Bears Bombard Blackberry-Maker, Research in Motion
by Andrew Wilkinson - March 1st, 2010 5:00 pm
Today’s tickers: RIMM, CAT, MGM, F, SLM, FRX, FXI, MWW & AIG
RIMM - Research in Motion Limited – Blackberry maker, Research in Motion, attracted bearish options strategists even though the firm’s target share price was upped to $100.00 this morning from $95.00 at Canaccord Adams. RIMM opened the session higher, but slipped slightly in afternoon trading by 0.05% to $70.85. One bearish tactic employed today was the use of a plain-vanilla put spread in the March contract. The trader responsible for the transaction purchased 4,400 puts at the March $65 strike for a premium of $0.54 apiece and sold the same number of puts at the lower March $60 strike for $0.20 each. The net cost of the spread amounts to $0.34 per contract. Maximum potential profits of $4.66 per contract are available to the investor if RIMM’s share price slumps 15.30% beneath the current value to $60.00 by expiration. We note that the mobile device manufacturer’s shares last traded below $60.00 on December 4, 2009. The bearish risk reversal is another pessimistic tactic utilized today. One trader sold 5,000 calls at the April $75 strike for a premium of $2.66 each in order to purchase 5,000 puts at the lower April $70 strike for $3.80 apiece. The net cost of the reversal play amounts to $1.14 per contract. The investor stands ready to accrue profits to the downside if shares of the underlying stock trade beneath the effective breakeven point at $68.86 by expiration in April.
CAT - Caterpillar, Inc. – February marked the seventh consecutive month of manufacturing expansion in the United States; this fact, coupled with today’s jump in equities’ prices, inspired bullish options trading on machine-maker, Caterpillar. CAT’s shares rallied 1.50% during the session to $57.92 after its earnings forecast through the year 2012 were increased by analysts at Morgan Stanley. MS maintains an ‘overweight’ rating on CAT and a $70 share price target, at present. Bullish options activity appeared on the put side of the field where one investor established a credit spread. The trader sold roughly 16,300 puts at the April $55 strike for a premium of $1.38 apiece, and purchased the same number of puts at the lower April $50 strike for $0.47 each. The investor pockets a net credit of $0.91 per contract, and keeps the full amount as long as Caterpillar’s share price remains above $55.00 through expiration day in April. The parameters of…
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Testy Tuesday Morning
by Phil - January 5th, 2010 8:27 am
Wow - what a lot of work to get back to last Tuesday’s high!
As usual, the vast majority of gains came in pre-market trading and the rest came in light-volume, early morning trading while the rest of the day was dominated by every buyer finding a willing seller for 75% of the day’s volume. We saw what happened on Thursday when someone big wants to sell and there are no buyers so we’ll see how long the bull’s luck (manufactured or otherwise) will hold out as we begin to get economic data along with some early earnings reports.
The Ag sector popped 2% yesterday ahead of tonight’s earings from MOS with MON checking in tomorrow morning so we’ll see how wise those last-minute bets were in short order. SONC also has earnings tonight and we like those guys long-term. SONC makes a decent buy/write candidate as you can buy the stock for $10.29 and sell June $10 puts and calls for $2.25 for a net entry of $8.04 with a very nice 24% profit if called away at $10 and an average entry of $9.02 (a 12% discount) if more stock is put to you below $10 in June.
FDO and WOR also report tomorrow morning. FDO will be interesting but a weak dollar probably hurt them last quarter. Tomorrow night we hear from BBBY, BLUD, OHB and Sonic competitor RT, who seem a bit pricey at $7.50. Thursday we get our first real builder, LEN along with STZ and TXI. After the bell on Thursday we hear from APOL, CRI and SCHN with GBX and PSMT on Friday. AA officially kicks of earnings season next Monday with GAP, INFY, KBH, BGG, SCHW, SHFL, INTC and JPM highlighting the reporters.
We have plenty of data this week including Factory Orders and Pending Home Sales at 10 am along with December Auto Sales throughout the day (did you get a new car for Christmas?). Tomorrow is jobs day, with the ADP Report and Challenger Job Cuts ahead of the bell followed by ISM Services (yesterday’s ISM was a nice beat) and, of course, Crude Inventories at 10:30 which are unlikely to sustain $82 oil (USO Jan $40 puts for .80 are a good way to play this). We talked about the other stuff yesterday so I won’t repeat it - suffice to say we have plenty of data this week to see if we justify these lofty levels.
