Phil's Stock World, Stock Options Trading & Information

Phil is a master at keeping you laughing, as well as making you money. - It is like \" laughing all the way to the bank!\"

- Gel1, Feb 16, 2010

I’ve recently done exactly what Phil described. I upgraded my ability to trade the IRA acct. by transferring acct. from TDA to TOS. TDA would not allow spreads; TOS does. Neither will allow naked options. With spreads I am able to buy calls or puts several months out then sell front month calls or puts over and over. This allows me to collect premium, which is, of course, the goal. This wasn’t an original idea. Phil put me onto it. Since the transfer I’ve substantially increased my performance in the IRA!

- Iflantheman, Feb 8, 2010

hil, I hit my targets for the year in my 401K (thanks in no small part to your site), so I cashed out of all positions a couple of weeks ago. Feels good... I'm conservative with this money –looking for 2% per month, which i’ve been able to do… thx.

- Lunar, Dec 31, 2009

Phil - I caught the interview…. terrific!. Your host recommended that the viewers should \" go to your site, as you will be entertained \". That is for sure if you consider entertainment is laughing while you read, learn and make unbelievable leveraged profits that you never thought were possible. That is my kind of entertainment !

- Gel1, Nov 10, 2009

Phil/Everyone here/Thank you - What everyone here with their insightful comments (including yourself) has helped me with is that I’m greatly increasing my ability to trade more psychologically neutral, although I’ve got a ways to go. Two years ago I’d wake up early and my heart would race if futures weren’t pointing exactly how I wanted… I’ve noticed an exponential leap in my discipline skills especially over this past two weeks. The old me would have ran with that trade for profits without even asking. Now I know that there are ALWAYS more trades and that I have PLENTY of options to turn a bad trade even. Also, it’s more logical and less emotionally draining which lets me focus my faculties on my wife, college, my job, and studying for the ol’ Series 7. Would it be safe to say that one of the most important skills to develop is the ability to adjust? I’d love to get to the point where I can look at a bracket and know, for example, what I need to sell for cover in what month in order to get my desired results. Both COF and my past DMM venture have been excellent learning experiences. Thanks, everyone. I look forward to further lessons.

- Skasiah, Aug 25, 2009

Hi Mr. Phill, I am a Venezuelan lady tormented by our politicall situation, who use to be an emerging market trader, and many other executive positins in the finance \"arena\" and now is trying to built a new concept and service for asset management for clients on my own, I am in the trial and learning process at the moment, I also invest for some friends and myself. I want to congratulate you , because reading you fill my days with a touch of irony (besides ,of course the spectacular market insight) that happens to give me energy, its a joy the remarks and comments even the pictures used, sometimes I just read it for the fun, I completily agree with your thouhts, though we belong to totally different cultures and enviorements and certanly realities Your readings is like a little hand helping me out to be in the market and fight for my devastated country where every single day we looe inches and yards of liberty. You shoul try to writte a book!

- Mindeyes, Aug 5, 2009

AMZN ... thanks Phil; boy did they run a squeeze on everyone there ... made me sweat ... scaling helped! I think AMZN has an 85 handle tomorrow ... maybe lower.

- Cap, Jul 29, 2009

I am a Registered Nurse, so is my wife. We work hard to take care of seven kids that are the joy of our lives. The cost for a basic membership is ALOT from our our monthly budget of spending and saving…but well worth it! Phil has allowed me to really ramp up the savings we put away for our children’s college funds and our retirement.

- David , Jun 6, 2009

Phil - Another excellent teaching article - when you write like that it blows me away. Thank you! I had the ideas from earlier articles but what I didn’t have was enough understanding. The familiarity of ideas through repetition, re-working, revision - over time - the variation, the pulling out of implications - it all contributes to understanding and mostly thats on the student - but a good teacher (worth their weight in gold) makes understanding a pleasure. I wanted to learn about trading options because it makes my brain feel better - fitter, healthier. Actually mostly it makes me happy to think about the trade and trading options. You are a good teacher and I know that or I wouldn’t value the subscription the way I do. It pays for itself through the pleasure of understanding alone.

- Redfern1, May 18, 2009

Sold out my AAPL mar95 calls. Up over 100% today on them!

