Merry Christmas Eve
by Phil - December 24th, 2009 8:28 am
First of all, what are you doing here?
Why it’s Christmas Eve, Mr. Scrooge - Most global markets are having a half day so, if you are waiting for a Santa Clause rally on a half-day’s trading, you are very likely to be disappointed.
Remember Marley, who cried: "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!"
Those covetous old sinners in Congress passed the Health Care Bill in the Senate today with a 60-39 vote (Republican Jim Bunning did not vote against the bill but was too chicken to actually vote for it) so we can pretty much count on it moving through the House and on to Obama’s desk in the very near future. While it’s a total botch-job of a bill, at least America has taken the first civilized strep to recognizing that health care is a right and not a privilege - Tiny Tim would be very proud!
We were told by Fox that Health Care reform would destroy the universe but the market has taken the December passage of the bill very much in stride so maybe we should have just gone for it with Universal Health Care after all… Oh well, maybe next year! Meanwhile, we’ll be looking for good investing opportunities once we get a handle on the final bill but I still favor the device space (IHI, MDT, BSX, JNJ, GE, ISRG) as well as big pharma (MRK, PFE), who will be able to serve tens of millions of new customers. Hospitals (UHS, THC) should also start filling up and we always like our CELG as well as AMGN, who should also benefit from adding a population the size of England to the health care rolls right here in the USA. I’m waiting for the final bill but home health care providers (AMED, ADUS, GTIV) also look like winners so lots of fun investing opportunities in one of the fastest growing markets on…
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Which Way Wednesday - The Beige Book Boogie
by Phil - October 21st, 2009 8:14 am
The last Beige Book report was on September 9th.
At the time the Dow was looking toppy at 9,650 and we had poor consumer confidence numbers (just like yesterday) and poor consumer credit number (no change) and the book had very little "good" news to report (see my analysis) - Yet the market broke over 9,600 again that day and then took off all the way to 9,900 a week later. At the time, we were looking for any excuse to go higher on the hopes that this earnings period will look like last one but have we now come too far, too fast?
It seems we are finally hitting the point of diminishing returns for earnings. Expectations have finally gotten so high that even big beats aren’t enough to keep the momentum going.
Last earnings Q, we were down from 8,900 in June to 8,100 on July 9th as companies began reporting and we had a nice, 1,000-point relief rally over the first two weeks of earnings. This time, we went up an additional 500 points in the past two weeks, over our 9,600 line and that has been in anticipation of a repeat of last earnings but the circumstances are very different this time and it takes a lot to justify a 20% run off the July lows.
Keep in mind that, looking at the sector charts, Energy, Materials and Tech are leading us. Since semiconductors are simply another form of commodity - this is almost entirely a commodity rally in the midst of a recession with Consumer Staples, Financials, Health Care, Industrials, Telcom, Utilities and Transports all underperforming the rest of the S&P. As I keep saying - if no one is shipping anything, how the hell can we be having a proper recovery?
The Beige book is an anecdotal view of the economy gathered roughly through the middle of October and we’ve seen no improvement in Jobs since the Sept 9th report, Cash for Clunkers ground to a halt and, just this morning, we got a horrific 13.7% decrease in the number of mortgage applications from the previous week. That number includes "seasonal adjustments," without adjustments, morgage apps plunged 22.4% despite record low rates as government assistance begins to peter out. The Refinance Index, also adjusted for the holiday, decreased 16.8 percent from the previous week and the seasonally adjusted Purchase Index decreased 7.6 percent from one week earlier. The unadjusted Purchase Index decreased 16.7 percent compared with the…
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Wild Weekly Wrap-Up - August in Retrospect
by Phil - August 29th, 2009 8:28 am
It has been a crazy few weeks!
I went back over our Long Shots list from August 9th, thinking all our picks must be doing great but really only C, with a 67% gain, is really outperforming. Long spreads on UYG and BHI are on target for nice gains but haven’t moved much. Looking at our original picks in Pharmboys Phavorites from the same week, GSK is on track and up nicely already, our AZN cover is up 45% and MRK flew up 19% already. On the riskier Biotech side, ARIA’s stock is up 16% and our spreads are all performing well, ONTY has been flat, OGXI is up 33% and the Jan $17.50s are up a rockin’ 63% with that "cautious" spread up a surprising 75% already.
SPPI had a wild ride (as we predicted with TSCM’s failed assassination attempt) and the buy/write is already up 24%, the Feb vertical is up 50% and the naked Jan put sale is up 27% and our Feb hedge play is right on track so all good there and a fine example of how following Cramer and his lackeys and and doing the opposite of what they say can be very profitable! Congrats to Pharmboy for a very fine set of picks, proving once again that there is room for research and fundamentals - not a single loser in the bunch in a choppy market! It was very timely as I had mentioned just that week in my interview with AOL Finance that XLV was my favorite sector and our IHI pick of 8/10 is up 28% on the naked Feb $45 put sale while the Feb $45 calls have already jumped 16%. It was a great call as IHI outperformed XLV and all our major indexes.
So our energy service pick (BHI) and overall financial pick (UYG) have not done much in 3 weeks and those were our leading sectors into my call to cash out our exposed long calls on Aug 13th, ahead of expirations. The Dow was at 9,400 on that day and now, a bit more than 2 weeks later, we’ve gained another 144 points but to listen to the MSM, you would think you are missing the rally of the century the past couple of weeks. This is one of the reasons I’ve gotten a bit more cynical about the rally - there is so much hype and so little actual progress, something must be wrong.
Back on Thursday, Aug 6th,…
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Turning Up Tuesday - Can We Hold It?
by Phil - July 14th, 2009 8:18 am
I WAS really excited about yesterday’s rally.
