Weekend Wrap-Up, Still Trying to Get Bullish
by Phil - March 14th, 2010 5:20 am
I’m having writer’s block this weekend.
Usually when I can’t think of what to write it helps me to go over our portfolios so I started this morning reviewing the Buy List but I didn’t get far because it was silly. Of 43 plays on the buy list, 39 are doing well - too well in fact to the point where it’s hard for me, in good conscience, not to say let’s kill the whole thing and get back to cash as we’re up about 20% in 2 months and that’s just ridiculous - most people would call that a good year and go on vacation.
The Buy List was 100% bullish and we did catch a good bottom on our early February entries. I was gung ho bullish then because I felt comfortable that the 10,000 line on the Dow would prevail and that we were good for a run back to the top (10,700), following, more or less, the pattern we had in 2004 (see original post for charts). Well that’s pretty much what’s happened since then but that’s not making me happy because I see no reason we won’t complete that pattern and begin falling off a cliff shortly.
As you all know, I’m not a big fan of TA, or patterns for that matter but the reason I started looking for patterns was to try to get a handle on how long market could really keep going up before falling victim to exhaustion. To me it seemed we weren’t at that point on Feb 6th but now that we’ve put in that big push back up - if we can’t punch up to new highs on all our indexes then I do think it’s time for the markets to take a break.
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Clearly I’ve been too bearish for the past couple of weeks and we are now 224 points over 10,400 on the Dow which is where I turned bearish as the January data made me lose faith in our ability to get back to 10,700. I should have stuck to the TA because we’re a lot closer to 10,700 than we are to 10,400. With the Russell and Nasdaq exploding to their own new highs. You can see though, from the above chart, why I do want to wait to see the NYSE, Dow and S&P confirm this move up - it’s not far now!
We’re finally getting the hang of the Wonderland Market though it’s actually quite simple…
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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 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 a very poor use of recessionary capital as is inflating the money supply to…
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Wild Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - December 19th, 2009 8:20 am
Wheee - that was fun!
Last week, I asked the question were we "Too Bearish or Just Too Early?" I said in that wrap-up: "This Friday the market topped out about 150 points higher than last Friday, closer to the top of our range so we went much more bearish on Friday, perhaps too bearish considering this was the best Friday finish since Nov 6th and we haven’t had a down Monday since October 26th." We did get the move up we feared on Monday but we stuck to our guns and had a fabulous week.
Even as the market was going against us Monday morning, my first Alert of the week to members at 9:44 said: "I’m still more inclined to look downward at: Dow 10,250, S&P 1,100, Nasdaq 2,187, NYSE 7,200 and Russell 600… I’m still bearish because oil is weak, gold is weak, the financials (XLF at 14.30) are weak and most of the good news we are hearing is nothing but fluff." That was a pretty good call as we hit our target levels yesterday and held them, so we flipped more bullish right at 11:30 on Friday, in what was some very good timing for our intra-day play.
We are still on a stock market roller coaster that’s going to have plenty of ups and down in the thin, holiday trading that will likely characterize the end of the year. The market will be closed 2 Fridays in a row and good luck finding people around this Thursday or the next one so 6 proper trading days left to 2009 at best. We got out - that drop was very satisfying and we’ve moved mainly to cash (our $100K Portfolio has $88,000 in cash at $107,249 at the end of it’s first month). Last week we were able to cash out the bull side, this week we got satisfaction from our bear plays and that leaves us footloose and fancy free to have fun the next two weeks. If our day trading goes as well as it did on Friday, we can end this year with quite a bang.
Manic Monday - Dubai, CitiGroup and GS Move Markets
This picture says it all. When you want to blow smoke up investors’ asses, the dream team of economic BS is Greenspan and Cramer, who appeared on Meet the Press last Sunday to tell us that the market is smarter than reality and Greenspan actually had the nerve to say that we are underestimating…
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Friday: Dell Misses, Is Goldman Sachs Stupid or Evil?
by Phil - November 20th, 2009 8:18 am
How can a firm that never loses money be so totally wrong?
