Wednesday Wheeeee – We Love it When a Plan Comes Together!
by Phil - January 11th, 2012 8:21 am
Once again, we're done with our day before you get up.
In my 5am note to Members, I said: "I see nothing in the news to justify this pre-market "recovery" and I hate to sound like a broken record but I like shorting oil (/CL) if we get below that $102 line with tight stops and the Dow (/YM) is right at 12,400, which is a great spot to short. RUT (/TF) is at 762 and below 760 (same as yesterday) will confirm a downturn but 12,400 is a great line so why wait?" By 6:26, I was able to follow it up with:
And wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! There go the Futures!
It's 7:07 and we're still going down, with oil at $101.24 (up $760 per contract) and the Dow at 12,340 (up $300 per contract) and, as Dennis said: "Good enough for steak and eggs for me!" Roro got up late but still caught the Dow at 6:16 and that was right on the nose for the oil drop as well as we hit it right on the nose this morning and now we're done and waiting for the next good set-up.
Of course we scale in and scale out of positions as there's no need to get greedy in the Futures, where a single remaining contract catching a $1 move down in oil (now $101.25 again) pays $1,000. This week, we have even stationed our own Craigzooka in New Zealand, where it's tomorrow – which makes it much easier to bet on today's action as he can tell us what happened already! Not that today was all that hard to predict, right? My comment to Members LAST Wednesday was:
It’s been a pretty reliable bet that they tank the markets into the longer-term note auctions because it scares people into T-Bills and keeps the rates low. From this line-up, it seems to me they intend to jack us up on Friday and then zap us on Tuesday as Esther George releases something hawkish ahead of the 3-year and it’s no coincidence that Plosser, by far the biggest Hawk, is given the floor at 12:30 on Wednesday – just 30 minutes before the critical 10-year auction. Coincidence? Surely you cannot be that naive!
So that's how we've been playing the past 7 days and it culminated in pressing our…
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DiggTurnaround Tuesday – Greece is Fixed (again)
by Phil - September 20th, 2011 8:28 am
Yay! Another crisis averted.
Well until next quarter, at least, when we can begin the "crisis" cycle all over again. As it stands, after much hand wringing yesterday, Greece will get the $11Bn they need to fund their nation for another 3 months. Yes, as I noted yesterday, this is not a typo – Greece needed $11Bn and the global markets gave up $1Tn in value because we weren’t sure if they were going to get it on Monday morning.
To meet their budget goals in a declining economy, Greece is being pressure to cut 100,000 public jobs by 2015. With just 11M people in Greece, cutting 100,000 jobs is like asking the US Government to cut 3M jobs – isn’t that insane? And by insane, of course, I mean – isn’t that the Republican platform? Yes, nothing say "economic recovery" like firing 3M people in this topsy-turvry World.
We expected this, of course, and we got very bullish with our picks yesterday morning and were handsomely rewarded into the close and hope to be even more handsomely rewarded this morning as QE FEVER once again takes over the nation (see November’s "POMO Fever" article to review the scam).
Interestingly, my main suggestion for playing QE2 last year was: "We can bet on inflation with our gold plays with potentials for 923%, 309%, 3,900%, 567%, 276% and 46%." Gold was "only" $1,300 last November and I was still enthusiastic about it at the time. Yesterday we shorted it with the GLD Nov $180/174 bear put spread at $3.30, selling $193 calls for $3 for a net .30 trade that bets gold won’t hold $2,000 through Thanksgiving.
Also different this year is that we are betting against TLT (also in yesterday’s main post) and we got fabulous prices for our short play yesterday as TLT ran all the way up to our goal at $115. As we got a nice sell-off at the open, my morning Alert to Members had trade ideas to go long on Oil Futures (/CL) off the $85 line (now $87, up $2,000 per contract) and we sold some DIA Oct $111 puts for $3.10 in the Income Portfolio, which are already down to $2.70 (up 13%) – simply following our rule of ALWAYS selling into the initial excitement.
At 10:08 we got aggressive with a TNA Oct $41/45 bull call spread at $2,…
Whipsaw Wednesday – What Us Worry?
by Phil - September 7th, 2011 8:25 am
That was easy!
Only 3 days of panic and we’re back to manic already – I’d say that was a record but our last panic only lasted two days, on August 18th and 19th, when we dropped 600 points before bouncing back 800 points the next week so this last 3-day, 600-point drop was gentle by comparison. That, of course, did not stop the usual round of Doomcasters from declaring the end of the World (especially the European section) as we know it but that was all so yesterday morning and now it’s 24 hours later and the Dow is up 300 from that bottom in the pre-markets.
Pre-market yesterday we were bullish but cautious, going long on Dow (/YM) futures at 11,000 (now 11,227 – up $1,135 per contract) and Russell (/TF) Futures at 666 (now 688, up $2,200 per contract) and our bullish EWG spread from the morning post should be going gangbusters already as the DAX pops 3% this morning!
