Which Way Wednesday – Topping or Popping?
by Phil - January 19th, 2011 8:30 am
When we first began following the Alpha 2 TradeBot pattern on Jan 3rd (see Stock World Weekly for current chart) back on Jan 3rd, I said: "Let’s assume we get that extra 2.5% between Friday’s close and expiration day – that’s going to take us to Dow 11,850 and S&P 1,285." Yesterday the Dow hit our 11,850 mark, 2 days ahead of schedule! If we break higher here (and the S&P is already at 1,295 – see David Fry’s chart) then we are "off the charts" and possibly running a whole new series – which is very possible as last year the IBanks didn’t have $25Bn worth of POMO a week to feed into their machines – that has to be worth something right? At least 10 S&P points…
If, on the other hand, S&P 1,300 becomes a hard stop and the Dow can’t hold 11,850, let alone break up over 12,000 – then the second part of my prediction was that we would pull back to Dow 10,900 and S&P 1,188 – a test of the 200 day moving averages. If we get that pullback and those levels hold, THEN we will be happy to get on the bullish bandwagon – we just want a test!
Not, of course, that we are waiting around doing nothing. We already had our "Secret Santa Inflation Hedges" and, at this point, you either have them or you shouldn’t even look as they are up well over 200% already and the market is "only" up 2.5% since then. We were waiting patiently for Russell 800 to confirm our Breakout 2 levels and we not only got that but we got several nice tests since then so we’ll have to put that one in the "win" column as well for the bulls.
While I don’t like chasing the MoMo stocks higher, AAPL and IBM show us that there are some solid fundamentals underlying the big boys and I mentioned in the Morning Post of the 6th that I did like CSCO ($20.77 at the time) and GLW ($18.98 that day) as solid, go-forward positions. Even without our option plays, they are both up nicely in less than two weeks – certainly a higher percentage (5% for GLW, 2.5% for CSCO) than AMZN, which is up $3.50 (1.8%) or NFLX, which is up $6 (3.2%), who I cautioned…
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DiggFickle Friday’s Jobs Report
by Phil - January 7th, 2011 8:29 am
I don’t know what the Jobs will be but I’m betting on disappointment.
I had said to Members yesterday that I liked the Jan QQQQ $56 puts at .77 and the Weekly (next week, not today) QQQQ $56 puts at .53 as good ways to play a jobs miss. My comment in Member Chat was that I felt the ADP figures pushed expectations up significantly higher and now we would be much more likely to disappoint with almost any number short of 250,000 jobs added.
The key is the seasonal adjustments but there was already some very disturbing jobs numbers in the Gallup Poll, which came out last night and showed unemployment RISING from 9.3 to 9.6% in December and, even worse, the number of Underemployed workers shot up from 18.5 to 19%, just 0.5% lower than we were in January of last year.
Gallups Job Creation index showed no improvement in December but it is holding +10, which is the best net level we’ve had since October of 2008. So we have ADP going one way, yesterday’s unemployment numbers were flat and Gallup says things are getting worse. 8:30 will be very interesting indeed.
While we wait for the number, let’s take a look at last week’s post to see how things are tracking. Monday morning I mentioned we liked FCX short at $120 (a trade that was reiterated Tuesday morning) as we felt the run in copper was overdone. It was a rough week but FCX is down at $116 now so we’re on track at the moment of course we took a spread in chat, which was the Feb $119/110 bear put spread at $3.60, selling the Jan $120 calls for $3.60. That spread is now $4.60 and the calls have dropped to $2.30 for a nice net $2.30 gain already.
I said that $90 was already ridiculous for oil and we shouldn’t go any higher. We picked up the USO Feb $40 puts on Tuesday morning in Member Chat at $2.10 and those are now $3.70 so a nice $1.60 gain there, which is about the same as if we had just shorted the stock as it dropped from $39 that morning to $37.68 now. That’s where puts are very useful, you don’t have to commit as much as a short on the stock, you limit…
Thrilling Thursday – Comedy or Tragedy?
by Phil - January 6th, 2011 7:29 am
Russell 8-0-0, Russell 8-0-0! Wherefore art thou Russell8-0-0? Deny thy dollar and refuse to fall, or, if thou spike not, be but consolidating at resistance and I’ll happily Capitulate….
