1,160 – That was the S&P close after yesterday’s wild action. A neat 160-point drop (12%) in 3 months for the World’s largest market kind of sucks, don’t you think? My commentary in June 30th’s "It’s the End of the Quarter as We Know It" post was:
We feel fine because we cashed out on the long side (shorter-term, unhedged positions) and we really don’t care what the market does today or tomorrow but we are betting this rally reverses and we will be taking some (more) short hedges today – hopefully selling into the last legs of this fairly fake-looking rally.
My top downside picks to play the sell-off were EDZ ($17.90 at the time, now $28, which is up 36% even without using options to make a spread) and TZA ($35.50 at the time, now $51.10 – up 44%). As I said in that morning post: "I didn’t think they could take the Dollar below 75 but they hit 74.54 last night and it remains to be seen if they can hold it down in real trading, especially with the Pound weakness (see this morning’s Alert) and the Yen’s unwanted strength. Something’s gotta give and we’re betting it’s this fake, Fake, FAKE rally…."
We were shorting oil futures (/CL) at $95 (now $80, up $15,000 per contract) as we thought the holiday weekend was the end of the run but we did keep heading up to $100 (down $5,000 per contract) before finally getting a drop to $75 (up $25,000 per contract) in early August.
One funny play from that June 30th Member Chat was the VIX Aug $15/17 bull call spread at $1.20, selling the $16 puts for .50 for net .70 on the $2 spread. That just seems so cute (and obvious) with the VIX at 38.84 now (it was 30 at the end of Aug for a full 185% gain on that hedge).
Other hedges we liked in that post were the TZA Oct $31/42 bull call spread at $3, selling RUT Aug $710 puts for $2.90. The RUT puts expired worthless so net .10 on the spread that is currently $20 in the money for pretty much the full 10,900% gain.…
Luxurious, avaricious, false, deceitful,
Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin
That has a name; but there’s no bottom, none.
That’s the way the markets feel this week as we, like Henry V – head once more into the breach (or close the wall up with our EU dead!). I had said on Tuesday, that it was 1,200 or bust on the S&P (as usual) and we failed to hold 1,200 and we busted and then we failed to hold the bottom of the rising channel David Fry had drawn at the top of that post (117.5 on this chart) and so we tumble back down towards our much more reliable -5% line at 1,140, which I drew in red.
While tricky, it is not impossible to trade this kind of action. We are very fortunate to have been trading this exact range on our virtual $25,000 Portfolio and we just had our best 2 weeks of the year, despite the insanity, with a net $16,475 gain since 9/15. That’s 66% of $25,000 right there and we’re now at $97,400 and on track to hit our $100K goal for the year on Friday as long as the Russell doesn’t fail 645. If not, as with many trades this year – we’ll work it out!
That’s the whole point of this portfolio exercise – to illustrate the idea of balance, even in aggressive short-term trading. We are never all bullish or all bearish and sometimes we’re wrong but, generally, we simply do more shorting at the top of our range and more buying at the bottom of our range and then we simply sit back and wait for the winners to come in. Of course for almost every winner there’s a loser but then, a week later, the losers are winners too!
OK, so PATIENCE and BALANCE – that’s those are our two points! And taking profits off the table. Right, then our THREE points are patience and balance and taking profits off the table while not being greedy. So that’s FOUR points. Amongst our points are Patience and Balance, Taking Profits off the Table and Not Being Greedy.
As I often say to Members, if you wake up in the morning and you’re not sure if you want the markets to…
700 has been a tough nut to crack in our small-cap index.
Dollar weakness has hurt the companies that do most of their business in the US, collecting crappy dollars for their goods and services and having to pay through the nose for high-priced commodities and imported goods. Small caps don’t have the muscle to hold down wages in overseas factories while they boost productivity to the point of suicide like our beloved Apple can. No, while our small caps may have a plentiful supply of US workers willing to work "cheap" – we’re still not at the point where our Government forces students to work in the factories as "interns."
So, while we wait for those IPhone 5′s to roll off the assembly line, we’ll be keeping an eye on the Russell, which should benefit from the recent strength in the Dollar, which is is up over 5% in September – although probably topping out at 78 – which is good, as it will give the markets a nice boost on the way back down.
