Fed Speak Friday – Volcker, Lacker and Ben Batting 1, 2, 3
by Phil - September 24th, 2010 8:33 am
What a fun day for debate!
Former Fed Chair, Paul Volcker went way off-script in Chicago yesterday and "moved unsparingly from banks to regulators to business schools to the Fed to money-market funds during his luncheon speech. He praised the new financial overhaul law, but said the system remained at risk because it is subject to future “judgments” of individual regulators, who he said would be relentlessly lobbied by banks and politicians to soften the rules."
Banking — Investment banks became “trading machines instead of investment banks [leading to] encroachment on the territory of commercial banks, and commercial banks encroached on the territory of others in a way that couldn’t easily be managed by the old supervisory system.”
Financial system — “The financial system is broken. We can use that term in late 2008, and I think it’s fair to still use the term unfortunately. We know that parts of it are absolutely broken, like the mortgage market which only happens to be the most important part of our capital markets [and has] become a subsidiary of the U.S. government.”
Risk management — “Markets that are prone to excesses in one direction or another are not simply managed under the assumption that we can assume that everybody follows a normal distribution curve. Normal distribution curves — if I would submit to you — do not exist in financial markets. Its not that they are fat tails, they don’t exist. I keep hearing about fat tails, and Jesus, it’s only supposed to occur every 100 years, and it appears every 10 years.”
The recession — “It’s so difficult to get out of this recession because of the basic disequilibrium in the real economy.”
This afternoon, Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker will speak in Kentucky (his hometown) on "Reflections on Economics, Policy and Financial Crisis!" and it always makes me nervous when Fed Presidents put exclamation marks on the word "crisis" so we’ll be paying attention to that one. After market hours, at 4:30, Uncle Ben comes to the plate with "Implications of the Financial Crisis for Economics," which sounds like a snoozer but that’s three Fed guys in a row saying "crisis" in the same day – I don’t like it!
I was bearish yesterday morning but we bottomed out earlier than I thought and I…
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DiggThursday – Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble!
by Phil - September 23rd, 2010 7:51 am
"I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high, nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams they fade and die.
Fortune’s always hiding,
I’ve looked everywhere,
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air."
Gold, Treasuries, Junk Bonds, Netflix (we shorted them yesterday), PCLN (we shorted them Monday), Credit Default Swaps – take your pick of what is going to be the next bubble to burst.
We shorted TLT again yesterday ($105) as I sure wouldn’t lend the US money at those rates and neither, it seems, will the "smart money" guys anymore. The cost to hedge against losses on U.S. government debt rose to the most in six weeks as investors bet the Federal Reserve will put more cash into the economy. Credit-default swaps on U.S. Treasuries climbed 1.7 basis points, the biggest increase in more than three weeks, to 49.4, according to data provider CMA. The Fed said Tuesday that slowing inflation and sluggish growth may require further action. The statement positioned the central bank to expand its near-record $2.3 trillion balance sheet as soon as their November meeting – just in time for a Santa Clause boost for the markets.
So why does this not make us bullish? Well, as I said to Members on Tuesday, it was an anticipated statement with no immediate action and we’re at the top of a 10% run for September so, as I said in yesterday’s post, we anticipate a pullback of 2%, back to our 4% line (see post). Also in yesterday’s post, I mentioned our IWM 9/30 $67 puts ($1.10) and the DIA Oct $105 puts (.89) both of which were good for a reload on yesterday’s silly spike, where I said to Members in the 9:56 Alert:
I like the same IWM and DIA puts as yesterday as we test 10,800 on the Dow – I don’t think it’s going to last. Tomorrow we lose the usual 450,000 jobs for the week and we have Existing Home Sales at 10, which can now disappoint as Building Permits were a big upside surprise yesterday. We also get Leading Economic Indicators at 10 but they are expected up just 0.1% and I doubt they go negative. Friday we have Durable Goods, which should be down 2% and New Home Sales at 10, also now set up to disappoint even
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Goldilocks and the 300,000,000 Bears
by Phil - August 14th, 2010 3:43 am
Talk about feeling outnumbered!