- Singapore Steve, Mar 17, 2009

Beginner's Guide to Options Trading. Free PDF Guide. Where & when to trade, how to prevent stock or option loss and how to make money!

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Posts Tagged ‘HCBK’

Testy Tuesday - Have the Markets Become Comfortably Numb?

by Phil - January 19th, 2010 8:08 am

"There is no pain you are receding
A distant ship’s smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying.
When I was a child
I caught a fleeting glimpse
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger on it now
The child is grown,
The dream is gone.
but I have become comfortably numb." - Pink Floyd

I have a theory that the markets (and the American people in general) aren’t irrational, they are simply shell-shocked after suffering a very traumatic group financial experience…

To be shell-shocked is to be "mentally confused, upset, or exhausted as a result of excessive stress" and the most common symptoms are: Fatigue, slower reaction times, indecision, disconnection from one’s surroundings, and inability to prioritize - That certainly sounds like our Congress doesn’t it? Combat stress disorder was first diagnosed in WWI, when 10% of the troops were killed and 56% wounded - far worse than had been experienced in previous wars. Our current financial crisis has similarly affected more people than any previous crisis with almost everyone knowing someone who is bankrupt or lost their jobs or homes and almost no one escaped the carnage of the downturn without some financial damage.

Combat fatigue may go a long way to explaining the severe drop-off in volume that has plagued the markets since March, with participation now down to 25% of where we were last January and that leaves us open to the blatant sort of market manipulation that Karl Denninger caught last week as well as the usual nonsense we get daily from HFT programs that drive the market with such precision that we are able to tell how the day is going to go by simply checking our hourly volume targets. Here’s a clip from CNBC where a floor trader discusses market manipulation as a fact of trading (2 mins in).

As Nicholas Santiago points out on In The Money Stocks, "January is usually a very high volume month, yet it has started off the New Year even lighter than the last two months of 2009. Light volume markets are very difficult to short. Hence the old saying, ‘never short a dull market’." Not only is the market volume light, but over 60% of the trading volume is concentrated on 5 stocks: AIG, C, BAC, FNM and FRE!

We have often noted that high-volume (relatively) days almost always tend to be down days and PSW Members can tell you how the…

Tags: ADTRN, AMTD, BAC, C, COH, CREE, CSX, EAT, EBAY, EDU, FAST, FFIV, FHN, FRX, FULT, HBHC, HCBK, IBM, IIVI, KMP, LOGI, MMR, MS, MTB, NTRS, OHB, PETS, PGR, PH, PNFP, RJF, SBUX, SLM, STT, STX, USB, WFC, WIT, XLNX

Posted in Uncategorized | 184 Comments »

Stock Market Crash - Year One Review III - March Madness!

by Phil - September 10th, 2009 5:51 pm

We left off in Part II with our Feb 23rd Big Chart Review.

Even though I said: "Once again we are in a market that environment that reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Homer jumps over a gorge, crashes, is taken up by a helicopter (Ben) smashing against the wall along the way only to fall all the way from the top again. Pain, pain and more pain every time we try to get long" - we still weren’t fully prepared for the devastation that was to follow as the Dow fell from 7,500 to 6,500 in the next 10 days. My commentary on the environment the next day was:

According to Cap, someone on the YHOO message board was counting the number of times CNBC talking heads said "nationalization" this morning and, as of 8:15, they were up to 300 times. Sadly, this is the fear-mongering that is driving the markets to new lows while Cramer continues to keep his sheeple out of protective ETFs like SKF. So you have the man’s network telling you financials are going to zero while dog and pony boy tells his minions to sell ALL the financials, causing them to go to zero - even though they could hold on and protect themselves with conta-funds, if Cramer didn’t spend 3 days a week convincing his viewers contra-funds are poison. I’ve never seen anything like this outside of a racketerring investigation. Speaking of racketeering - Dennis Kucinich nailed it when he pinned that charge on Paulson and company back in November.

Our wall of worry continues to be a steep one. After yesterday’s failure we do not expect too much out of today, we’ll be happy to just see a bottom at this point but it’s looking a little more likely that we’re heading into a capitulation event that can take us down to frightening levels. The 60% line is a line the markets dare not cross but, as I pointed out yesterday, we already lost the SOX and the Nikkei, with the Hang Seng and the BSE hanging on by a thread. Let’s take these levels very seriously, if the administration can’t turn it around this week - the downward momentum can easily pick up steam.