Don’t worry, no one will be arresting Rupert Murdoch because – well, he’s rich. Rich fixes everything, doesn’t it? Rupert’s pal, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (What? You didn’t think he only buys Western politicians, did you?), says no one should rely on China to bail out the world economy. "Countries must first put their own houses in order," Wen said today. Asian stocks dropped following his comments, but European markets and futures have shaken the news off after the bank downgrades in a classic example of selling the rumor and buying the news.
It’s very sad when you can get your best financial advice from cartoon characters.
I apologize for the language but this video pretty much says it all. As the man in green says: "Buy the f’ing dip, you f’ing idiot." That’s the entirety of the market strategy we are being trained like Pavlov’s dogs to follow. Also as the man says "Now, don’t forget this only works if you go out and tell all your friends and family to do the same. That way, when they are buying more expensively than you, you can sell back to them and collect your money."
Of course it’s a Ponzi scheme but it’s a gigantic, legal one and the best thing about it is that the Government FORCES everyone to play so you never run out of suckers. When there is a lack of actual new sucker/investors to put money in, the Government steps in with stimulus or buys equities (QE1) or buy Treasuries from the banks so they can have free capital to buy equities with (QE2). They debase the currency and drive inflation higher while talking it up even more so and virtually penalizing people for saving money and not shopping. In this way, the US Government places a tax on every single citizen through a systemic devaluation of their lifetime accumulation of wealth as well as unfavorable savings and inflation conditions that are aimed to force money into equities and commodities.
What is the logic to this? Well, none if you are a government that actually cares about the long-term benefit of 310M people but we haven’t had a government that was "for the people" since they put two in the back of Kennedy’s neck so why complain about it now? What we should be doing is celebrating the sheer stupidity of the situation and enjoying the ride as this stock market roller coaster clacks up the tracks – towards a drop that is certain to have investors screaming all the way down but, for now, let’s listen to what the Bernanke Bears have to say in their latest cartoon about the Bank America crisis with WikiLeaks as well as their advice on NFLX and CRM:
Now, what could be more simple than that? Just take all your money out of bank stocks and put it into NetFlix. Well, maybe not NFLX as we…
We were too bearish as I had expected a bogus commodity rally in last weekend’s wrap-up but I didn’t expect it to persist for a week, even as the dollar held it’s ground above 80, a 10% pullback off the top, when oil was $40, copper was $1.50 and gold was $850. Now oil is $80 (up 100%), copper is $3.35 (up 123%) and gold is $1,135 (up 33%). Let’s say gold is a true indicator of dollar weakness – that means that only 33% of oil and copper’s move up can be attributed to the 10% drop in the dollar (not that even that makes sense but we’ll give it to them). Can the rest be attributed to demand?
Certainly not with copper. Global copper consumption was down 1.9% in 2009 and Q1 2010 is lower than any quarter since Q1 2009 and even Barclays’ very aggressive targets for China growth only bring global demand up 2.5% this year – whch would just about bring us back to 2007 levels of consumption. That, of course, also assumes a rebound in housing construction – something we are not seeing at the moment. Also, China spent $700Bn last year stimulating their economy and one of the ways they did this was to stockpile copper. As you can see from the chart – that too appears to be winding down and even Goldman Sachs has abandoned the bullish side of copper at this point.
Oil is just as silly. According to the EIA, global oil consumption is not expected to return to 2007 levels until late 2011 – and that is with some very rosey estimates of a global econonomic recovery – exactly the type of thing that can be derailed by high oil prices! Mighty China’s consumption is projected to go from 8.66Mbd this year to 9.13Mbd in 2011, a 500,000 barrel increase. Last week, the US had a build in inventories of 4Mb – we just send those over to China and everyone is happy! I’ve already had my say on oil demand this this weekend, so let’s just move on…
Let’s just say I’m a little skeptical about any market moves that are lead by commodity pushers at this very early stage in a recovery. Prices are not going up based on demand but…
Peter D has a long-running and very successful system of selling premiums on a regular basis that’s well worth learning.
Investors selling a short strangle are expecting the underlying stock to not move much in either direction. The strategy is accomplished by selling a call option at a higher price than the current stock or ETF price and by selling a put option at a lower price than the current stock or ETF price. Both of the options will have the same expiration month. The investor in a short strangle benefits from the underlying moving within the spread between the call strike and the put strike.