Meredith Whitney gave us the catalyst for the bear squeeze we expected But THEN I saw Cramer last night. Nothing scares me more than watching Cramer’s bandwagon do a 180 degree turn and head my way as he’s been wrong and wrong and wrong and then wrong for months now. Still, I’m going to try to ignore that noise and keep a level head, dealing with facts rather than fads to figure out which way thing will be going. We were happily buying last week while Cramer was herding his sheeple out of the market and we’ll be enjoying the free ride as he stampedes the masses back in, especially during expiration week but we’d rather see some honest, uptrending consolidation based on earnings than going back to early May’s roller coaster model that hurt so many investors on both sides.
We are, of course, thrilled with the move so far, as you can see from the new buy list that I put up over the weekend. We cashed in our FXPs right at the top and went long on the DIA $83 calls at .40 as our 2nd trade of the day (the first was a long on GOOG into earnings). Those calls finished at $1 (up 150% and we are done, of course) and we also went long on GLD while it was still low in our 10:31 Alert and I put up a hedged play on TNK but that was it. We did all our buying last week, when things were cheap and we just spent the rest of the day waiting to see if we would make our target levels.
As I said in yesterday’s morning post, we were looking for 1,750 to hold on the Nasdaq as our primary indicator that we were going to hold our 33% pullback levels on the broader index so it’s not really rocket science to see where that DIA trade came from as we timed it for right when the Nasdaq crossed back over the line after the morning dip. Having a trading premise is always helpful and, in the 9:32 level watch to Members I had said: "Without $60 oil the best we can really hope for today is to claw back to our middle set of figures. Earnings can take us up over the higher numbers as the market rotates out of commodities (if they see that other stocks look "safe"). So that’s the outlook…
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Just Another Manic Monday
by Phil - May 18th, 2009 7:22 am
I went away this weekend and didn’t do much reading.
Traveling and speaking to actual people every so often is a good thing when you are looking for perspective. As I’m often introduced by friends to new people as "Phil the stock guy," I tend to get into a lot of interesting conversations about people’s jobs, the economy, their investments (including their homes), outlook… etc.. It’s kind of like being a doctor, where everyone wants to tell your their medical status as soon as they meet you. This is a good thing actually, as I love to get "real" information to offset the mountains of anonymous statistical data that we usually have to wade through.
I was down in DC, where most people still have jobs and retired people have insanely generous government pensions so I wouldn’t call them typical but there is a lot of optimism that things are really getting better and will continue to do so this year. On the way down there, I was reading a horrific article in the NY Times on the foreclosure rates in our region so I was in a pretty bad mood when I got to our nation’s capital but I was very impressed with the "can do" attitude of my political pals, who couldn’t hang out on Sunday because they had to work. I haven’t seen government employees work on a weekend since just after 9/11 but I will tell you that people in DC are busting their butts to get things done with a motivation I haven’t seen since Clinton took office.
Whether it will be "Yes they can" or "No, they are deluded" remains to be seen. Barry Rhitholtz did a nice, negative overview of the NYTimes article so I won’t go into it here and the map below is really horrific but an optimist would say that 98% of the people still have their homes and, even if the worst is not over, it’s certainly not as bad as the doom and gloom crowd is painting it. In the Great Depression, 25% of the people lost their jobs and, in 1934, nearly 1/2 of all US urban home mortgages were delinquent as US personal income dropped 44% over 5 years. THAT’S A DEPRESSION. The only reason the talking heads on TV can get away with using the "D" word so often is that we, as a nation of viewers, are such poor students of…
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Uranium company sees calendar call spread
by Andrew Wilkinson - April 20th, 2009 5:05 pm
Today’s tickers: CCJ, BAX, XHB, T, VIX, PCP, PG, JNJ, HIG & USO
CCJ Cameco Corporation – The producer of commercial-use uranium to fuel nuclear power plants has experienced a share price decline of about 4.5% to $17.08. According to one news source, uranium-oxide concentrate for immediate delivery rose 2.5% or $1, to $41.50 per pound last week, although uranium spot prices have declined by more than 26% since December 1, 2008. Additionally, trading last week jumped to more than 4.3 million pounds up from just 2.2 million pounds in the first three months of the year. CCJ edged onto our ‘hot by option volume’ market scanner after one investor initiated a calendar spread. Perhaps with revived demand for uranium and trading volume for the commodity on the rise, this investor is hoping that CCJ’s share price will receive a boost in the next six months. The trader purchased 7,500 calls at the September 22.5 strike price for an average premium of 52 cents per contract. The long call position was funded by the sale of 7,500 calls at the January 2010 22.5 strike price for 1.15 apiece. The investor receives a credit of 63 cents on the trade and is hoping shares rally through $22.50 by expiration as he would then be able to exercise the call options and take delivery of the underlying shares. The fact that the sooner-to-expiration September calls have a higher gamma means that its premium will rise faster for a given rally in the underlying share price. On the flip side, the investor could see the credit pocketed today erode if the calls fail to land in-the-money by expiration in September. We’re unsure what the investor will do with this strategy should shares rally but not far enough to allow September exercise – an event that would leave him short of calls after expiration.
BAX Baxter International, Inc. – Shares have dipped by about 1.5% to $50.95 for BAX, a company that develops, manufactures, and markets products that aid persons with hemophilia, immune disorders, infectious diseases and other chronic and acute medical conditions. A complex combination trade took place that grabbed our attention, but the trade is likely marked inaccurately on the exchange. The trade shows the sale of twice as many calls purchased, which makes little sense and so we’ll describe the way we think the trade went. Using the May contract an investor possibly initiated…
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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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