As the guy in Airplane kind of said – "Looks like I pricked the wrong week to get bullish!" Of course, as I often tell people I am neither bullish nor bearish – I’m rangeish – and our range is the 5% band between around Dow 10,200 and S&P 1,070, which takes us as low as Dow 9,690 and S&P 1,016 and as high as Dow 10,710 and S&P 1,123 before I really "flip flop" my positions. Despite the fact that this is the range we predicted last October and is the range we’ve been in (other than a brief trip to 11,200, which we shorted the hell out of) all year – people still seem to find it necessary to call me either bullish or bearish as we navigate the channel.
I suppose I have been HOPEFUL for the month (now heading into day 14) that we will finally make a little progress and establish a higher floor at our usual mid-points while, at the same time, the MSM have decided that we are all going to die. That does make me kind of bullish by comparison doesn’t it? We are mainly in cash and we are well hedged to the downside so, unless we are REALLY heading much, much lower, there is little profit in speculating to the downside, other than our quick trades. As PT Barnum once said:
"A man who is all caution, will never dare to take hold and be successful; and a man who is all boldness, is merely reckless, and must eventually fail. A man may go on "’change" and make fifty, or one hundred thousand dollars in speculating in stocks, at a single operation. But if he has simple boldness without caution, it is mere chance, and what he gains to-day he will lose to-morrow. You must have both the caution and the boldness, to insure success."
Balance is the key to long-term success and we’ve had many conversations about that in Member Chat. Our goal is to be neither bullish or bearish but rather to sell premium to both the bulls and the bears when conditions permit us. As Ravalos said Friday in Member Chat:
"Ever since I became member (actually before I became member I was already following your newsletter for quite some time) I find it hard for me to BUY PREMIUM. Over time, I’ve realized that buying the
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Thank Jobs It’s Friday!
by Phil - July 2nd, 2010 8:23 am
Do I know what the jobs data will be at 8:30? Nope.
Then why would I title a post "Thank Jobs It’s Friday!" – what if the report sucks and we go down? Well, at this point, even if that does happen, I think that will be the end of it. We’ve been building up to this "terrible" jobs number all week and we got a rotten ADP Report and a rotten Unemployment Report so everyone is expecting a rotten Non-Farm Payroll report. When everyone expects the same thing, we like to bet against it. Sometimes we’re wrong and sometimes we’re right but you make some amazing money when you are right. The magnitude of the short squeeze that would follow a significantly BTE NFP Report could send up up 300 points or more on the day, likely with a big finish this afternoon and some follow-through on Tuesday as the rest of the world plays catch-up.
A bad report, on the other hand, is already baked into the cake and we have yet to test S&P 1,000 so we can expect support there. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but we should be able to scramble and protect ourselves if we head lower so the smart move is to play for the mega-move higher, and that’s where we are. Of course, it’s also a balance issue. In our last Weekly Wrap-Up, we had the following open trade ideas going into June 21st (we had gotten bearish at the end of the previous week):
- APOL July $40 puts spread at .46, now .60 – up 30%
- BBY Jan $37 puts sold for $4, now $3 – up 25%
- BP July $30/32 bull call spread at $1, now .70 – down 30%
- YRCW at .21, now .15 – down 28%
- BP Oct $33/July $33 ratio backspread (3:5) at net $225, now $524 – up 132%
- TZA July $7 calls .08 (net of spread), now $1.50 – up 1,775%
- SIRI 2012 $1 puts sold at .33, still .33 – even
- USO July $33 puts at .51, now $1.08 – up 131%
- GLL July $37 puts, sold for $1.30, now .35 – up 70%
- TBT July $38 puts sold for $1, now $2.05 – down 105%
- OIH June $104.10 puts at $2.02, now $8.70 – up 330%
- TZA July $6/8 bull call spread for .55, now $1.48 – up 169%
- TZA July $6 puts sold for
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Advanced Pattern Recognition: Omega III Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - June 19th, 2010 6:46 am
What a fine and predictable week it was!
