Thrilling Thursday – The Luck of the Irish
by Phil - November 18th, 2010 8:03 am
Yawn!
Yes, YAWN I say to a 1% bounce! I mean REALLY people, have we taught you nothing following our 5% Rule? This is a very basic part of it, you get a 20% reversal off of 5% moves and that is called a WEAK BOUNCE. Don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules… Oh wait, actually I did make this one. Anyway, don’t blame me, this is just a rule based on how the system works so let’s not get too excited about what basically amounts to physics.
It could have been Ireland (which we were expecting) or it could have been JPM bashing the dollar (they did) or it could have been Buffett saying "All is well" in the NYTimes (gotta get the liberal into the market too!) – it could have been anything but SOMETHING was going to give us a dead cat bounce.
Note the Nov 2nd levels on the chart. Here, if it helps I’ll do an impression of a TV analyst: "It is truly amazing to see how resilient our markets are making such a strong recovery and we project…" Oh, excuse me, I made myself sick… Come on people, we’re back to our Nov 2nd highs (if that) and, if we pull back to the "year to date" view, the song "I’m Always Chasing Rainbows" springs to mind (the Alice Cooper version):
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So pretty, isn’t it? Maybe this time it will be different. I’m not saying we CAN’T go up – with the Fed pumping in cash at an annualized rate of $1.8Bn it would be pathetic if we DON’T go up but I am very skeptical until we do break over those April highs and hold them as a firm floor. I was skeptical about Monday’s bounce (from 11,200 on the Dow to 11,275 and from 1,200 on the S&P to 1,207) and that served us quite well so give me the benefit of the doubt on this one before you all go off chasing this rally. We have a weekend coming up (lots of things could go wrong) and then a short week into a holiday which just so happens to be the holiday after which we expected the market to fall off a cliff if it continues to follow April’s Beta 3 pattern (see Monday’s…
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DiggTempting Tuesday – Getting in the Zone
by Phil - November 16th, 2010 8:29 am
It’s hard to be in cash, isn’t it?
I’ve been calling for cash for weeks and now I’m starting to feel like Braveheart, trying to get anxious Members to hold, Hold, HOLD in chat every day as traders, by nature, like to trade and sitting in cash waiting for market certainty is pretty boring. Of course it’s a lot less boring than riding the market down all tied up in positions, isn’t it? As you can see from David Fry’s TLT chart, we did get it right when I called a top on Treasuries at $105 (Sept 24th) but it did take it a little while before it really began breaking down – better early than late in your market timing!
I was early with "October’s Overbought Eight" on the 3rd although, obviously, we had a few huge winners on our short-term plays as we caught that first dip on NFLX, PCLN, BIDU and FSLR while AMZN is looking good as is TLT (Dec $102 puts now $8.50 from net .35 entry, up 2,328% and done, of course). MOS, on the other hand, went up and up but is finally backing off it’s run. Dec $62.50 puts at $2.10 should do quite well if they fail to hold the $65 line.
CMG, on the other hand, has become our white whale, now up 27% from where we first looked at them. The original play was a ratio backspread of 4 March $190 calls at $10.75 ($4,300), selling 5 Nov $175 calls for $8.75 ($4,375) which was a net credit of $75 on the spread. The good news is the March $190 calls are now $51 ($20,400) but the very bad news is the Nov $175s are now $56 ($28,000). We have, of course adjusted this trade several times but it is still very painful to wait out.
An example of a simple adjustment on a trade like this is to roll the calls to 10 Jan $210 calls at $28 ($28,000) and rolling the March calls to 8 June $230 calls at $29 ($23,200) so an extra $2,800 put into the trade to buy a more manageable 6-month spread. When you do this, you have to keep in mind that your net entry has gone up from a $75 credit to a $2,725 debit and killing the trade now would cost $4,800 more so the…
Monday Market Movement – Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy!!
by Phil - November 15th, 2010 7:40 am
The Fed is in all-out attack mode this week with $35Bn scheduled for release in the next 5 days. If that doesn’t goose the markets, then I think we are screwed because people, $35Bn is A LOT of money for a week. It’s $1.82Tn a year at that pace or 12% of our entire GDP being created by the Fed to give you the illusion that all is well with the markets. So say, thank you Chairman Bernanke, for treating us like children who would rather be lied to than facing reality and making necessary choices.