Just this Monday, Goldman Sachs helped to gap the markets higher at the open in low-volume futures trading with the following pronouncement: "Goldman Sachs resumes coverage on Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) and gave DELL a Buy rating at a 12-month price target of $19. Goldman believes that DELL will benefit from a corporate PC refresh cycle and will show better earnings as DELL is trying to optimize its cost structure. Goldman believes Dell will report better than expected earnings and beat analysts’ expectations. Goldman expects DELL to report earnings of $1.09 for CY2009 and $1.37 for CY2010 from their previous estimates of $1.07 for CY2009 and $1.35 for CY2010." Fact is, they missed by a mile.
That report took Dell up 2% for the day and the Dow gained 150 points and we were dumbfounded by the move, both in DELL, who were swallowing a difficult acquisition of Perot Systems and of the market, which acted like $31Bn DELL is the same kind of bellwether that $120Bn HPQ is, even if Goldman’s report had been even close to accurate. As it was, they couldn’t have been more wrong if they were playing "opposite day." How is it that a firm that has only 3 losing trading days in 6 months can be this amazingly wrong on crucial analysis?
So is Goldman actually stupid and, as many have implied, simply cheating to rack up their amazing market gains or are they intentionally manipulating the markets. Former GS-employee Jim Cramer jumped right on the bandwagon on Monday afternoon and told viewers that "obviously," since DELL is going to do so well (because GS says so) that INTC and MSFT must be buys too.
This is how manipulative stock pumping works - start a rumor, push it out through the media, extrapolate the rumor out to affect market-moving stocks that don’t even have upcoming news events and then tell people they are missing an opportunity, even after the train has left the station (by Cramer’s 2:30 spot on Monday, the Nasdaq had already hit the high for the week, peaking out exactly at the moment Cramer told his retail investors to pile into the market).
Were the beautiful sheeple only buying what Cramer’s buddies were selling? Is that how GS makes their money, buying low on Friday, making an upgrade on Monday, getting their pals to sucker people into the "rally" and then dumping into the retail…
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Thrill Ride Thursday - CRE Crash?
by Phil - November 19th, 2009 8:12 am
What a nice day we had yesterday!
I led off my morning post saying it was time to short the Dow, Copper, Oil and the Euro and anyone playing those futures bets off my 8:27 post made out like a bandit. I even posted a nice little DIA play FOR FREE (for those of you who can’t be bothered to subscribe yet), picking the DIA $104 puts at .55. It only took 45 minutes for those puts to shoot up to .85 and I warned our Members to take it off the table on the way up and, since it was my free trade of the week, I also posted it over at Stock Talk on Seeking Alpha. This is a great way to follow-up on some of our trades and is also the back-up for our member chat whenever we have server issues so do make sure you are signed up to follow me there (just click on my picture).
Yes, I know that so many newsletter writers give you free trade ideas that make 54% in 45 minutes that it’s hard to keep track so only do it if you REALLY want to. The futures, of course, make TONS more than that as they are heavily leveraged, As I said in yesterday’s post, we have been trying to get more bullish but sometimes we just have to put our bearish foot down. In Member Chat we also took bullish pokes at EDZ, SRS, DIA $103 puts and ERY early in the morning and then we were able to just sit back and watch the dip. I was a penny early calling a bottom on copper at $3.12 but .05 on the futures contracts is a huge win and we are very nervous bears, especially on low volume days, and we take our profits quickly.
At 1:40, I said to members: "DIA - Well mission accomplished on the $103 puts and now we see what Mr. Stick can accomplish for the day. Without the RUT over 600 I have no desire to cover the March puts" and we even decided to go with the DIA $104 CALLS at 3:20 to protect us against the anticipated stick save. Those went from .65 to to .80 into the close, another very quick 20%. We don’t do this all the time, these plays are fun to make during expiration week as the premiums are low and there are huge short-term rewards for good market timing. Our longer-term short play for…
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25% Off the Top Tuesday
by Phil - November 17th, 2009 8:09 am
10,500 - that’s 75% of 14,000 in the Dow!
