guy for the next scandal…
Oops, sorry, I wasn’t supposed to mention the scandals as that’s not really a buying premise unless of course you look at the sheer volume of things the IBanks were getting away with and then look at the virtual nothing that is being done about it and then we can conclude there is no reason they can’t pump this market back up to Dow 14,000 because we already know it was such total BS last time, when we dropped 50% like…
Motorola Business Split Creates Appetite for Options
by Option Review - February 12th, 2010 4:37 pm
Today’s tickers: MOT, ALL, BWLD, BONT & X
MOT – Motorola Inc. – The Shares are almost 8% higher at $7.20 on the news that the company will split into two with networks on one side and mobile devices on the other. Shares are on the move because this probably reflects management’s confidence in the turnaround for mobile devices. It appears that one option investor is looking for further upside and placed a 20,000 lot call option spread when shares were trading at about $6.95 this morning. The spread involved the purchase of now in-the-money April call options at the $6.00 strike, which cost $1.12. The buyer sold the same amount of $9.00 strike calls expiring at the same time for 7 cents to reduce the breakeven to $7.05 in two months. It is likely that this investor wants to take a stake in the company now that it’s announced this corporate split and as long as Motorola’s shares stay north of $6.00 in April, he will be able to exercise that option.
ALL – Allstate Corp. – Looks like a substantial amount of call option buying in the home and auto insurer today as its share price holds up relatively well in the face of a 1% loss for the major market averages. At $29.36 shares are off by just a nickel, possibly still sheltered by a 22.7% surge in revenue and earnings that exceeded investor hopes earlier in the week. Call option buying at the April expiration $31 strike has so far totaled more than 22,000 contracts. Buyers paying around 65 cents per contract for rights to get long of shares in the insurer should they rally by more than 5.6% in the next nine weeks are clearly banking on a rebound to the January peak above $31.50. Implied volatility has slumped in the aftermath of earnings further eroding the premiums today.
BWLD – Buffalo Wild Wings Inc. – An earnings miss earlier in the day from the Minneapolis-based restaurant operator attracted option investor attention today. The activity is curious simply because it’s contrarian. The share price slumped more than 12% earlier to $41.28 before steadying to $43.00. The decline in options implied volatility to 37% is twice the decline in the share price and is perhaps behind investors willingness to write almost 2,000 put options at the soon to expire February $40 strike. Premium sellers, who…
Wild Weekly Wrap Up – Only Halfway Through January!
by Phil - January 16th, 2010 8:29 am
Wheee, what a ride!
The week can be neatly summed up by my 1:35 comment to Members in yesterday’s chat, summed the week up quite nicely as I said: "So funny, a whole week of gains I thought were ridiculous wiped out in 4 hours." Of course it’s easy to laugh when you play the market correctly – as I had said in the morning post, we had cashed out into Thursday’s run up and planned on going bearish through the weekend but it turned out we got our sell-off early, jumping the $100K Virtual Portfolio, for example, up 12% in one day – enough to send us back to cash rather than risk a weekend reversal.
We laid the groundwork for this little sell-off in last weekend’s posts as we put up an aggressive Buy List for Members but in my regular weekend post we emphasized the need to cover our buys with "Disaster Hedges" as we were heading to the tops I had predicted when I published the "Last Charts of the Decade," where I set resistance target of Dow 10,457, S&P 1,135, Nasdaq 2,314, NYSE 7,389 and Russell 638. As you can see, I pretty much hit them on the head, other than the Dow but that’s because our year-old 5% rule calculations did not account for the change in the Dow that replaced C and GM with TRV and CVX, who added about 100 Dow points since their inclusion so we started using 10,549 this month and we’ll make it 10,557 for today’s chart, which makes perfect sense looking at this group (I added the Transports as they are fell right off our 2,000 target, giving us the early warning that things were not right):
As you can see, the 5% Rule rules! I will apologize for being such a grump this week but the rally was really starting to annoy me as it was so blatantly forced up through our levels without a proper test that is was really getting me down about the markets. I don’t mind that the markets are manipulated, that’s been going on since markets were invented – it’s stupid and destructive manipulation that bothers me, the kind that, long term, destroys more investor confidence than it builds and squanders capital resources on the "wrong" companies (and now, ETFs!).
In this case, very precious investor capital is being steered into commodities, which is…
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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
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