Everyone is talking about AAPL’s new "Slate" computer so I’m not going to. …
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Phase Transitions and the Googlephone
by ilene - December 23rd, 2009 4:30 pm
Baruch compares the smartphone space to a place called "Extremistan" and questions Google’s decision to branch out from its own Googlextremistan home to more dangerous territory where it may only have mediocristan survival skills. - Ilene
Phase Transitions and the Googlephone
Courtesy of Ultimi Barbarorum
Baruch keeps thinking about Apple and what it’s done to mobile phones. Call him obsessed if you will, but it is also his job to think about it, and there’s good money to be made if you get it right. You may recall his last post on the subject, that Apple has become wholly dominant in the mobile internet and smartphone space. What’s struck him recently is how few of the intelligent analysts and counterparties he talks to actually agree with him on what seems even to generalists utterly obvious. Lots of them still think it’s a good idea to push other smartphone stocks, like PALM or RIMM, which if Baruch is right is a very efficient way to lose money, inferior only to piling it up in big mound and setting light to it.
Why people can think this way was a mystery to Baruch, until he made the realisation that the phase transition in the handset market is not yet evident to them; they still think the handset market resides in Mediocristan, as opposed to the Extremistan regime it has most likely become. They haven’t been reading their Taleb.
It’s a forgiveable error; again, Mediocristan is a fictional place where standard distributions, bell curves, rule, where market shares are shared between players, and where tall poppies get their heads cut off. Hardware and appliance markets have traditionally exhibited these characteristics. Look at cars, or blenders; lots of players can make a decent living selling blenders. Similarly, until now, 4 or 5 names shared out the vast majority of goodies in mobile telephones. Maximum market shares seemed to be limited at 30%-40%; losing or gaining 10 points of share took years. Over long periods those gains or losses would, unless something had gone very wrong with one of the players, tend to mean revert. It seemed a fast, dynamic sector at the time, but really, it wasn’t.
Now, software or application markets show us entirely different characteristics, those of Extremistan, where rapidly evolving monopolies and duopolies are much more common. SAP and Oracle own the enterprise software space. Adobe owns documents. Google owns search. Microsoft still owns PC operating systems and office software suites. Autonomy owns unstructured data mining, etc etc. In…
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Wild Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - December 19th, 2009 8:20 am
Wheee - that was fun!
Last week, I asked the question were we "Too Bearish or Just Too Early?" I said in that wrap-up: "This Friday the market topped out about 150 points higher than last Friday, closer to the top of our range so we went much more bearish on Friday, perhaps too bearish considering this was the best Friday finish since Nov 6th and we haven’t had a down Monday since October 26th." We did get the move up we feared on Monday but we stuck to our guns and had a fabulous week.
Even as the market was going against us Monday morning, my first Alert of the week to members at 9:44 said: "I’m still more inclined to look downward at: Dow 10,250, S&P 1,100, Nasdaq 2,187, NYSE 7,200 and Russell 600… I’m still bearish because oil is weak, gold is weak, the financials (XLF at 14.30) are weak and most of the good news we are hearing is nothing but fluff." That was a pretty good call as we hit our target levels yesterday and held them, so we flipped more bullish right at 11:30 on Friday, in what was some very good timing for our intra-day play.
We are still on a stock market roller coaster that’s going to have plenty of ups and down in the thin, holiday trading that will likely characterize the end of the year. The market will be closed 2 Fridays in a row and good luck finding people around this Thursday or the next one so 6 proper trading days left to 2009 at best. We got out - that drop was very satisfying and we’ve moved mainly to cash (our $100K Portfolio has $88,000 in cash at $107,249 at the end of it’s first month). Last week we were able to cash out the bull side, this week we got satisfaction from our bear plays and that leaves us footloose and fancy free to have fun the next two weeks. If our day trading goes as well as it did on Friday, we can end this year with quite a bang.