On the S&P we topped out all the way up at 1,550 in October, 2007 so 1,162 would be the target there. For the Nasdaq it’s 2,100 (already over), 7,750 on the NYSE is still far away and 637 on the Russell is tantalizingly close (5%ish). The SOX still need to gain 30% to get back to 400 and the the Transports are going to need a lot of gas to get back to 2,250. (see Fallond’s breakout charts here)
Oil was $100 a barrel in October 2007 so $75 is right on track and gold is clearly our over-achiever, UP 42% from 2 years ago and that is "obviously" according to the pundits, because the dollar is trading 1.5% lower than it was back then. We are being led higher by great companies like XOM who, at $75 are well above their 75% level at $67. This is VERY impressive since they earned $9.4Bn in Q3 ‘07 and just $4.7Bn last Q on 20% less sales but that doesn’t stop investors (or at least tradebots) from snapping them up at these prices.
TRV was added to the Dow and that stock is now OVER the 2007 highs of $52.50, which is really impressive as they are doing it with less revenues ($200M) and less earnings ($263M, 21%). Perhaps we are seeing a pattern? Earn 50% less, like XOM and get valued 16% lower, earn 21% less, like TRV and get valued 5% HIGHER. CAT was at $70 in Q3, 2007 with $11.4Bn in sales and a $927M profit so OF COURSE they are at $60 now (down just 14%) on $7.3Bn in sales and $404M in profits. Just like XOM, 56% less earnings equals a 14% haircut on the stock price. After all, you can’t fool these savvy investors, can you?
I’ll be going through the Dow in detail this weekend as we set up our new Buy List for Members as (if we are going to accept the premise that these investors are not crazy) there are certainly some bargains in the Dow like VZ (got ‘em already), who earned $1.3Bn on $23.8Bn in sales 2 years ago and earned $1.2Bn on $27.3Bn in sales last Q, yet they are still trading 25% below where they were. INTC made more money on less sales but they are trading 20% off while DIS made more money on more…
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Wild Weekly Wrap-Up, Topping or Popping?
by Phil - November 14th, 2009 12:02 pm
This was an annoying week for bulls and bears alike.
We had a very exciting day on Monday, topping out at 10,248 but I didn’t like the way we got there (low-volume, commodity rally, as noted in David Fry’s chart) and, when pressed for a prediction on TV that evening, I had to say that I felt that we were more likely to be down by Thanksgiving than up with a possible Santa Claus bounce into Christmas. What we did get for the remainder of the week was very choppy action on even lower volume.
I had mentioned in last week’s "Wrong-Way Weekly Wrap-Up" that we were partying like it’s 1999 as we broke through Dow 10,000 and S&P 1,080, despite rapidly deteriorating fundamentals. Stocks are being bought because they are going up in price (much like commodities), not because there is any actual demand for them and that is very clear from the rapidly declining index volume as we run back into resistance at S&P 1,100.
Since early September our upside targets for the indexes have been: Dow 10,087, S&P 1,096, Nasdaq 2,173, NYSE 7,204 and Russell 623 and nothing has happened to change our fundamental outlook for the better so the closer we get to those levels, the LESS comfortable we are taking bullish positions. In fact, yesterday as we got our mid-day spike to 10,300, I told members that it was sorely tempting to just cash out all bullish positions and take 20% of the portfolio 100% bearish with a 10% stop. Rather than mess around with a mix of positions, going fully bearish can allow for some spectacular gains if we crash and stopping out with a 50% loss would suck - but a breakout like that, well above Dow 11,000 and S&P 1,200 would certainly give us reason to be more bullish.
