Wednesday Wheeeee – We Love it When a Plan Comes Together!
by Phil - January 11th, 2012 8:21 am
Once again, we're done with our day before you get up.
In my 5am note to Members, I said: "I see nothing in the news to justify this pre-market "recovery" and I hate to sound like a broken record but I like shorting oil (/CL) if we get below that $102 line with tight stops and the Dow (/YM) is right at 12,400, which is a great spot to short. RUT (/TF) is at 762 and below 760 (same as yesterday) will confirm a downturn but 12,400 is a great line so why wait?" By 6:26, I was able to follow it up with:
And wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! There go the Futures!
It's 7:07 and we're still going down, with oil at $101.24 (up $760 per contract) and the Dow at 12,340 (up $300 per contract) and, as Dennis said: "Good enough for steak and eggs for me!" Roro got up late but still caught the Dow at 6:16 and that was right on the nose for the oil drop as well as we hit it right on the nose this morning and now we're done and waiting for the next good set-up.
Of course we scale in and scale out of positions as there's no need to get greedy in the Futures, where a single remaining contract catching a $1 move down in oil (now $101.25 again) pays $1,000. This week, we have even stationed our own Craigzooka in New Zealand, where it's tomorrow – which makes it much easier to bet on today's action as he can tell us what happened already! Not that today was all that hard to predict, right? My comment to Members LAST Wednesday was:
It’s been a pretty reliable bet that they tank the markets into the longer-term note auctions because it scares people into T-Bills and keeps the rates low. From this line-up, it seems to me they intend to jack us up on Friday and then zap us on Tuesday as Esther George releases something hawkish ahead of the 3-year and it’s no coincidence that Plosser, by far the biggest Hawk, is given the floor at 12:30 on Wednesday – just 30 minutes before the critical 10-year auction. Coincidence? Surely you cannot be that naive!
So that's how we've been playing the past 7 days and it culminated in pressing our…
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn 
del.icio.us
DiggWhich Way Wednesday: Through the Roof or Smashed into a Thousand Pieces?
by Phil - October 19th, 2011 8:08 am
GRANDPA JOE: But this roof is made of glass. It’ll shatter into a thousand pieces. We’ll be cut to ribbons!
WILLY WONKA: Probably.
Is today going to be the day? After pressing against our breakout levels for a week, today do we should finally have the gas to get over the top or will our Must Hold levels keep acting like a solid barrier? Oddly enough, I was asking the same question on August 30th, when I asked if we were "Breaking Higher or Dressing Windows?" My comment from that morning works for today as well:
No way to slow down. That line from Tull’s "Locamotive Breath" keeps playing in my head as I look at these rumor-driven markets and contemplate that we MUST keep going higher – or we will fall. On the whole, that’s not generally a winning long-term investing premise BUT – it does so happen to be the entire principal on which space travel is based so let’s not discount it entirely.
Willy Wonka understood stock market physics, there had to be enough power to get through that overhead resistance or it was going to be a very painful test of the top (like the one we had in August). Since our July dip, we’ve come back for another try at our Must Hold lines 4 times but the volume has been substantially lower than it was in July, leading us to believe it is only TradeBots, and not Oompa Loompas, who are buying this market.
Can TradeBots alone give…
Income Portfolio – Month Four – Stormy Weather!
by Phil - August 13th, 2011 7:57 am
Riders on the storm
Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out alone
Riders on the storm
What a crazy couple of week’s we’ve been having! Very fortunately, in last month’s update of our virtual income portfolio, we had already cashed out $33,084 – more than enough to take us through our first 8 months (our planned $4,000 a month to live on). We did that using just $200,000 of our $1M in buying power ($500,000 portfolio), staying very conservative and waiting for a bigger dip than the one we had had in June.
Well, here we are! We are now 10% below June’s bottom and we did do a little bottom fishing, adding positions in WFR, SONC, IMAX, VLO, OIH, TBT and HOLI – positions we’ll be reviewing below. To a large extent, we followed the strategy I called "Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There" during this sell-off although it was (and still is) a nail-biter as we tested my August 2nd prediction of the "worst-case" scenario of a 20% drop from the top.
We stuck to our guns this week and had a lot of fun playing the wild gyrations with our short-term betting but the Income Portfolio is an exercise in managing a "low-touch" portfolio – one that does not require us to make daily adjustments. I am aware that can be frustrating for people who stare at the markets every day but that is what our short-term trade ideas are for in Member Chat. That goes for people who are retired or semi-retired too. You don’t HAVE to play every day – or any day for that matter but you do need to work one week a month and that would be this week – the week of…
Stock World Weekly: Deadlocked
by SWW - July 24th, 2011 12:02 am
Here’s the latest Stock World Weekly. Click on this link to read the full SWW: "Deadlocked" and sign in with your PSW user name and password. (Or sign up for a FREE trial to Stock World Weekly.)
Excerpts reviewing the week and looking ahead
U.S. Debt Ceiling Deadlock
One line of reasoning from the “no tax hikes” crowd is the inaccurate premise that the very wealthy, the top 0.1%, are job creators. If they’re the “job creators,” it might be in the public interest to protect them from excessive taxation – thereby allowing these top 0.1% to spend money on creating jobs. This is incorrect. The overwhelming majority of U.S. jobs are ‘created’ by ordinary Americans when they spend their paychecks. Consumer spending drives about 70% of our GDP. When average Americans are struggling with high unemployment, which recently popped back up to 9.2%, they are reluctant to spend money on anything beyond basic necessities. The broader U6 unemployment number – which includes the underemployed and “discouraged workers” – is 16.2%.