Manic Monday - Dubai, CitiGroup and GS Move Markets
This picture says it all. When you want to blow smoke up investors’ asses, the dream team of economic BS is Greenspan and Cramer, who appeared on Meet the Press last Sunday to tell us that the market is smarter than reality and Greenspan actually had the nerve to say that we are underestimating…
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Blackberry Bull Banks Profits as RIMM Shares Rebound
by Andrew Wilkinson - December 7th, 2009 4:13 pm
Today’s tickers: RIMM, BAC, VZ, CAG, NYB, RMBS, TEVA, DIS & NVDA
RIMM - Research in Motion Limited – Blackberry maker, Research in Motion, revealed a distribution deal with Digital China – a unit of Legend Holdings – aimed at expanding its business in China. Shares stood 2.5% higher to $60.22 thirty minutes before the closing bell. One option investor banked profits on a previously established call position in the January 2010 contract today. It appears the trader originally purchased 25,000 calls at the January 80 strike for 30 cents apiece on December 4, 2009. Today the investor shed all 25,000 lots for 43 cents each. Net profits on the closing sale amount to 13 cents per contract for total gains of $325,000. Option implied volatility on the stock is up slightly on the day to 59.91%.
BAC - Bank of America Corp. – A bearish risk reversal on Bank of America this afternoon suggests one investor expects shares to suffer significant declines by expiration in May 2010. BAC’s shares slipped 2% to $15.98 in late-day trading. It appears the pessimistic player shed 7,500 calls at the May 22 strike for 36 cents apiece in order to partially offset the cost of buying the same number of put options at the lower May 13 strike for 70 cents premium each. The net cost of the transaction amounts to 34 cents per contract. The effective breakeven point on the put options of $12.66 is 20.77% lower than the current price per BAC share. The investor responsible for the reversal could be taking an extremely bearish bet on Bank of America. If this is the case, the investor expects shares to nosedive down to lows experienced at the end of July 2009. Alternatively, the trader could be long the stock, and financing cheap downside protection by selling covered call options. The long puts serve as protection in case the stock tumbles, whereas the short calls suggest the investor is happy to have the underlying stock position called from him at $22.00 each. Shares of BAC would need to rally 38% from the current price in order for the March 22 strike calls to land in-the-money.
VZ - Verizon Communications, Inc. – Option traders displayed mixed near-term sentiment on the communications company this afternoon. Shares edged 2% higher to a new 52-week high of $33.36 with less than one hour remaining in the trading session. Bullish traders picked up…
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Two Week Wrap-Up - Trading Our Range
by Phil - December 6th, 2009 7:58 am
Your "crystal ball" was dead-on with the insights into the report on jobs as well as the initial rise and then correction. Truly impressive. - Champstar2
We didn’t have a weekly wrap-up last week because of the holiday.
In our Nov 21st Wrap-Up, I had said next week we’ll be watching to see if we can get more bullish above our 25% lines at: Dow 10,250, S&P 1,100, Nasdaq 2,187, NYSE 7,000 and Russell 600 and that became the bottom of our new range while I sent out a 9:41 Alert to our Members on Nov 23rd sticking with our upside targets of Dow 10,471, S&P 1,113, Nas 2,205, NYSE 7,266 and Russell 605. That has been a very reliable range to play for the past two weeks and we’ve been having a good time playing both ends of it.
Rather than just wrapping up this week’s moves, I thought we’d add the prior week as the pattern is very much the same (and it was the same the week before) so it certainly bears (oops, don’t say bears!) studying. Of course, when I talk about patterns, I don’t just mean the chart pattern where we have all of our gains for the week on Monday and Tuesday on low volume and then larger volume selling for the rest of the week as the funds who pump the futures up dump their ill-gotten gains on retail investors. I’m talking about the global new patterns, as reported by the MSM, that make this sort of manipulation so effective. It’s not that I’m so good at predicting things - it’s really just that I’m good at spotting the BS…
Monday - Stuffing the Futures for Thanksgiving
I was pointing out that morning that 90% of the market gains since October had been coming on a single day each week and how a lot of that was happening in the very thinly-traded Futures market, where a few thousand shares traded overnight are able to lever the entire US market up by Trillions of Dollars. It’s a very sick and broken system that has been seized by manipulators to yank investors around, making sure retail investors have little ability to participate in these wild market moves as the game is already over by the time trading starts the next day.