Speaking of necessary choices, I HIGHLY recommend looking at Barry Ritholtz’s "Fix It Yourself" deficit kit. Barry takes the more complex (but also good) NY Times article and presents the very excellent chart that shows us exactly what budget cap needs to be filled and what the available choices are to fill it. It’s a great way to think about the budget and also it makes you realize that 5 or 6 reasonable people sitting down with this chart at a table should be able to knock this thing out in a weekend if we were living in a rational world or perhaps one where an out-of-control Central Bank cooperated with a deceitful Treasury Department to maintain a status quo that clearly is not working for the American people.
QE2 is not about "fixing" the economy, it’s about FIXING the profits of the Primary Dealers (Gang of 12) who are estimated to reap a $50Bn benefit by simply acting as the conduits through which the Fed distributes our money as if they were the town Santa tossing candy off the back of a fire truck.
POMO spending might keep equities up and that is good for those of us who own them but what is it doing for the great unwashed and unemployed masses? Speaking of unemployed, did you know that 100,000 of Octobers 156,000 jobs created were not actual jobs but a bookkeeping entry as the government changed the "seasonal adjustment" it made to payroll numbers? Our friend, John Maudlin, explained the shenanigans over the weekend:
"According to John Williams at Shadow Government Statistics, the BLS’ fiddling with the figures via what he calls ‘seasonal-factor games’ actually created 200,000 phantom jobs last month. John cites such finagling as the
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Thank GDP It’s Friday – Finally Some Facts
by Phil - October 29th, 2010 8:29 am
Is bad news going to be good news?
Last quarter, after several adjustments, it has been decided that our GDP grew at a 1.7% rate. The general consensus is that this quarter we should be up around 2% but the whisper number is a big miss, down to 1.3%. Slower GDP growth will be GOOD for the stock market as it gives Ben and Tim the excuse they need to crank up the printing presses for some real Zimbabwe-style inflation.
It’s easy to pay off $15Tn in fixed rate 2-year to 30-year notes when your country is cranking out $1Tn bank notes, right? Can this really be the path our nation is following? The markets are certainly betting on it but we have been betting against it with longs on UUP at $22.50 (still there) and a short play on the QID weekly $13 calls at .46 yesterday along with other bearish trade ideas we’ve entered ahead of the GDP as well as the elections and next week’s Fed meeting.
Why can’t we just give up and go with the flow? Well, first of all, you can read my last few weeks of posts or you can read our last few Newsletters so I won’t rehash the great global macros here but I will make the point that (and this may shock you) we are not alone in the World and the things we do, or try to do in our economy, affect the economies of other nations. Perhaps when the US was 40% of Global GDP, we could have gotten away with it but now we are 20% and falling fast yet we still attempt to run our foreign and economic policies as if we are large and in charge.
This is not the way the rest of the World sees us anymore. To the rest of the World we are unrealistic children with dangerous spending habits who happen to owe them A LOT of money. We borrowed $15Tn and our "plan" is to pay them back with hyperinflated dollars that are already discounted 33% from where we began cranking up the borrowing in 2002 (to pay for wars and tax cuts).
Already, other nations are refusing to lend us more money so we have begun to engage in what Bill Gross, the world’s biggest bond…
Monday – Will APPL Earnings Today Keep Bears at Bay?
by Phil - October 18th, 2010 8:21 am
Am I too bullish?
I know I’ve been making a bearish case last week and I know we put out our first bearish list since April this month but, in reviewing October’s Overbought Eight for Members this weekend we reviewed the week’s picks and I realized that, despite all my griping, we had ended up with 21 bullish trade ideas vs. just 10 bearish ones AND, not only that, but half the bearish bets were quickie trades where we played the drops, like Friday’s DIA and QQQQ puts from the morning Alert that didn’t even last an hour (but made 300% and 200% respectively, so worthwhile, nonetheless).
That’s not very bearish. I had said to Members in last Monday’s Morning Alert: "The critical test levels above 7.5% are Dow 10,950, S&P 1,160, Nasdaq 2,400, NYSE 7,450 and Russell 690- all green for day 2 and that does put us technically bullish if we hold it, even though it’s a BS, low-volume day." and we did hold those lines on Tuesday’s dips to we cashed our first set of shorts and ended up flipping more bullish for the ride up to the 10% lines (Dow 11,220, S&P 1,177, Nas 2,420, NYSE 7,500 and Russell 700), despite out misgivings. When the technicals are very strong, you have to switch off the fundamental side of your brain and go with the flow.