If it’s good enough for fair Juliet, it’s going to have to be good enough for us as the Russell finally makes it over our 800 target – the last barrier that was keeping us on the bearish side. Above these lines – it’s time to stop worrying and love the rally as we romanticize the deadly combination of QE2 the Obama tax cuts as: "A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, whose misadventured piteous overthrows doth with their death bury their parents’ strife."
Of course Willie Shakespeare has nothing on Jimmy Cramer, who’s pearls of wisdom are also sure to be repeated centuries from now. Last night the Bard of Wall Street sang a veritable sonnet in praise of the stock market and foretold a tale of woe for anyone dumb enough to take profits into this rally:
We got the correction this morning, Dow fell 35 points… Today’s action was proof positive that you need to stop worrying and learn to love corrections… What scares me, and what should scare you, is that if you sell your stocks here, you won’t be able to get back in. You should be worried about stocks getting away from you, because I think we can be on the verge of something big – something very positive. FORGET the fact that stocks have run up a lot in the last 6 months. For more than 10 years, this market has done nothing, THAT is the most important frame of reference…
What’s changed? We are finally starting to see big breakouts from a slew of breakouts from several large cap companies including: CAT, UTX, FCX, SWK, CBE, ETN, CSX, UNP and so many other big industrials. Ladies and gentlemen, we have waited over a decade for this move and what do people want to do now that it has arrived? They want to sell! That’s right, they want to sell. That’s right. They want to dump the stocks (sell button sound effect) because they are up way too much short-term or because they think the moves are illusory or driven by short squeezes that will
…
Testy Tuesday – Topping or Popping?
by Phil - December 28th, 2010 8:24 am
Looks like we picked the wrong week to short FCX!
Copper hit a new all-time high in Shanghai this morning (as the guy who owns 90% of London’s closed for the holiday exchange supplies sold it to himself for more money than he did yesterday) and gold is back at $1,400 in the futures and that should give us a better entry on FCX puts than we expected for round 2 but Paul Krugman has me worried now that maybe commodity prices are just high because the World hasn’t got enough of them to go around. Usually Paul and I agree but i think he may be discounting the effect of a 10% decline in the dollar a little too much – which is understandable as he is still arguing for more stimulus while I’m arguing that the way they are stimulating now is causing this problem and can not and should not be sustained.
Still, we have to be pragmatic. That’s why, this weekend, I posted our "Secret Santa Inflation Hedges for 2011" as a follow-on to the "Breakout Defense – 5,000% in 5 Trades or Less" ideas of the 11th and, in the week between the two, we had bullish bets on HMY, XLF, CAKE, TNA, IWM, CCJ, CHK, EXC, TNA, XLF, UNG, GLD, AAPL, GLW, TOT and AXP – which I had mentioned on the 19th in the weekend post "It’s Never too Early to Predict the Future." Just because I think there’s going to be a disaster doesn’t mean we can’t go with the flow while we wait, right?
We don’t have to like the market to buy it above our breakout lines but we do need to keep in mind that this is a very thin rally that is very likely nothing but window dressing aimed at dragging money off the sidelines so the IBanks who have been propping up the markets can, once again, stick the retail shareholders with the bag as they load up on puts (watch the VIX to confirm) and crash the markets once again. I’ve seen it happen in 1999, I saw it happen in 2008 and, both times, the rally lasted longer than seemed logical but the smart play was to hit and run – not to leave your money on the table but to participate in the upswings and then…
Weekend Reading – It’s Never Too Early to Predict the Future!
by Phil - December 19th, 2010 7:57 am
Barron’s already has the 2011 Outlook on the Cover.
We were discussing the generally bullish in Member Chat and Barfinger said "So, Phil, what is your response to the bullish preview?" That was a great question because it made me think. Does he expect a "rebuttal"? I can understand that as I’ve been fairly bearish but let’s not confuse caution (I called for a cash out when the Dow hit 11,200 in early November, it peaked at 11,444 on the 5th and closed Friday at 11,491) with bearishness – it’s just that my now 45 days of running around saying "the sky is falling" while it stays in place does make me seem like a perma-bear.
The "October Overbought Eight" was my first bearish virtual portfolio since April 28th’s "Hedging for Disaster – 5 Plays that Make 500% if the Market Falls" (and it did, and they did). THAT was a bearish outlook! We are not that bearish here, otherwise it would have been the easiest thing in the World to re-up those plays for the new year. We expect a correction, but hopefully not the kind we had between May 4th and July 2nd, where the Dow dropped 1,600 points in just over 2 months. We are HOPING for a nice 20% pullback off the 15% gain from 9,800 to 11,270 back to the 11,000 line and holding that would make us very bullish going into next year.