How can you not have fun when the market does exactly what you expect it to do every day? Why it’s almost as if we stole Goldman Sach’s evil playbook (and the Russell once again is at 666) so we too can make profits EVERY SINGLE TRADING DAY – just like they do! This is a real testament to my famous saying:
We don’t care IF the game is rigged, as long as we know HOW it is rigged so we can place our bets accordingly.
Remember it was last summer that Goldman’s secret trading program was stolen. At the time, Goldman Sachs asserted that: "There is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways." I believe this was a misquote and what GS meant to say was that there was a danger someone ELSE could use it to manipulate the markets in unfair ways. Was it just a coincidence that the indictment of computer thief Sergey Aleynikov on Feb 11th coincided with the beginning of this year’s massive rally or was that the day GS regained sole control of their pet program?
Does this sound conspiratorial? Well perhaps then you haven’t read Tim Lavin’s "Monsters in the Markets," where he points out: "Algorithms now trigger 70 percent of all trades in U.S. equities. The speed and volume of everyday trading have propelled the market into a new and esoteric dimension, and rendered traders in the pits largely obsolete… At least a few high-frequency traders have learned to make a killing by detecting the more simplistic algo strategies deployed by basic pension funds and mutual funds, buying the next stock the funds plan to buy, and then selling it to them at a higher price. This may not be illegal, but it’s almost certainly unfair to the funds’ investors. “It is increasingly clear that there are quite a number of high-frequency bandits in the high- frequency-trading community who pump up volume statistics, front-run investor orders, increase transaction costs, and hurt real liquidity,” according to former NASDAQ vice-chairman David Weild."
We certainly know better than to trust our money to fund managers! Last Friday ("Pattern Recognition 101"), we determined that the TradeBots were following the rally pattern we now call Omega III and that meant we expected the day to finish…
Jobless Thursday – Productivity and Prices are Peaking
by Phil - June 17th, 2010 8:27 am
What a run we are having!
Of course we are thrilled because we flipped bullish last week, when it was still out of fashion and now we are following along the Trade Bot Omega-3 rally pattern that I pointed out in last Friday’s post:
Close enough, right? Of course we don’t base our decisions on pattern matching (which can give you many false positives) but when we feel the fundamentals are the same AND the market movement looks the same, then we get pretty interested in watching how that pattern is playing out! so today should be a flat day and we most likely flatline into expirations, which would be good as we still need to form a base but the question remains – do we have enough good news and data to take us back to the top of our range at 10,700 (1,140 on S&P)?
See Friday’s post for how this patten plays out for the next few weeks. The TradBots are clearly in control of the market and the volume is back to anemic as confused retail bulls are now confused retail bears as the MSM scrambles to figure out how to tell you they were right. Our friendbuddypal Jim Cramer was so wrong in his call last week that he had a little temper tantrum about it saying:
I am calling this a bad rally. This market has now become more depressing than Ethan Frome. Even the good days are now bad days. It’s almost as if the whole market is caught between 1st base and 2nd base. So we get an endless rotating short squeeze in oil, in the banks, in tech, in discretionary…. But once the shorts are done getting picked off, we’ve got no more reason to run. It is a rally that stops that a blast of future selling comes in. It is a rally that stops the moment the buyers just walk away. We used to have fundamentally based rallies – that’s not how this market works. This market is stupid. And it is hated for a very good reason. The market seems rapacious, arbitrary, capricious and downright ridiculous. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Wow, Jim, I’m touched that you would use my old literary references from January in your broadcast but we’re done with…
Wonderful Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - June 12th, 2010 8:28 am
I love it when a plan comes together!