It has been ALL about the dollar and, as we mentioned in this week’s Stock World Weekly, Trichet gave us the word we expected on Tuesday that knocked the dollar down to new lows against the Euro, Pound and Yen, with the dollar index bottoming out at 76 which should, in theory be strong technical support.
So, we have strong technical AND fundamental reasons to expect a dollar bounce and we KNOW that a dollar bounce will knock down commodities and we KNOW that a pullback in commodities will knock down the indexes as the energy and metals sector lead us lower. If we KNOW all this, then we MUST be too bullish, right?
Of course we reached that conclusion on Thursday and this is just a recap as 6 of those 10 bearish trade ideas from last week were from Thursday and Friday with EDZ, QID, QQQQ, SQQQ, QID (again), and DIA all picked short as we tested those 10% lines. We like to…
Testy Tuesday – Trichet Talks Tough at High Noon
by Phil - October 12th, 2010 7:40 am
Anti-Claud is coming to town!
You’d better not print, you’d better not ease you’d better not contract or your wages will freeze - Jean Claude Trichet is coming to town… The EU’s Central Banker has a lunch meeting at the NY Economic Club and there is no one who knows better when Bernanke’s sleeping and when the recovery is fake, so we’d better pay attention, for the country’s sake! THIS is the most powerful banker in the World, not the hollow Bankster puppet we have setting US policy, and Trichet has fought easy money tooth and nail -even as the US embraced it this year.
As you can see from the Chart on the right, Europe is a bigger (slightly) trading partner of China than the US and a MUCH bigger buyer of US goods than China by a factor of 3. The strong Euro lowers Europe’s trade imbalance as they have to send less Euros to both the US and our peg-partners in China for the same amount of goods they bought last year while the same goods they sold last year ship out in exchange for larger amounts of foreign notes.
With the Bank of Japan this week boosting its asset- purchase plan and the U.S. Federal Reserve mulling a similar shift, Trichet said last week that ECB policy makers are in the “same mood” as a month ago and for now remain committed to phasing out their unlimited lending program. That boosted the Euro back to $1.40 for the first time since February. The ECB and Fed compose “two different schools of thought,” said Jacques Cailloux, chief European economist at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London. “The ECB is looking at their own economy and seeing some signs of a revival. They’re very concerned about going down the line of the Fed.” Now Mr. Trichet will attempt to school us this afternoon – not coincidentally, on the same afternoon that the Fed Minutes will be released and QE2 mania is likely to peak out.
As noted yesterday by Zero Hedge, "While risk assets may hit all time highs courtesy of free liquidity, the economy, also known as the middle class, will be stuck exactly where it was before QE2… and QE1." The article does a great job of outlining my long-standing premise that money simply cannot be printed fast enough to overcome…
Fed Speak Friday – Volcker, Lacker and Ben Batting 1, 2, 3
by Phil - September 24th, 2010 8:33 am
What a fun day for debate!
Former Fed Chair, Paul Volcker went way off-script in Chicago yesterday and "moved unsparingly from banks to regulators to business schools to the Fed to money-market funds during his luncheon speech. He praised the new financial overhaul law, but said the system remained at risk because it is subject to future “judgments” of individual regulators, who he said would be relentlessly lobbied by banks and politicians to soften the rules."
Banking — Investment banks became “trading machines instead of investment banks [leading to] encroachment on the territory of commercial banks, and commercial banks encroached on the territory of others in a way that couldn’t easily be managed by the old supervisory system.”
Financial system — “The financial system is broken. We can use that term in late 2008, and I think it’s fair to still use the term unfortunately. We know that parts of it are absolutely broken, like the mortgage market which only happens to be the most important part of our capital markets [and has] become a subsidiary of the U.S. government.”
Risk management — “Markets that are prone to excesses in one direction or another are not simply managed under the assumption that we can assume that everybody follows a normal distribution curve. Normal distribution curves — if I would submit to you — do not exist in financial markets. Its not that they are fat tails, they don’t exist. I keep hearing about fat tails, and Jesus, it’s only supposed to occur every 100 years, and it appears every 10 years.”
The recession — “It’s so difficult to get out of this recession because of the basic disequilibrium in the real economy.”
