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:…
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Digg$112,291 Virtual Portfolio Update, Week 16
by Phil - August 8th, 2009 8:23 am
Next week will be the last week for our very profitable virtual portfolio, that started with $100,000 on April 10th.
This virtual portfolio has already made 19% in 16 weeks and many members wanted to start a new one from scratch. So, by popular demand, we will be restarting a brand new virtual portfolio the week after options expiration, also with $100,000 and also a hedged virtual portfolio but this time with the goal of drawing a monthly income. I got this idea when I went down to Florida last week and spoke to many people who asked me about their investing accounts. Many of these "safe" accounts had been cut in half or worse and the returns they were producing were coming in at 5% year – if that and people were counting on this money for their monthly expenses. I spoke to many people with $1M in the bank who were living off $50,000 a year in interest and dividends!
Using options and good hedging strategies, we have been able to produce a return in our virtual portfolio of 19% in just 16 weeks (12% cash, 7% unrealized). I’m not advocating someone take a whole $1M and shift it to stocks and options but, if you can make 20% on $200,000 while your other $800,000 makes a "safe" 5%, your annual income goes from $50,000 to $80,000 – that’s a lot of early-bird specials! I will, of course, be happy to answer any adjustment questions on this virtual portfolio anytime during chat but we will no longer be tracking it weekly or making new plays. The goals of the new virtual portfolio will be similar and the new trade ideas can be applied whether you are looking to draw an income or just start building long-term set of holdings for reinvestment.
In the last $112,007 Virtual Portfolio Update, from July 28th, we remained bullish and it really paid off with another $2,117 in unrealized gains ($6,690 not included in above total) as we made a very well-timed bottom call the week before and ran with it. We have haven’t had to call an "audible" in two weeks, sticking to our plan as the market held up nicely.
The first few weeks after you sell options are usually the worst and the rising VIX had boosted the premiums of the puts and calls we sold but none of that matters because we played a little more aggressive to the upside and, despite losing…
Weekend Wrap-Up, Ripping Through the Top or Topping and About to Tip?
by Phil - July 25th, 2009 12:34 pm
What a week this has been!
In last week’s 600-Point Weekly Wrap-UP, I said it would take some spectacular earnings results next week to keep the rally going and it seems like we got them this week as roughly 85% of the companies reporting this week beat expectations with 42 of this week’s reporting companies guiding up and only 18 guiding down. While people like Richard Bernstein may make very good arguments for why we shouldn’t focus too much on quarterly earnings surprises, I have to say I am somewhat swayed by the preponderance of evidence we’ve gotten this week that, by and large, the vast majority of our companies are weathering the storm far better than analysts have expected.
"It’s pretty amazing what passes for good news these days," remarks Barry Ritholtz on his blog, The Big Picture (www.ritholtz.com.) "Beating dramatically lowered earnings forecasts on cost-cutting and layoffs — rather than top-line growth — seems to be the order of the day. The irony is that the Wall Street analyst community overestimated earnings at the top of the cycle — pure extrapolation of trend to infinity. They seem to be doing the same thing now, only extrapolating falling earnings to zero. What that produces is not true upside surprises, but merely jumping over a dramatically lowered bar," he says.
It’s interesting Barry says this now because it sounded familiar and I went back to my May 2nd Weekly Wrap-Up, where the sentiment was very similar and I said at the time: "With 2/3 of the S&P 500 weighing in, earnings have been 70% positive. I had warned earlier in the week that we are only beating a very low bar but we are beating nonetheless. As you can see from the above chart, even if we do keep moving up, we are heading into some very serious overhead resistance that may not prove futile this time. With the added pressure of the old "sell in May, go away" adage – there will be a lot of obstacles to overcome this week and next so we will remain on guard but we have also trained ourselves not to think and simply go with the flow, letting our levels guide us and, so far, our levels keep saying yes – despite our common sense saying no."