There are two reasons we like this strategy a lot at PSW:
1) It’s boring! Unless the market is MUCH more volatile than normal, taking sensible, NON-GREEDY, out-of-the-money short option positions is a fairly market-neutral way to place our bets. While the risk/reward ratio may seem inverted, statistically it’s a winning play over time.
2) It’s perfect for our "be the house, not the sucker" philosophy of trading. We are always looking to SELL volatility. The idea behind this trade is that front-month volatility is relatively expensive compared to historical long-term volatility and we take advantage of selling a very high cumulative volatility over the course of the year.
I keep a notebook (actually several) of all of my trading ideas including results from back testing from all of the various stocks, indexes, etf’s, futures, market statistics and yes, even planetary alignments, tides and lunar cycles. While reviewing all of my Blue Wave test results today, I stumbled upon a consistency heretofore completely unnoticed yet intriguing in it’s premise and applicability to trading, especially trend trading.
It appears from my testing that one particular trading vehicle consistently generated better results, sometimes much better results, then any other. What I found was that the Russell 2000 index (RUT) did better in my myriad of testing then any other index, including SPX, OEX, QQQQ, SPY and DIA.
Naturally, I Goggled this phenomenon and found a number of similar observations, best summed up here:
The Russell 2000, while not as popular as the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq, is actually much easier to trade. The broadness of the Russell’s index causes it to trend better than the Nasdaq and the S&P. The breadth of the 2000-stock-index tends to filter out the noise in the market, which makes it a more efficient market to trade. The brokerage houses tend to tout the S&P and Nasdaq markets because they are best know to the public. The Russell 2000, however, is utilized a great deal by institutional players because it trends so well.
And then this:
However, there is another market also catching the eye of many day traders — E-mini Russell futures. A quick glance at the top trading systems we ranked across seven different statistical measures at the end of 2004 showed something extraordinary — several E-mini Russell trading systems occupying spots at the top of the list.
So let’s take a look at the RUT, which coincidentally is the base index for four of the highest leveraged ETF’s: TNA, TZA, BGU and BGZ.
Above is our big picture Weekly chart of the Russell 2000 index. A week ago it flipped from LONG
Damn. Two (MJ and Whitney) of the big 4 of the 80s gone – Madonna and Prince remain. Probably the most well known Star Spangled Banner ever…
Disclosure Notice
Any securities mentioned on this page are not held by the author in his personal portfolio. Securities mentioned may or may not be held by the author in the mutual fund he manages, the Paladin Long Short Fund (PALFX). For a list of the aforementioned fund's holdings at the end of the prior quarter, visit the Paladin Funds website at http://www.paladinfunds.com/holdings/blog
We have posted various extracts from this piece from Credit Suisse previously. We will post from it again, because, to loosely paraphrase Lewis Black, it bears reposting... especially in the context of the latest and greatest Greek "bailout" (of Europe's bankers), which incidentally, will achieve nothing and merely bring the country one step closer to a military coup and/or civil war.
The flaw
The market is essentially proceeding on the assumption, as we see it, that banks’ capital requirements can be met organically, through earnings and deleveraging. We ...
Mario Draghi captured the utter ineptitude of him and every other Eurocrat out there when he said the following at today’s press conference in response to a question about a Greek exit: “To have a Plan B means defeat already. I am confident that all the pieces of this will fall in the proper places.”
Most 5-year old children in pre-school have already been told not to believe that they can always win and that “winning isn’t everything”, but Draghi & Co. still refuse to consider the possibility of failure even as it is staring them in the face. What’s really disturbing is that the stakes here are obviously much, much higher than they are o...
What with the word "next"? Also what's with the words "could be"? Without a doubt student loans are in a bubble and have been for many years. The source of the problem, as it always is with financial bubbles, is cheap money, loans to nearly anyone, and in the case of student loans, no way to discharge the debt, even in bankruptcy.
Top 5 RisersStockRatingAnalysisICABUYThe projected value for Empresas ICA is still rising quickly even though past earnings have already improved significantly.XBUYThe projected value for US Steel is still rising quickly even though past earnings have already improved significantly.FEICBUYProjected value continues to rise for FEI while long term increases in earnings growth are also becoming more widely expected.ASBCBUYMany analysts are expecting higher than previously expected long term growth from Associated Bancorp, and its near-term earnings outlook is also improving....