This afternoon, Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker will speak in Kentucky (his hometown) on "Reflections on Economics, Policy and Financial Crisis!" and it always makes me nervous when Fed Presidents put exclamation marks on the word "crisis" so we’ll be paying attention to that one. After market hours, at 4:30, Uncle Ben comes to the plate with "Implications of the Financial Crisis for Economics," which sounds like a snoozer but that’s three Fed guys in a row saying "crisis" in the same day – I don’t like it!
I was bearish yesterday morning but we bottomed out earlier than I thought and I…
Technically Troubling Tuesday
by Phil - August 24th, 2010 8:27 am
We finally blew our levels!
Sadly, it’s time to flip bearish until we can retake our watch levels at Dow 10,200, S&P 1,070, Nas 2,200, NYSE 6,800, and Russell 635. If we can’t retake at least 2 of them today, we may be seeing 2.5% drops back to Dow 9,945, S&P 1,043, Nas 2,145, NYSE 6,630 and Russell 619. Since the Russell already blew 619 we have to consider the possiblitlity of even a test of our 5% lines at Dow 9,690, S&P 1,016, Nas 2,090, NYSE 6,460, and Russell 603.
Fundamentals are great but once panic sets in the market is all about technicals and we just need to strap in and go along for the ride. We have been playing for a bounce off our 10,200, 1,070 lines but, now that we lost it – it’s time to flip bearish – I was wrong and that’s that, time to move on and make some downside money. Of course it will take more than a single day to give us a trend but the same way we don’t get very bearish until we loser 3 of 5 of our center levels, we don’t get bullish again until we break back over. Yesterday I sent out an Alert to Members as we broke down, saying: "We could very easily drop 250 from here on the Dow (2.5%)."
We added a fresh DXD hedge but we already had a proper hedge from Friday when the morning trade idea was:
A better way to hedge at the moment is the DXD Sept $27s for $1.70. They have a delta of .62 but can be transferred into a vertical if the Dow goes up by selling the $25 puts (now .20) for .50 and covering with the $29s (now $1) for at least .70, leaving you in a $2 spread for .50. That would be the ESCAPE, at the moment I like the plain DXD $27s at $1.70 until we get a real move back up.
That was an addition to the Morning Alert Trade, which was the DIA Sept $99 puts at $1.50. Neither the DXD or the DIA plays have been paying off so far but they did provide cover for our speculative bullish plays as we tried to play the line. Of course we take our major disaster hedges when the market is high (it’s cheaper then),…
Goldilocks and the 300,000,000 Bears
by Phil - August 14th, 2010 3:43 am
Talk about feeling outnumbered!
As the guy in Airplane kind of said – "Looks like I pricked the wrong week to get bullish!" Of course, as I often tell people I am neither bullish nor bearish – I’m rangeish – and our range is the 5% band between around Dow 10,200 and S&P 1,070, which takes us as low as Dow 9,690 and S&P 1,016 and as high as Dow 10,710 and S&P 1,123 before I really "flip flop" my positions. Despite the fact that this is the range we predicted last October and is the range we’ve been in (other than a brief trip to 11,200, which we shorted the hell out of) all year – people still seem to find it necessary to call me either bullish or bearish as we navigate the channel.
I suppose I have been HOPEFUL for the month (now heading into day 14) that we will finally make a little progress and establish a higher floor at our usual mid-points while, at the same time, the MSM have decided that we are all going to die. That does make me kind of bullish by comparison doesn’t it? We are mainly in cash and we are well hedged to the downside so, unless we are REALLY heading much, much lower, there is little profit in speculating to the downside, other than our quick trades. As PT Barnum once said:
"A man who is all caution, will never dare to take hold and be successful; and a man who is all boldness, is merely reckless, and must eventually fail. A man may go on "’change" and make fifty, or one hundred thousand dollars in speculating in stocks, at a single operation. But if he has simple boldness without caution, it is mere chance, and what he gains to-day he will lose to-morrow. You must have both the caution and the boldness, to insure success."
Balance is the key to long-term success and we’ve had many conversations about that in Member Chat. Our goal is to be neither bullish or bearish but rather to sell premium to both the bulls and the bears when conditions permit us. As Ravalos said Friday in Member Chat:
"Ever since I became member (actually before I became member I was already following your newsletter for quite some time) I find it hard for me to BUY PREMIUM. Over time, I’ve realized that buying the
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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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