This week, we had 2 days like that with both Tuesday and Friday gapping up over 100 points at the open, accounting for 250% of the…
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Weak Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - November 21st, 2009 8:26 am
This chart says it all (thanks Jesse).
In last week’s wrap-up I said: "Since early September our upside targets for the indexes have been: Dow 10,087, S&P 1,096, Nasdaq 2,173, NYSE 7,204 and Russell 623 and nothing has happened to change our fundamental outlook for the better so the closer we get to those levels, the LESS comfortable we are taking bullish positions." I mentioned how tempting it had been to cash out all our longs and go 100% bearish when we hit 10,300. Our downside levels told us to wait until the 16th, when Monday’s move up was finally the last straw and we are out of the bull game (our last major Buy List was July 11th and most picks are up over 100%), probably for the rest of the year.
This chart shows you that the S&P is primed for a 5% correction back to 1,050. I don’t know why Jesse didn’t extend out the lower support line, which would take us right about to my pullback target of S&P 1,000/Dow 9,650. I stuck my neck out on TV two weeks ago, calling for a 10% correction to those levels but we’ve been playing both sides of the fence until this week, when I finally had to put my foot down on Monday, after having discussed cashing out for the holidays in Member Chat over the weekend. Our general plan this week was to cash out the winners and leave only longer-term, hedged bullish plays while adding more speculative downside plays for the short-term correction.
Why the change of heart? Well, something you don’t see on this chart but is pretty clear on the Yahoo monthly view, is that virtually all of the gains (ALL of them if you include the spikes) in the Dow for the ENTIRE month of November have come on single days each week. This week it was Monday (139 points), last week Monday (206 points) and Nov 5th was Wednesday (198 points). Take those days out of the run from our Oct 30th close at 9,712 and we’re up just 63 points to 9,975 despite there being only 1 losing day in the first week (11/3, down 16 points) of the month and one losing day in the second (Nov 12th, down 92 points). That is one super-flimsy way to build a "rally" don’t you think?
Getting 90% of our gains in on 3 days in 3 weeks indicates a certain lack of follow-through to these bullish market moves. I outlined the nature of the manipulation that takes place in yesterday’s post so…
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October Overview - When the Goblins Come Home to Roost
by Phil - November 1st, 2009 8:15 am
What a crazy month we had!
The Dow began the month of October at 9,712 and finished the month of October at EXACTLY 9,712. Now I don’t want to say the market is manipulated but… No, I’ve got nothing, there are no buts - the market is totally manipulated! Either that or you believe that the random outcome of tens of millions of traders around the globe trading hundreds of billions of shares of stock would just so happen to begin and end the month within .50 after going as low as 9,378.77 (on the 5th) and as high as 10,157.94 (on the 21st). So that is literally a 1 out of the 779-point swing coincidence to hit that 9,712 nail on the head.
At PSW we couldn’t be happier about this frankly. As I often say to members: We don’t care IF the game is rigged, as long as we can figure out HOW the game is rigged so we can play along. We were bearish in our September 27th Wrap-Up when I predicted that Earnings season would bring about a "Return to Fundamentals." We targeted retrace moves of Dow 9,512, S&P 1,020, Nasdaq 2,030, NYSE 9,496 and Russell 556 - all of which we hit the following Friday.
That week I highlighted my fundamental market concerns and Monday (9/28) my topic was "6 Unemployed People Per Available Job," Tuesday I said "Consumer Confidence is Key," Wednesday we caught the turn perfectly as I predicted "End of Quarter, End of Pump," and Thursday, October 1st was the day that "REIT’s Turned Rotten" - which was something we had been playing for during the September rally so we were thrilled with what is NOW the 2nd worst down day of the month. That was the day GS decided to agree with me that REITs were over-valued and gave us a signal that the Gang of 12 were no longer all on the same page. Friday, the 2nd, we were back to looking at the Jobs numbers when I asked "Is Anybody Working for the Weekend."