The following are the M&A deals, rumors and chatter circulating on Wall Street for Friday February 10, 2012:
Actuant Acquires Jeyco Pty
The Deal: Actuant (NYSE: ATU) announced Friday that it has acquired Jeyco Pty Ltd (“Jeyco”). Headquartered near Perth, Australia, Jeyco designs and provides specialized mooring, rigging and towing systems and services to the offshore oil & gas industry in Australia and other international markets. Additionally, its highly engineered products are used in a variety of applications for other markets including cyclone mooring and marine, defense and mining tow systems. Jeyco generates annual revenues of approximately $20 million.
Actuant shares closed at $27.33 Friday, a loss of 0.18% on average volume.
Greece was “saved” for less than 24 hours but now major ETFs around the world skid into the weekend on Greek fears
After wangling for a week or more, Greek took their new deal to the European Ministers meeting, only to have it promptly rejected and so as we go into the weekend, major global markets and ETFs have again hit the skids on Greece.
After two years of wangling, the European zone is demanding yet more and deeper cuts for Greece to qualify for the next round of bailout loans that will keep the country from going bankrupt on March 20th.
Major European and United States ETF responded negatively to the new developments:
To learn more, sign up for David's free newsletter and receive the free report from All About Trends - "How To Outperform 90% Of Wall Street With Just $500 A Week." Tell David PSW sent you. - Ilene...
Reminder: OpTrader is available to chat with Members, comments are found below each post.
This post is for all our live virtual trade ideas and daily comments. Please click on "comments" below to follow our live discussion. All of our current trades are listed in the spreadsheet below, with entry price (1/2 in and All in), and exit prices (1/3 out, 2/3 out, and All out).
We also indicate our stop, which is most of the time the "5 day moving average". All trades, unless indicated, are front-month ATM options.
Please feel free to participate in the discussion and ask any questions you might have about this virtual portfolio, by clicking on the "comments" link right below.
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Here is a quick update of past trades and our current position.
AA Money
No trade this week as we wait for AA to settle. Phil remarked last week that AA seemed overvalued. In the meantime, it looks like we might have to roll our Feb 9 calls. Good thing we sold only 5 of them against our position.
Last week P&L - 310.00
We lost ground last week, but we still have 11 months to sell premium!
FAS Money
Very good week for FAS Money as we benefited from the large amount of premium sold the previous week. We covered most of the shorts in advance of the Fed speech, but sold another set of options on Wednesday after the speech - 2 FAS calls that expired worthless on Friday, 2 FAS put that we are still holding and 2 FAZ put that we bought back for a profit on Friday. A late stick comparable to last week's almost gave us problems at the end of the day though!
Last week P&L - $4277.00
IWM Money
A decent week in this virtual portfo...
Reminder: Pharmboy is available to chat with Members, comments are found below each post.
Finding new and exciting Biotech companies that target novel mechanisms is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure there are many companies working on cutting edge science, but investing in those companies to reap the rewards of their work is a very dangerous game. More often than not, companies fail because the mechanism does not pan out, the compound(s) do not have pharmacokinetics (get into the body or last very long in the body), or an adverse event happens that knocks years off a development timeline. In addition, the stock can be manipulated by market makers so investors don't know which way is up. I approach investing in biotechs as a long term prospect. I continue to like our current portfolio of biotech companies (join in chat for many of those plays), and we continually add/subtract shares and sell/buy options on ...
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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1,320 – That was the S&P close on June 30th.
Other hedges we liked in that post were the TZA Oct $31/42 bull call spread at $3, selling RUT Aug $710 puts for $2.90. The RUT puts expired worthless so net .10 on the spread that is currently $20 in the money for pretty much the full 10,900% gain.…
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MacDuff once said: 
700 has been a tough nut to crack in our small-cap index. 
Don’t worry, no one will be arresting Rupert Murdoch because – well, he’s rich. Rich fixes everything, doesn’t it? Rupert’s pal, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (What? You didn’t think he only buys Western politicians, did you?), says 
It’s very sad when you can get your best financial advice from cartoon characters..jpg)
This whole week did not feel right to me.
Let’s just say I’m a little skeptical about any market moves that are lead by commodity pushers at this very early stage in a recovery. Prices are not going up based on demand but…
Peter D has a long-running and very successful system of selling premiums on a regular basis that’s well worth learning.
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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
(