Last week, I felt like I was going to have to call Animal Control to help me fight off the bears. As I mentioned in last week’s Wrap-Up, all 14 misses (out of 55 trade ideas for the week) we had were bullish plays that we were grabbing on the way down. On Friday we went bullish on USO, SSO, DIA, TBT (well, we’re always bullish on TBT), AET, ABX, Copper Futures and even poor BP. Those followed up on bullish plays we had taken on Thursday on TSRA, USO, MEE, FCX, EEM, ERX and XOM. We went into the weekend still bearish but we were excited about flipping back to bullish. My closing comment in the Wrap-Up was: " I’m hoping for a blow-off spike down on Monday with heavy volume, hopefully followed by a recovery over the next few days" and, gosh darn it, wouldn’t you know that’s EXACTLY what we got.
I don’t MAKE the markets do these things, I simply tell you what is going to happen and how you can make money on it… Needless to say, we had a LOT of fun this week at PSW! Last weekend, however, was such a bearish frenzy in the MSM that it was making our Members nervous and THAT I do not tolerate so I wrote : "The Worst-Case Scenario: Getting Real With Global GDP!" to illustrate why I felt our bottoms would hold and I began a Top 20 Buy List on Sunday and boy did we get some fabulous entries this week!
Monday Market Movement – Will We Survive?
As I said on Monday Morning: "I already stuck my neck out calling a bottom so now we’re just waiting patiently." We were disappointed to have not gotten a stronger statement from the G20 over the weekend but it was just the Finance Ministers, so we weren’t expecting too much until the big boys meet at the end of the month. While we were in a buying mood, I cautioned against getting too bullish until we took back our anticipated "weak bounce" levels, which were the orange lines on Monday’s Multi-Chart:
I pointed out (on another Multi-Chart) that Europe was already gathering strength so we were pretty confident things would go our way but, as I said in the 9:50 Alert to Members, SOX 340 and TRANQ 2,000 had be taken back before we could feel confident. My outlook for the day was:…
Tumultuous Tuesday – Funds Tend to Short Ten-Year Treasuries
by Phil - May 4th, 2010 7:55 am
Societe Generale is out with the latest edition of their hedge fund watch and in it we see that they’ve found hedge funds to have the "shortest position EVER on bonds."
Well, ever is since 2005 but still, hedge funds now have more than 270,000 short contracts on the 10-year Treasury Bond and that’s not even counting PSW Members and their TBT positions (ultra-short the 20-year) so we are either twice as smart as hedge funds or twice as dumb – either way, it looks like it’s coming to a head!
SocGen also reports large short positions in 30-year TBills too with a net short there of about 100,000 contracts and the Bank concludes that funds are also "strong net sellers of the Yen (50K net short) and buyers of US Dollars." Short positions in the Euro are being reduced now that we’re near my $1.30 target but this is a critical line for the Euro and we could still break 10% lower if it doesn’t hold, I mentioned our Euro play in the Weekend Wrap-Up so I won’t get into it here but what a day we had yesterday already!
According to Market Folly, hedge funds are also now net sellers of equities with long/short equity funds are now around 25% net long, which is definitely below their historical average of 35-40% net long. Folly also sees that, according to CFTC data, many hedgies have been adding to shorts in S&P futures. Whether they are simply selling longs to lock in some profit or making a market timing call, one thing is clear: hedge funds are definitely cautious in this market. Following the funds has been profitable this year as they are up 13% year-to-date after the Hedge Fund Generals Index was up 69% last year.
PSW members did their best to avoid temptation yesterday despite the "rally" (that failed to make it back to Thursday’s highs on low volume) and despite the "fabulous" auto numbers that CNBC et al could not stop fawning over. Indeed the statistics were so good they were – RIDICULOUS – Chrysler up 25%, DIA up 18.8%, F up 24.7%, GM up 6.4%, HMC up 12.5%, Hyundai up 30%, Kia up 17.3% and TM up 24.4%. This caused me to comment to Members:
OK, now I may be an old fuddy-duddy but I’m counting less than 1M cars sold in a month in this group and it seems to
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Which Way Wednesday – Fed Up Edition
by Phil - April 7th, 2010 7:56 am
I don’t know what Fed minutes the market red yesterday but the ones I read scared me!