More importantly, with…
Wild Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - May 31st, 2009 8:29 am
What a wild week that was!
We got such a good sell-off last Friday that we went 1/2 covered into the weekend on our DIA puts (a little bearish) but we had already cleaned up on quick short plays on the Dow and USO and we were very much in cash but still making bullish plays at the time. I did a 3-part series on dividend-paying stocks over the weekend, elaborating on the 21 dividend payers we picked that Tuesday along with our $104,340 Virtual Portfolio (used to be $100,000) so we had no shortage of bullish ideas but it didn’t take us long this week to turn pretty bearish.
Last Friday morning (22nd), ahead of the holiday weekend, with the Dow at 8,323, I sent out an early alert to members saying: "I’d go long on the Dow here but frankly I’m just not in the mood today. Still full covered on long DIA puts and still in the DDMs but just hanging out and watching today since you can’t take the action seriously anyway." Our plays that day ran the gamut: We sold BAC July $10 puts for $1 (now .66), took a TBT spread that has been a wild ride but right back where we started and an ICE bull call spread ($90/$100, selling $90 puts $2.33, now .57) that is right on track. All that came before 11:33 on Friday, where I rightly called a top at 8,342. We made nice profits on DIA puts and took an EXM and T hedges that are doing well. One of our best plays on Friday was the USO $32 puts at .80 we took into the weekend, those cashed out Monday morning at $1.05 (up 44%) – those USO trades were followed through in detail in our Members Only post: "Stupid Options Tricks - The Salvage Play."
As I mentioned, we have been mainly in cash for over 2 weeks now so mainly we’re just taking small opportunities and having fun while we wait for the market to break one way or the other. One article I wrote over the holiday weekend was a timely update to "How To Vacation-Proof Your Virtual Portfolio," something anyone not in cash needs to take under strong advisement and DO NOT miss the very generous free video lesson from Sage’s Market Tamers that is on that post. Our…
Hedging Your Way To Healthy Dividends – Part 3
by Phil - May 25th, 2009 5:56 pm
We’re going to go out with a bang here and give you a 3-for-1 in this final post on the issue.
In Part 1, we discussed the idea of going after former dividend payers who may bounce back while creating an artifical dividend through option hedging. In Part 2 we looked at using the buy/write strategy to give ourselves a nice discount on the stock, giving us a 30% hedge on the stock on top of the dividends. Today we will look at a couple of ways to play the safer bets and how to simply and effectively boost your dividend yield while also protecting your investment.
In Tuesday’s post we had 21 dividend payers divided into 3 categories. We’ll look at what we consider a "pretty safe" dividend payer, PGH, who pay a MONTHLY dividend of about 8 cents on a $8.11 stock (12%) as well as our long-time favorite, KMP who pay about $1 per quarter and our Blue-Chip selection will be CAT, who have a 4.9% dividend and are trading at a nice, cheap $34.31.
As we have 3 trades here I’m not going to go too heavily into the merits of each one. Suffice to say we like them at these prices and we like the option hedges we can put to work on the postions…
PGH is a stock we went crazy for back in March, when they were under $5 but that was when they were in the category of stocks where people felt the dividend was in jeopardy. It didn’t take much for them to fly back to $8.11 but, through the magic of hedging, we can knock that price back to an entry price of $5.29 by selling the Jan $7.50 puts and calls. As always, our major risk is that the stock falls below $7.50 and another round of shares are put to us at that price on Jan 15th. That would create an average entry of $6.40, which is 21% below the current price. Should we get called away as $7.50, that would be a $2.21 gain on cash so 42% PLUS 7 months worth of dividends, perhaps another .56.
Sticking with our $5,000 per position maximum risk, we can make the play the following way:
- Buying 400 Shares at $8.11 ($3,244)
- Selling 4 Jan $7.50 calls for $1.50 and 4 Jan $7.50 puts for $1.32, netting $2.82 ($1,128)
- If the stock is
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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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