As I concluded last week: "We’re generally not happy until we see Russell 600 and the Dow Transports over 4,000 (now 3,852) and we took a 55% bearish stance into the weekend because we’ll feel a lot less silly being burned by a move up than we would if we weren’t bearish enough for a move down. It would be nice to be able to make more of a commitment but the bulls clearly have the bears cowering in fear so we’ll just patiently wait and see how far they can play things out." Not much has changed since then and we are still waiting to confirm…
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Jobless Thursday - Get Ready for the Next Million Layoffs
by Phil - November 12th, 2009 8:21 am
"California tumbles into the sea."
Yes, Steely Dan predicted it in 1973, when Ronald Reagan was still Governor but we thought they were talking about earthquakes at the time. This year it’s clearly California’s 49.3% budget gap and 16.2% drop in state revenue that has them leading a list of lemming states to their doom. Over 1M state and municipal employees may be getting their last checks this Christmas as 9 states face budget issues on par with California.
According to The Atlantic: Nine more states are "barreling toward an economic disaster" according to a new Pew poll that sees deep service cuts and temporary tax hikes to avoid fiscal calamity. Some of these states will be familiar to Atlantic Business readers. I’ve been leading the funeral cry for the united states of MichiCaliFlAriVada (that’s Michigan, California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada), and all five states are on Pew’s list. Rounding out the ten are Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin. Here’s the graph from the Pew Center on the States:
| Six Factors | Revenue change | Budget gap | Unemployment rate change | Foreclosure rate | Need supermajority? | GPP "money" grade | Score | ||||||||
| United States | -11.70% | 17.7%5 | 4.4 | 1.37% | 17 yes, 33 no | B- 5 | 17 | ||||||||
| California | -16.20% | 49.30% | 4.6 | 2.02% | Yes | D+ | 30 | ||||||||
| Arizona | -16.50% | 41.10% | 3 | 2.42% | Yes | C+ | 28 | ||||||||
| Rhode Island | -12.50% | 19.20% | 4.5 | 1.50% | Yes | D+ | 28 | ||||||||
| Michigan | -16.50% | 12.00% | 6 | 1.47% | Yes | C+ | 27 | ||||||||
| Oregon | -19.00% | 14.50% | 6.4 | 0.86% | Yes | C+ | 26 | ||||||||
| Nevada | 1.50% | 37.80% | 5.2 | 3.12% | Yes | C+ | 26 | ||||||||
| Florida | -11.50% | 22.80% | 4.4 | 2.72% | Yes | B- | 25 | ||||||||
| New Jersey | -15.80% | 29.90% | 3.7 | 1.18% | No | C- | 23 | ||||||||
| Illinois | -10.90% | 47.30% | 3.5 | 1.44% | No | C- | 22 | ||||||||
| Wisconsin | -11.20% | 23.20% | 4.4 | 0.96% | No | C+ | 22 |
This horrible news only underscores the fact that even though 70% of stimulus spending has gone to fill in Medicaid and state budget holes, our states are still in dire straits because state tax revenue is collapsing across the country. Unlike the federal government, states cannot run deficits, which means cascading revenue becomes cascading services and many, many cut state jobs. For those who resist another state bailout-type stimulus bill, they must recognize what that entails: hundreds of thousands of state employees joining the ranks of unemployment, and unemployment benefits. Q3 was great, but this thing isn’t close to being over. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports that states could cut almost a Million jobs without US aid because of budget shortfalls.
A Million jobs!?! That can’t be good, right? Of course, as Jim Cramer told us on Friday: "The bears were right, unemployment is awful but no one seems to care." So far this week, Jim is right and I am wrong - we’ve gone up another 100 points since I made my top of the market call on Monday night so I tip my cap to Jim, who seems to be able to switch off his brain and go with the flow a lot better than I can. My call yesterday morning, was to take advantage of the futures pop at…
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Weekly Wrap-Up - 10,000 or Bust!
by Phil - October 17th, 2009 8:27 am
I think I was right on the money last week when I said:
The bar for corporate earnings is still set at very easy to beat levels yet, like this limbo-playing child, when they announce their beats of very low expectations we’re going to get all excited and tell them how great they are doing. The problem is, these are not kids who we hope may grow up one day to be President or CEOs of major companies. these ARE CEOs of major companies and they are being paid top salaries for top performance and we, the stock purchasing public, are paying top dollar for what should be SPECTACULAR performance, not beating 75% off last year’s earnings by a penny!