That would be 1,180 on the S&P (the declining 200 dma) and just 5% down from Friday’s close – THAT’s how bearish I am! Where we are now is simply where the 5% Rule told us we’d be back on May 5th, where the chart pointed out that 1,240 is 20% off the upper, non-spike consolidation at 1,550 that marked the high for the S&P. 20% is the most powerful level in the 5% Rule and that’s why it’s been safer to wait and see how this line resolves than place long-term bets in either direction into the slow and volatile holidays.
Obviously, I am fairly convinced that Global "leaders" are making all sorts of policy mistakes handling the economy and I do believe it will all end in disaster but that does NOT mean I am market bearish.
Think if it this way: If you come across a…
Fiscally Irresponsible Friday – Proles Swallow $858Bn in Debt for $ 613 and Some Magic Beans
by Phil - December 17th, 2010 8:18 am
Good job Congress!
Way to bend of and take it from your new Republican Masters! Not since Jack sold his cow for some magic beans has a deal like this been made by our "leadership" where families earning between $35,000 and $64,000 go $7,800 further into debt to get a $613 tax break while families earning between $5M and $10M get $38,590 and families earning $50M to $100M get $380,590 and families (or Corporations, of course) earning $500M to $1Bn get $3,859,000 or about 12,590 times more than the average middle class family but, then again, they deserve it because – they are that much better than you are!
Face it, unless you are in an income category where your tax benefit has 5 digits, you are what George Orwell (who worked in England’s Ministry of Propaganda) called a "Prole." In "1984" the Proles (proletariat) were the vast majority of the populace, the working class of Oceana. Though the proles are the majority, they are unimportant. The Party explicitly teaches that the Proles are "natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals". As one of the Party Leaders observes: "the relative freedom of working-class people is merely a symptom of the contempt in which they are held".
It is not only the Party which regards the Proles as unimportant: the arch-enemy, Goldstein, dismisses them too, referring to the divisions of High, Middle and Low people, in which the Low are essentially destined to remain powerless. This attitude has much in common with the one Huxley shows in Brave New World—the lower castes are mindless enough to be satisfied with little, and can be relied on not to be troublesome.
You’re not going to be any trouble are you? Enjoy your $613, little people. That’s what, about a month’s worth of gasoline and cable TV? Congratulations on your voting acumen – you certainly have gotten the Government that you deserve! I apologize because I had mischaracterized the tax cuts as being fairer to the Middle Class last week, when I said it was only an outrage. I thought that families earning $50,000 would be getting $900, not $613, but it turns out that 12,590 times $287 is another $3,613,330 that could be given to a Billionaire and they NEED that money to buy stuff that might create a job while you would only…
Thursday Thoughts – GDP Up, Jobs Down
by Phil - July 29th, 2010 7:55 am
Forget the GDP.
We’ll get the report on Q2 GDP at 8:30 tomorrow but I’ll be watching the Employment Cost Index to see if we are recovering. I know it seems like "commie talk" to my Conservative friends, but rising wages and benefits are signs of a healthy economy and you can plot the rise and fall of the stock market very neatly against how well the workers are treated.
It was Henry Ford who first "discovered" that, if you expect American consumers to buy your products, you have to pay American workers enough to afford them. In January of 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced they would pay $5 a day to its workers. The pay increase would also be accompanied by a shorter workday (from nine to eight hours). While this rate didn’t automatically apply to every worker, it more than doubled the average autoworker’s wage. Workers came from all over the nation and all over the world to work for Ford, who had their pick of the best and the brightest, which led to a 60-year legacy of dominance in American Industry.
Henry Ford had reasoned that since it was possible to build inexpensive cars in volume, more of them could be sold if employees could afford to buy them. The $5 day helped better the lot of all American workers and contributed to the emergence of the American middle class and that led to a massive economic boom in "the Roaring 20′s" until greedy Banksters and speculators crashed the market in 1929.
Unfortunately, earning $5 a day is still a dream for much of the workforce employed by US corporations as that is more money than is paid to their tens of millions of employees and suppliers in China, India, Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, etc. Not only have American corporations "unlearned" the lessons that made this country great but they are actively involved in tearing down what is left of the American Middle Class by undermining their ability to earn and save as they ship jobs out of the country and cut wages and benefits for those few workers (135M at last count) who are left.