We also laid out new hedge ideas on EDZ and GLD but the point of those was, wisely, to take the money and run on our old hedges as they bottomed out in the morning (max profit), trading in our well-ridden horses for fresh ones that have more time to expiration and lower deltas to snap back on a bounce is all part of our range-trading strategy – we may need those hedges again, just not now….
By the time the market opened, things looked too good not to play bullish and we ended up picking 19 bullish plays in yesterday’s Member Chat with not one bearish one. My comment to Members in the 9:44 Alert, where we took a very aggressive upside play on the Dow was: "Damn, and I said I wasn’t going to get too bullish. Oh well, what can you do?" As I have been pointing out in our Range Trading posts – sometimes you just have to go with the flow…
Just 18 minutes later, I put up 6 long-term trade ideas on CAT, DIS, HOV, JPM, SKX and T as we took advantage of low prices, a probable bottom and a high VIX. The nice thing about our buy/writes is that they have a built-in 20% discount (see "How to Buy a Stock for a 15-20% Discount") and can usually be scaled in to ride…
$25,000 Virtual Portfolio – Week 21 – Goaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!!!
by Phil - July 2nd, 2011 6:39 am
We are over our $50,000 mark and right on schedule at the halfway mark! Not bad considering we began with our aggressive $10,000 virtual portfolio last year, which we ran up to $36,630 – put that $11,630 back in the virtual bank and began this year in February with a $25,000 Virtual Portfolio.
The last major update to our virtual portfolio was back on May 21st. We do send out Alert updates on a regular basis and discuss the trade ideas daily in Member Chat. Now we can start July off with a clean $50,000 Virtual Portfolio with the same goal – to double up in 6 months but sticking to the same small allocation hit and run trade ideas that we used (mostly) in the first half. I urge you to read the original post and the update if you haven’t already to get an idea of what we are trying to learn by following this "hyper-aggressive" virtual portfolio model.
As promised, it has certainly been a wild ride and our last Alert Update from June 23rd left us off with $95,072 worth of closed transaction and a virtual net balance of $45,972, with about $49,000 worth of unrealized losses in our still-open positions.
Getting that close to goal with a week to go put us in shut-down mode and we didn’t do too much trading last week but we did close the following transactions, which amounted to mainly closing out all of our losing trades for the year, charging them off against our $95,072 worth of winners that we already cashed out. Our goal was to get those losses under $45,000, so that we’d be left with $50,000 cash: …
Technical Tuesday – Twelve Thousand Two Hundred or Bust!
by Phil - June 7th, 2011 8:11 am
Our winning streak continues!
With 335M barrels of oil still on fake order at the NYMEX, yesterday’s early morning short play at $100.60 gave us a ride back to $99 and that was good for as much as $536M pre-market. In the morning post, I said "hopefully we’ll get another crack at shorting oil at $100 or higher" and we did – right at the open – and that was good for a ride back to $99 for another $335M of potential gains (just following through with last Thursday’s plan to break the NYMEX speculators).
We took the money and ran on those USO June $40 puts at $1.40 (up 22%) in Member Chat at 10:53 but the next rebound in oil didn’t quite get to $100 ($99.88) and we missed the run down to $98.50, which is where it’s sitting this morning.
Of course, we don’t only short oil… In my 9:58 Alert to Members I, of course, reminded them that oil was at $100 and shortable again but we also grabbed the QQQ weekly $56 puts for .33 and those finished the day at .55 for a 66.6% gain (the mark of the Blankfein), which is not bad for 6 hour’s work (or so I am told). We also had a more complicated spread with DDM offsetting SPY as a sort of arbitrage on two spreads.
Thanks to David Ristau’s guest appearance in Member Chat pre-market, where he mentioned he was jumping on our short oil bandwagon, we selected HAL for a short trade in Member Chat at 10:10 along with our planned PCLN short play (mentioned pre-market in the morning post) and both of those were, of course, huge winners already so thanks for HAL David!
It wasn’t ALL bearish, we went long on XLF as it hit $14.90 with some short put sales along with a very long-term bull play on HOV but we took a loss bottom-fishing on IWM as the June $79 calls stopped us out after falling from $2.07 to $1.95 (down 5.8%) but we had to try something long to get a little balance or risk being too bearish. Our bullish sentiment didn’t last long though and we decided to short the Nasdaq futures at the 2,300 line at 11:42, those gave us a spectacular run down…
Thoughtful Thursday – The True Meaning of Christmas
by Phil - December 23rd, 2010 8:19 am
Why it’s almost Christmas Eve, Mr. Scrooge!
The Global markets are closing for the weekend and we’re bound to have a very slow day – if you are waiting for a Santa Clause rally on today’s trading, you are very likely to be disappointed. Today is a day for relaxation and reflection. Remember, the words of Jacob Marley, who said:
Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!