As usual, I went through the minutes in Member Chat (and there’s a highlighted version in Seeking Alpha minus my color-coding) and the red (negative) statements are far outnumbering the green (shoots) in the minutes including little blow-offs like "the Federal Reserve’s total assets had risen to about $2.3 trillion" and "the Desk had been reinvesting all maturing Treasury securities by exchanging those holdings for newly issued Treasury securities" which, if you put them together in non-BS language, pretty much says: "Of the $1.3Tn in Treasuries sold in 2009, it’s hard to see how the Fed bought less than half of them, maybe closer to all of them since we rolled our short-term paper over each time, therefore buying much more than it seems."
Once again, the finger is pointed sqarely at Commercial Real Estate as, according to the minutes: "Conditions in the nonresidential construction sector generally remained poor. Real outlays on structures outside of the drilling and mining sector fell again in the fourth quarter, and nominal expenditures dropped further in January. The weakness was widespread across categories and likely reflected rising vacancy rates, falling property prices, and difficult financing conditions for new projects." In a real economy, that statement alone would send investors running for the exits but we also got these three – all in a row:
The dollar value of commercial real estate sales remained very low in February, and the share of properties sold at a nominal loss inched higher. The delinquency rate on commercial mortgages in securitized pools increased in January, and the delinquency rate on commercial mortgages at commercial banks rose in the fourth quarter. The percentage of delinquent construction loans at banks also ticked higher in the fourth quarter.
Delinquency rates on credit card loans in securitized pools and on auto loans at captive finance companies remained elevated in January but were down a bit from their recent peaks.
Total bank credit contracted substantially in January and February. Banks’ securities holdings declined at a modest pace after several months of steady growth, and total loans on banks’ books continued to drop.
The Fed blows off this bad news by noting that CDS rates were ignoring the weakness in CRE (so we should too?) and, even worse is the way the Fed keeps…
Short (but Wild) Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - April 3rd, 2010 7:55 am
What a crazy week!
The markets were bucking like a bronco but were they trying to throw off the shorts prior to a move back down or trying to flush out the weak-handed longs prior to a big breakout to new levels? After gapping open to 10,900 on Monday morning we went up to 10,950, down to 10,830 and back to 10,950 – all to finish the week at 10,927, which is up 39 points since March 23rd so don’t tell me we’re wasting out time as that’s 5 points a day baby (if we round up).
We had the day off on Friday but we did get the critical Non-Farm Payroll data for March but, as noted in my report (and in the Member Chat), despite the very excited reaction from the futures, there is no clear indication there that either the Bulls or Bears have a lasting point. So perhaps the wild market action is nothing more than good old-fashioned indecision – the futures flew up but then Goldman said they saw "Little Underlying Improvement" in the data and that "Productivity Gains Have Diminished Sharply" - clearly mixed signals that may take some time to resolve.
Last weekend, I complained that it was a "6-Point Weekly Wrap-Up" as that’s all we got from the S&P, which finished at 1,166. This week I am happy to report that we gained 12 points – all the way to 1,178 and we are closing in on that 1,080 mark, which we did touch briefly at Thursday’s open (which gave us the great shorting opportunity we had looked for in Thursday morning’s post!). It’s not that I don’t respect the rally – technically, you have to respect the rally but that’s why we’re in cash: We can take advantage of these huge intra-day moves down (and sometimes up) - getting our 6-second bull rides and scoring as many points as we can before the rodeo clowns turn on the buy programs and stop the ride.
Overall, it’s a pretty mindless market. You can go long at about about 2pm and flip short about 10 am the next morning – in the futures that can add up to shocking amounts of money and it sure isn’t bad when you are using options for leverage either. We’re sure the game will collapse one day and hopefully we’ll be able to pull the rip cord without…
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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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