We could not have been more pleased with what was the worst week in the market since then end of August, which was a,most as bad at the beginning of July (are you beginning to see a pattern?) and I said that Friday: "Just like any good roller coaster, market plunges can be fun when you are strapped in safely and prepared for them. Our members…
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Testy Tuesday - Apple Leads Earnings Boosters
by Phil - October 20th, 2009 8:29 am
Wheee, being bullish is fun!
We’re still not great at it as we shorted a few toppy-looking calls yesterday (WFMI, QLD, SPY and POT) but that was a normal offset to bullish plays on SO, ERX, VZ, RIMM, BMY, EMC, AAPL, TXN and T. Of course, we’re also playing our bullish Watch List, which still has plenty of laggards that we’re picking up. SRS was irresistible as they fell below $9.50 again but clearly we tipped bullish and all those bullish plays from last week should start bearing some fruit as well. The best thing about being a bull is - the markets went up for no reason on low volume and we were happy about it - Imagine that!
Of course we are still skeptical because the economy still sucks but it is fun to get a little more bullish while it lasts. Even our too bearish $100KP enjoyed yesterday’s action, finishing the day $101,364. That won’t last if we keep going higher and I’ll be looking for some bullish plays to officially add there if we hold our levels today (we didn’t yesterday).
AAPL is going to be a huge winner for us this morning. We’ve been selling Jan $165 and $170 puts for weeks as our key way to play earnings (collecting between $5 and $7) and yesterday, in Member Chat, I suggested selling the $185 puts for $7 as well as the April $180/200 bull call spread, also at $7. It was my position that you would be better off putting $2,000 into either of those plays than you would be spending $18,750 to buy 100 shares of the stock ahead of earnings. It will be interesting to see which position fares better today.
In other earnings fun, we are strategically taking well-hedged earnings plays. ZION was a ratio backspread, buying 4 Apr $21 calls for $2.10 and selling 6 Dec $19 calls for $1.55 in a bearish play on their earnings. Looking good so far. BSX was also played for a miss, selling an even amount of Nov $10s against the Feb $11s, both at .65 and we went bullish on TXN, buying 6 Jan $25s for .82 and selling just 4 Nov $24s for .70 as we expected good but not great earnings there. We’ll see how those do today but they’re all looking like winners in pre-market. The nice thing about plays like this is the are fairly low-risk and not capital intensive and you can often close…
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Weekly Wrap Up - Double Up or Double Top?
by Phil - October 10th, 2009 8:37 am
Not such a good week!
Last week was FANTASTIC and we had 28 winning trades out of 36 with an average gain of 42% on the winners and an average loss of 12% on the losers - now THAT’s A GOOD WEEK. We were stopped out of most of our bearish trades on Monday but we took a lot of new ones, which I’ll get into later… Of course, since we are rangish and play both ends, the good news is we still had our "losers" and puts that we sold on long positions and those turned into huge winners in just 5 days:
- AA at $13.30, out at $15 - up 12.7%
- AAPL Jan $165 puts sold for $7.40, now $4.70 - up 36%
- BAC Oct $17 puts sold for .97, now .28 - up 71%
- DIA Nov $92 calls at $5.40, now $7.30 - up 35%
- MHP 2011 $25 puts sold for $5.20, now 5.10 - up 2%
- RIMM March $100 calls at $1.45, now $1.25, down 13.7%
So, of the 6 that were not working last week, 5 are winners this week. As I mentioned at the end of last week’s wrap up, we were more than satisfied with our 5% drop that week and we did expect a bit of a bounce but we made the mistake of thinking The 250 points we gained by Tuesday morning was the end of it, but here we are at the end of the week, another 100 points higher and right back where we started from when we shorted into the rally in mid September.
Last weekend we were at a great point in our range as all our put plays had just paid off, this will be an interesting contrast as we have serious problems with our new short plays and we have a little less conviction than we had in mid September that we will get our correction - not after such a sharp turn off the 5% line this week. Nonetheless, we did stay 55% bearish into the weekend overall - still playing for our range. But, I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s go back to Monday and see how we got here….
Monday Market Manipulation - Goldman’s CIT Bonanza
I was not at all pleased with the scam GS was running on CIT and neither were many in the press but their attention span lasted all of 24 hours as the markets mysteriously began to take off, neatly drawing people’s attention elsewhere….
Our concern over falling tax…
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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
(