Marley was a man who worked and worked until the day he died and regretted it every day after. If you don’t believe in an afterlife and you don’t believe in leaving behind the World a better place than you found it, at least find some time for yourself so people don’t call you "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner" after you’re gone.
I was inspired this morning by a post on Barry’s site titled "Give and You Will Receive" listing 13 good ways we can all give every day. ’Tis the season of giving and goodwill to all man and all that and my children just completed their annual ritual of wrapping up all the toys they are done with to give to children who need them more than they do. It’s a little thing, but if you want your kids to learn the benefits of charity, actually parting with things they like or liked and physically giving them to kids who clearly appreciate it is much more gratifying than writing a check to some anonymous organization. The same goes for volunteering some time (and money!) at a local shelter and helping some people come in from the cold for a nice, warm meal – it makes you appreciate your family dinner a LOT more!
Anyway, end of commercial. Let’s just see who’s being naughty and who’s being nice this morning. We have quite a bit of data today with November Durable Goods at 8:30 (which have been tailing off) along with Personal Income and Spending. 2010 has NOT been an exciting year so far with monthly gains of about 0.4% but, on the bright side, there were only small negative months but this report only covers November and will not…
World of Worry Wednesday – The China Syndrome
by Phil - November 17th, 2010 7:52 am
Strap in kids, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
Nomura Holdings joined Goldman Sachs in advising investors to cash out of China and that sent the Hang Seng down 478 points for the day (2%) along with another 2% loss on the Shanghai. “The likelihood of a re-introduction of price controls on food is growing,” Nomura’s Sean Darby said in a report today. “The recent run-up in agriculture prices worldwide and signs of hoarding appear to have pushed the authorities to reconsider draconian measures.” Premier Wen Jiabao confirmed on state television that the cabinet is drafting measures to counter overly rapid price gains. “Command style economic principles generally mean much lower multiples over time on the sector and stocks,” said Darby.
The US has it’s own "command style" economy with B-B-B-Bennie and the Fed commanding our inflation to go higher while China is trying to get their 4.4% inflation under control. The joke is, like Sidney Poitier and and Tony Curtis, our economies are shackled together through the Yuan peg as well as our codependent trading relationship. That has the World’s #1 (falling) and #2 (rising) economies engaged in a Global tug of war that threatens to tear the rest of the World to pieces and it’s just getting worse every day.
With the US pushing top-down QE2 inflation and China’s Premier calling for consumer price controls on food (and soon fuel too as a severe winter is forecast for China) it’s not surprising that Carlsberg’s Chongquing Brewery Company fell limit down (10%) on the Shanghai this morning along with several other food and beverage distributors. Copper, sugar and rubber also went limit-down in China with copper dropping all the way to $3.60 (down 10% in a week) into China’s close at 3am.
Meanwhile Bernanke is like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Given the magic hat – he commands his broom army to fetch buckets of dollars to inflate the economy the easy way but his lazy solution quickly turns into disaster as the waters start rising and he finds he has no way to stem the rising tide of inflation. Already, the rest of the world is drowning and not many have China’s ability to bail themselves out. This is not likely to end well…
Europe (who are caught in the middle) is already under tremendous strain with Matt…
Trade War Tuesday – China, Japan and US at Odds
by Phil - September 28th, 2010 8:20 am
War does not determine who is right, only who is left. – Bertrand Russell
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Japan and China are at it again. We discussed the "fishing’ incident last week and Japan has released the Chinese captain who rammed one of their Coast Guard vessels. Now shippers in several Chinese cities said customs officers have stepped up spot inspections of goods being loaded onto ships bound for Japan and being imported from the country. Traders said officers in some cases were taking the highly unusual step of looking at every item in a container instead of following normal practice of examining a small sample. The heavy searches, which can add costly delays to shipments. For it’s part, Tokyo wants China to pay restitution and now China’s navy is moving into disputed waters.
China is fighting a trade war on two fronts as they are threatening to retaliate against US businesses operating in China if Congress passes legislation intended to force a revaluation of the Yuan. The House of Representatives is set to consider legislation this week that would let companies petition for higher duties on imports from China to compensate for the effects of a weak yuan. Forcing China to raise the value of its currency may create 500,000 jobs in the U.S., most in manufacturing at above-average wages, according to C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. China’s currency, which is undervalued by as much as 25 percent, is the most important trade issue facing the U.S., he said in testimony last week.
So we are pressuring China to strengthen their currency, which would make our currency relatively weaker. One would think the dollar couldn’t get much weaker than it is now (see Dave Fry’s chart). We’ve been shorting GLD (buying GLL) and TLT, expecting a dollar bounce off these levels but if we fail here – we’re going to have one very ugly chart.
Of course a 10% drop on the dollar could be just the ticket for the markets – since our stocks are priced in dollars. That makes them look pretty good compared to cash that’s sitting on the sidelines (or tied up in notes) that’s lost over 10% of it’s buying power since June.
That’s right, JUNE! As people who travel to…
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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...
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