Meanwhile, U.S. companies are not stepping up hiring due to weakness in the economy – there is no demand. As Paul Ashworth of Capital Economics wrote, “Businesses aren’t confident enough, and the longer this goes on, the harder it is to convince them that they should be.” (Dearth of Demand Seen Behind Weak Hiring)…
Let Them Eat Cake
Russ Winter of Winter Watch at the Wall Street Examiner discussed the gap between what people think corporations pay in taxes, versus what they really spend. For example, Microsoft “lowers its effective tax rate a full 7% by taking foreign income to $19.2 billion from $15.4 billion, and lowering US income (and expenses) from $9.6 billion to $8.9 billion. Today MSFT is effectively a 68% foreign operation. In return it gets all the benefits of stimulus and minimizes the costs of supporting the US system…
“Mark Kreiger writes a spot on piece regarding the high end luxury bubble that includes this gem - ‘The social crisis facing the country as a result of the most egregious plundering in modern American history will spell the end of the ‘high end’ theme. Buying into this trend now is like getting long Marie Antoinette’s unsevered
…
Weekend Wrap-Up, Still Trying to Get Bullish
by Phil - March 14th, 2010 5:20 am
I’m having writer’s block this weekend.
Usually when I can’t think of what to write it helps me to go over our virtual portfolios so I started this morning reviewing the Buy List but I didn’t get far because it was silly. Of 43 plays on the buy list, 39 are doing well – too well in fact to the point where it’s hard for me, in good conscience, not to say let’s kill the whole thing and get back to cash as we’re up about 20% in 2 months and that’s just ridiculous – most people would call that a good year and go on vacation.
The Buy List was 100% bullish and we did catch a good bottom on our early February entries. I was gung ho bullish then because I felt comfortable that the 10,000 line on the Dow would prevail and that we were good for a run back to the top (10,700), following, more or less, the pattern we had in 2004 (see original post for charts). Well that’s pretty much what’s happened since then but that’s not making me happy because I see no reason we won’t complete that pattern and begin falling off a cliff shortly.
As you all know, I’m not a big fan of TA, or patterns for that matter but the reason I started looking for patterns was to try to get a handle on how long market could really keep going up before falling victim to exhaustion. To me it seemed we weren’t at that point on Feb 6th but now that we’ve put in that big push back up – if we can’t punch up to new highs on all our indexes then I do think it’s time for the markets to take a break.
.jpg)
Clearly I’ve been too bearish for the past couple of weeks and we are now 224 points over 10,400 on the Dow which is where I turned bearish as the January data made me lose faith in our ability to get back to 10,700. I should have stuck to the TA because we’re a lot closer to 10,700 than we are to 10,400. With the Russell and Nasdaq exploding to their own new highs. You can see though, from the above chart, why I do want to wait to see the NYSE, Dow and S&P confirm this move up – it’s not far now!…
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…
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…
Frothy Friday – Churn Baby Churn!
by Phil - October 23rd, 2009 8:26 am
What a wild week we are having!
We dumped our shorts as planned yesterday morning, getting a very nice dip at the open and my 9:36 Alert to Members was even titled "Take Those Short Profits!" and our upside targets were set (as they were in the morning post) at: Dow 10,087, S&P 1,096, Nasdaq 2,173, NYSE 7,204 and Russell 623. Where did we finish? Dow 1,081, S&P 1,092, Nasdaq 2,165, NYSE 7,182 and Russell 613 – so a bit short of all of our targets but not bad considering we were opening 167 points below that on the Dow so perhaps I can be forgiven for a 6-point miss…
If knowing about massive market moves in advance would be helpful to you – please consider subscribing to our service. If you are already a member and know someone who might like to try our newsletter, you can send them a free trial subscription using this link and you can earn yourselves discounts on membership renewals for each friend who opts into the free trial. We have over 19,000 people on our Newsletter list now and I want to see if we can break 30,000 by the end of the year now that our new mail server is up and running (we’ve been on hold for a month as we filled up our old server!). Your help in this matter would be greatly appreciated. PSW Report Members can extend their subscriptions at no cost simply by referring others to a free trial report – my little experiment in viral marketing…
Even our free PSW Report readers would have done great just following the trades we had in last week’s Wrap-Up (Report subscribers get to read our articles without the 48-hour delay). We had GS Nov $210s shorted at .87, now .35 (up 60%), CERN short $85 calls at $4.15, now $3.10 (up 25%), ISRG Apr puts and calls sold for $39.20, now $36 (up 8%), PARD at $6.87, now $7.35 (up 7%), NTRI at $18.60, now $19.15 (up 3%)…
We had other trades that are still in progress. ICE notably burned us so far, but we rolled them up and shorted them some more yesterday (now $106.56). We’ve had a wild mix of short and long trades this week as we TRY to get more bullish on the markets but yesterday’s run-up had us reloading Thursday’s successful short plays as that set made…
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. …
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…
German
Spanish
French
Italian
Portuguese
Japanese
Korean
Russian
Chinese
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
(