In that post, I rattled off a list of stocks that seemed overpriced to me: AMZN, BIDU, AM, PALM, NFLX, PCLN, URBN, UHS, CERN, CREE, GMCR, CY, SWM, TRLG, BKE and you would have had a fabulous week just shorting those stocks as only NFLX, URBN and CREE stayed positive. Now most newsletter writers would quit right there and make a giant ad saying they were 12 for 15 on the week but, as our members know, THAT’S NO BIG DEAL AT PSW! I’m just going to remind members that they can refer friends to FREE advice like that in our trial newsletter and earn 20% or more off their subscriptions for doing it.
Picking stocks is easy but a few percent here and a few percent there isn’t much fun is it? On that list, the two we attacked were AMZN and BIDU, both of which ran (in our opinion) way too high AND had very liquid and very overpriced call options that we could sell to collect premiums. AMZN is a staple short in our $100K Portfolio and we had set up BIDU the week before, selling Oct $420 calls for $8.30 and the Oct $430 calls for $7,20. While both went higher on Monday, the fact that we had a plan for managing the trade kept us from panicking and, thankfully, Monday was the only day those positions gave us trouble and both finished the week worthless (100% profit for us).
Adjusting our positions kept us busy this week as we STILL have a slightly bearish bias and I apologize for that but, as I said in Friday’s post: Every time I try to get a little more bullish, they pull me back in! It’s the curse of being a fundamentalist, it’s not enough…
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Wednesday Rally - INTC and JPM’s Piles of Chips
by Phil - October 14th, 2009 8:26 am
That is a crushing beat of the 51 cents expected by analysts, who have been playing expectations catch-up for over a month, trying to get a handle on this quarter’s earnings. JPM’s earnings are more exciting than GS’s earnings as JPM were supposed to be "dragged down" by Chase Banking. With $2Tn under management, the company put up $3.6Bn in quarterly profit, almost 10 times what they made last quarter (.09). "These results included the negative impact of the tightening of the firm’s credit spread, offset by the positive impact of counterparty spread tightening and gains on legacy leveraged lending and mortgage-related positions," the firm said.
Of course we could nitpick and point out that last year they had competition from LEH and BSC and last year they didn’t have $25Bn in bailout money to play with and they didn’t have a Fed Discount window feeding them countless other Billions every month at 0.25% interest but we won’t, because we are trying to get more bullish! Not wanting the Government to get the idea that they don’t need any more free money, CEO Dimon said: "While we are seeing some initial signs of consumer credit stability, we are not yet certain that this trend will continue." Frankly, I think the company sandbagged the earnings as they put $4.967Bn aside as a provision for credit card losses against $5.159Bn in total sales so either their clients are MAJOR dead-beats, or there will be some more profits recognized down the road (assuming all this recovery stuff is real).
INTC also beat earnings expectations last night but they are underperforming last year by a wide margin so not in any way as exciting as JPM’s results. Our strategy for INTC yesterday was to short sell the Nov $20 puts and calls for a total of $1.95 so our upside break/even on INTC is $21.95 but even last night, on the announcement, I still said to members I thought they were a short at $22 but we’re not going to fight the market, not now that we’re over our breakout levels.
The levels we’ve been watching (Dow 9,829, S&P 1,071, Nas 2,146, NYSE 7,047 and Russell 620), should be crushed this morning and, hopefully, will hold up through the end of day. If this is a real rally then we should have no trouble and the last thing the bulls want to see is volume selling at this…
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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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