8:30 Update: Make that 134,543,000 workers left - as we lost another 457,000 American jobs last week. Continuing Claims picked back up to 4.56M, also more than expected but, as I said to Members yesterday, so what? We are investing in Corporate Pirates, not the victims they slaughter so when we see…
No-Thrills Thursday – Where’s the Kaboom?
by Phil - June 3rd, 2010 8:28 am
Where’s the kaboom? There’s supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom.
Well, it’s Thursday and the World hasn’t ended yet, contrary to the dire predictions we were getting last week and I guess that means you’d better buy some stocks! We’ve been buying up a storm since falling below the bottom of our range with 50 long-term entries on our Buy List and another dozen longs in the first two days of this week including speculative longs (haven’t taken those for a while) on BP and RIG. We even took two very bullish earnings plays on STP and JOYG – both of which were just way too low to ignore.
JOYG was a complex spread from our 12:50 Alert to Members with a max profit at $55 but STP was a very simple, VERY bullish play where we bought the $9 calls for $1 and sold the $9 puts for .47, for a net .53 entry and no limit to our upside over $9. Even if your margin requirement is 50% on the puts, you can pick up a single contract spread like this for $497 in buying power and your risk is being assigned the stock at net $9.53 but a move over $10 nets you a 10% gain in one day. As long as you don’t mind owning the stock on a move down, these are fun earnings plays to make…
We didn’t expect to be getting bullish (and we are still well-hedged for the next fat-fingered fall) but at 12:27 on Tuesday, I posted the following chart for Members where I drew a line in the sand for the downturn:
Yesterday I noted in the Morning Post that we were completing that move down into the open so all we really did was follow-through with our plan to flip bullish for at least a bounce. As we drifted along into the afternoon on a low volume move up, I re-examined the chart and decided it was a fine afternoon for a stick save and I drew this updated chart with the attached comment:
10,080 is the 0% line for the Dow and if I were Mr. Stick, I’d use that as my go point and jam the Dow up 100 from there, back to about 1,100 (on the S&P) so that’s the game(d) plan for the afternoon if we are getting back to the usual bullish shenanigans. Which would
…
Monday Market Movement – Can We Go It Alone?
by Phil - April 5th, 2010 8:17 am
It’s lonely out there in Stock Land today.
Everybody’s closed today except Japan and they are so thrilled with 94.5 Yen to the dollar that you can’t figure anthing out by watching their market add another 53 points this morning to finish the day at 11,339 but it was well off the gap up open at 11,400. As I mentioned in the Weekend Wrap-Up, where we discussed our Super-Secret Strategy for making money off this nonsense – just because a rally is totally propped up BS doesn’t mean it isn’t, technically, a rally – does it?
With everyone else closed, the MSCI Asia-Pacific Index hit 19-month highs and copper climbed to $3.62 in overnight trading (when there were no traders) and gold hit $1,130 while oil hovered around $85.50 so we can infer that commodities are very, very popular with vacationing traders. Asian traders were excited about our jobs numbers – obviously they didn’t read my analysis on Friday:
“Overall, we are seeing positive signs about the global economy,” said Hiroaki Muto, a senior economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Asset Management Co., which manages $111 billion. “While developing nations are leading global growth, they are waiting for the U.S. to rebound. Recent reports are suggesting that the U.S. labor market and consumer spending are improving.”
Consumer spending is certainly improving at the Apple Store with 700,000 IPads going out the door in 48 hours, bringing AAPL an estimated $500,000,000 in revenues over the weekend. I was in the NY Apple Store this weekend and there were about 200 IPads on display with lines 3-4 deep of people very patiently waiting considering the average person who touched one held on for a good half hour. Keep in mind that the IPads that are selling now are limited Wi-Fi only models – the good, 3G ones don’t come out for another couple of weeks!
So, based on 2 days of sales, we can project AAPL selling $175Bn worth of IPads this year and that will make AAPL worth about a Trillion dollars, which is very likely to boost the Nasdaq back to 5,000… OK, that may be a bit of an over-statement but we still cannot ignore the Apple effect on the market because it does look like they are going to move a tremendous amount of IPads this year and that will be good for chip…
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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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