I’ll spare you the details other than to say we DIDN’T turn it around that week and the downward momentum DID pick up steam. I was at war with Cramer at the time as he was blatantly ripping off my ideas and trying…

Tags: AIG, AMZN, BAC, CY, DIS, F, FAS, GE, GOOG, HCBK, IP, IWM, JPM, RKH, SKF, TGT, UNH, VNO, WFC, X

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Weekly Wrap-Up

by Phil - April 26th, 2009 4:22 pm

What a strange week.

Overall, it was a big, ugly "W": We began the week at about 8,100, fell to 7,800 Tuesday morning, rose to 8,050 on Wednesday (hump day), fell to 7,800 again on Thursday and then back to 8,100 on Friday. In summary - NOTHING HAPPENED! We have that gap to fill on Monday around 8,000 (last Monday’s gap down open) and, unlike this past week, next week is going to be chock-full of scary data points including Consumer Confidence and Case/Shiller Home Prices on Tuesday, GDP and the Fed on Wednesday, Jobless Claims and Personal Income and Spending along with the Chicago PMI on Thursday and Friday is still busy with Michigan Sentiment, Factory Orders, ISM and Auto Sales for April.

It’s going to be fun, fun, fun next week as another 25% of the S&P 500 are set to report and early on, we’ll be keeping our eyes on the following:

Monday: BEAV, CHKP, GLW, ENR, HUM, LO, ONB, QCOM, SII, TZOO, VZ & WHR. Evening: AXS, BIDU, FNF, FADV, HLTF, HXL, MAS, MTH, OLN, RCII, SWN, TUES, UHS, WRE, WRI and XL
Tuesday: AG, AMFI, AMED, AM, BDX, BMS, BMY, BCO, CRDN, CCE, CVH, ELNK, FMD, BEN, FDP, HCP, HL, KELYA, LAZ, LCAV, LVLT, MHP, NWPX, ODP, OXPS, ORB, PCAR, MALL, PCZ, PFE, SMG, SBNY, SPAR, STFC, TLAB, X, UA, VLO and WAT. Evening: ACE, BLDP, BWLD, CRI, ETFC, FIS, HTZ, MEE, NAL, PNRA, PRAA, RFMD, SUNH, JAVA and VFC.

So plenty to keep us busy but earnings last week were way better than expected overall and guidance was not too depressing so we’ll have to see what kind of follow-through we can now get on that and if there is any gas left in the market to finally punch through that 8,200 mark or if we are still doomed to correct back to 7,632 in the very least.

As I mentioned in last week’s wrap-up, we called it right by entering the weekend 55% bearish despite the fabulous stick save of Friday the 16th. In fact, I should have gone with my gut at 3:43 that day when I said to members: "DIA - 1/2 cover into the close it is then. I wanted to go more bearish but the levels won’t let me!" Thank goodness we stay bearish though because, as you can see from the chart above, there was no time to adjust on Monday morning as we gapped down almost 200 points in…

Tags: AAPL, DIA, FAS, FAZ, FSLR, GOOG, HCBK, HOV, OIH, QID, UAUA

Posted in Immediately available to public, Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

Phil's Favorites

The Boredom Before the Storm (Time to Buy Volatility)

March 20th, 2010 1:08 am

John's thoughts on the relentless trend higher in stocks, with the languishing VIX.

The Boredom Before the Storm (Time to Buy Volatility)

Courtesy of John Rubino at Dollar Collapse

As eventful as the past few months have been (what with Greece, California, Illinois, Iran, the Lehman Brothers revelations, U.S./China trade friction, and record deficits just about everywhere), you’d think the financial markets would be agitated, to put it mildly. Instead, just about everything is range-bound, and the things that aren’t, like U.S. stocks, are trending slowly, reassuringly, higher. This has taken the VIX, the main measure of fear (i.e. volatility) in the options market down to levels last seen before the ...

Zero Hedge

Armstrong Economics: Entering Phase II of The Debt Crisis

March 20th, 2010 5:48 am

Courtesy of Chopshop

In succinct synopsis of what lays just over the horizon ~ "the cycle of economic implosion" ~ for the ill-conceived amalgam known *today* as the European Union, phinance's phavorite political prisoner, Martin Armstrong, cautions that:

- "the EU is in dire position", on the precipice of shattering into default and civil unrest;

- the sovereign debt crisis materializing across Europe will soon reach US shores;

- the CFTC will curtail currency speculation by slashing leverage from 100:1 to 10:1, which "can cause a liquidity crisis that backfires, magnifying everything."

Since "debts will never be paid and interest expenditures are the greatest transfer of wealth ...

Chart School

Quad Witching Expiration and a Pullback from the Long Term Trend

March 19th, 2010 12:05 pm

Quad Witching Expiration and a Pullback from the Long Term Trend

Courtesy of JESSE'S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN

The front month on the SP futures has now switched from March to June as a part of the Quad Witching Expiration. (Technically it switched last week, but for charting purposes I made the switch last night.) The June Futures have essentially the same formations as did March, it's just that the earlier months have few trades to mark them. This is the first serious test for US equities since mid-February, as it has been on a spectacular rally streak, no doubt fueled by excess liquidity applied to a selling exhaustion in the funds. Curiously not among corporate...

Trading Goddess

Options and My Patience Expire Today

March 19th, 2010 9:29am

Well now we're officially cashed out!

As I always do before options expiration I reviewed our Buy List, which, this quarter, is a list of 37 stocks we've been playing since late December and, sadly, after reviewing 37 of our favorite investments very carefully this week - I could only conclude that cashing them out was the only decision I could be comfortable with this week. Of 66 trades we had on our 37 stocks, 64 are winners with an average return since 2/8 of 28% - since most of the trades were designed to make 40% for the year - it just seems silly not to take the money and run now, on March 19th.

You are not supposed to have 64 out of 66 winners in 6 weeks, you are not supposed to make 3/4 of what you anticipate for the year in 6 weeks - that is NOT how the markets are supposed to work! When the ma...

Oxen Group Trades

The Oxen Report: Five Keys to Fundamental Day Trading

March 19th, 2010 11:05 am

Identifying the Fundamentals

Stocks move under the influence various factors that we can use to identify stocks that are likely to move 3-5% in a single day. Even t...

The Options Report

By Andrew Wilkinson

Best Buy Option Investors Condone Broker Upgrade in Bullish Action

March 19th, 2010 4:41 pm

Today’s tickers: BBY, DNDN, GLD, BAC, AET, BA & NBR

BBY - Best Buy Co., Inc. – Shares of the world’s largest electronics retailer rallied 2% to $41.25 during the trading session after receiving an upgrade to ‘buy’ from ‘neutral’ at Goldman Sachs Group where analysts increased BBY’s target share price to $47.00 from $44.00. Options traders employed a few different bullish tactics to position for continued upward movement in the price of the underlying stock through expiration in April. Plain-vanilla call buyers targeted the April $44 strike to purchase 5,100 calls for an average premium of $0.55 apiece. These investors stand ready to accrue profits if Best Buy’s share price increases 8% from the current value to exceed the effective breakeven point on the calls at $44.55 by expirati...

Insider Zone

Insiders: March to Exit

March 15th, 2010 6:49 pm

By Ilene

Let's take a look at Insider Buying and Selling over the last week or so. These are screen shots from Finviz - the significant buys against a green background first and significant sells against the pink background second. All the buys fit into my screen shot but the sells did not. Click here to see all the sells.

Note that the largest buy in the group, for KITD was at a price of 9.73 (KITD is currently at 11.54). The buy was part of an Equity Offering rather than an open market purchase. Tuzman Kaleil Isaza's (KITD's Chairman and Chief Exec. Officer) history of buys is http://www.insidercow.com/ more from Insider

OpTrader

Swing trading portfolio - week of March 15th 2010

March 15th, 2010 8:55 am

This post is for live trades and daily comments.

To learn more about the swing trading portfolio (strategy, membership etc.), please click here

- Optrader

...

more from OpTrader

March 2010
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8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
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About Phil:

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...

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About Ilene:

Ilene is editor and affiliate program coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site (blogroll, archives, more). Contact Ilene to learn about our affiliate and content sharing programs.

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