Posts Tagged
‘SOX’
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
…

Tags: AA, AAPL, ARNA, BAC, CAVM, CSCO, DIA, DOW, DXD, GLL, Hedging, HERO, HPQ, IDCC, IWM, JPM, JWN, MEE, MO, NAHB, NETL, NFLX, Option Strategies, QID, quantitative easing, S&P, SDS, SOX, SPWRA, STX, TBT, UNG, USD, XLF
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by Phil - January 25th, 2010 3:00 am
Chart Review by Michael Clark
“By a continuing process of inflation, government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”
-- John Maynard Keynes
SO, IS THIS FINALLY THE ‘REAL’ CORRECTION?
What a week it was. The Bears gave the Bulls some payback. Obama got a wake-up call. And the banks got a well-deserved scare (and we hope they will get a well-deserved hair cut).
The markets reacted, as one might expect, with selling. Actually, the selling began before the Massachusetts election and before Obama sent a shot across the Goldman Sach’s bow. Last week Intel announced surprisingly strong earnings; and the stock started up and then sank. For the past half-year investor behavior had been the reverse: a buying spree for any stock that did not lose as much as it might have — beating ‘Street expectations’ that had been dumbed down over and over again during a quarter so that the company could report ‘surprising’ strength. Suddenly, now, even good earnings are being greeted with selling. Then came Massachusetts — wasn’t that a Bee Gees’ song?
All the lights went out in Massachusetts
Anyway, readers want to know where the markets stand today, after the sell-off this week. My view of it — my ‘view’, not my gut-feeling — is that we are, so far, merely correcting from an over-extended rally. This rally has been bizarre, to say the least. This has been a ‘fear rally’ — usually the ‘fear’ side of the equation is when selling comes in, ‘greed’ driving the expansion. But fear of systemic failure has driven this rally; and Ben Bernannke has been the captain sailing the ‘Boat of Fear’, Ben’s logic — that more debt will solve the insolvency crisis — has a shadow side, the logic that a collapse in stock prices will result in systemic failure, international chaos, revolution, repression…made him believe that preservation of the status quo was requiired, at any price. A ‘make-believe’ recovery could be jump-started, perhaps, if the Fed could just stimulate (and simulate) another asset-bubble. After all – that is how his mentor and predecessor, Alan Greenspan, had become the darling of the coctail party crowd, leading member of Time Magazine’s ‘Committee to Save the World’; and that was how he, himself, had become Time’s ‘Peson of the Year’.
Logic was thrown…

Tags: CRB, DAX, Dollar, DOW, EPI, FTSE, Gold, HSI, IDX, QID, REW, RSX, Shanghai Composite, SOX, Spain, SRS, SSMI, TBT, technical analysis of charts, Transports, VIX
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by Chart School - September 17th, 2009 2:21 am
Here are a few quick posts by Tim Knight at Slope of Hope. - Ilene
Or……..how I learned to stopped worrying and love the bull.
I bought a very large position in SSO earlier today for a couple of reasons:
- I don’t get my jollies out of losing money;
- The OPEX week clearly has import;
- I was impressed and convinced by Fujisan’s post last night, calling for – if memory serves – a push to 1086 by Friday.
I am having fewer and fewer compunctions about buying select stocks. That is evident from my watch lists.
One cause for concern for the bulls remains…………..volume! Just take a look at the volume graph; it’s simply pathetic.
It is generally true that prices climb higher at a far slower rate than they drop. This rally, however, has been a remarkable exception. The push higher has been explosive, and it has pushed higher with just about the same timetable and force as the drop itself.

The question, of course, is: when (if ever) will it end?
There are as many opinions as there are traders, but a few general camps would be, using the example of the Russell 2000 above:
- It has another 10% to go, and it will happen quickly. That would be painful for the bears, but I would hasten to point out that, at that level, the Russell would have completely retraced to the neckline of a head and shoulders pattern spanning three years whose beauty would make bears (if there are any left by then) weep tears of joy.
- It’s done climbing and will start falling. This has been uttered so many times by so many parties (including, I admit, a few times by me) that it’s not even worth considering anymore. The entire, "OK, now………….errr………OK, NOW!………..oh, wait…………….errr, NOW!" gets really, really old.
- We’re in a major new bull market and it’s simply going to keep pushing its way through to progressively higher prices.
For the bears out there who would like some encouraging news, the semiconductor index – which is a helpful bellweather – is looking like it is approaching a huge area of resistance. This is why I bought SSG yesterday.
…

Tags: bears, Bulls, market rally, SOX
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by Phil - August 11th, 2009 8:26 am
Our levels are holding so far.
We came right back to 1,000 on the S&P yesterday but it held like a champ and that gave us the confidence to take a bullish cover on our longer DIA protective puts, right at 3:04, ahead of the usual 50-point stick save but it was a move we initiated right at the bottom at 2:30, catching almost the dead bottom on our roll. Of course it’s total nonsense but it’s total nonsense we can count on with 8 stick saves of at least 50 points in the last 90 minutes coming in the last 10 market sessions accounting for 400 points of Dow gains or ALL of our gains since July 20th when we "broke out."
As illustrated in David Fry’s SPY chart, the only exceptions to the stick save were the last two Fridays and I said to members in yesterday’s chat, perhaps that is somehow significant that the collective we call "Mr. Stick", does not feel confident enough to make bullish plays into the weekend anymore. Today we should head right back to re-test 1,000 on the S&P but we are much more bearish overall, having taken profits yesterday and covered our unrealized gains in our $100KP - the plan we discussed in yesterday’s morning post.
We got a re-test and a re-failure of the Russell at exactly our 574 target right at 11:15 and the the Qs never even mounted a serious threat on our 40 line so it wasn’t a tough call for us in the morning. The other levels we are watching, Dow 9,297, S&P 1,000, Nasdq 2,017, NYSE 6,438, Russell 562 and SOX 308, are looking shaky and may not stand up to another test, especially if we get any bad news on our upcoming data with Wholesale Inventory and Productivity Reports on deck this morning. Our bearish additions were an ERY spread (3x Energy bear) and COF Sept $40 puts, which are already up 10% from our 12:17 pick. It wasn’t all negative, we liked a couple of buy/write plays and we took a very bullish spread on FRE, which should do very well this morning. At 12:57 we had noticed FRE moving up and, in Member Chat, we were discussing the merits and my take was this:
FRE/Ifl – The float of FRE is just 650M shares and they are capable of earning $5Bn a year in a
…

Tags: COF, DOW, FRE, Homeless, Housing, Productivity, SOX, SPY
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by Phil - July 31st, 2009 8:23 am
Can the S&P make 1,000 today?
As we can see from AlphaTrends chart, that’s going to be a tough breakout and, even if we do make it, can we hold it? In yesterday’s post I said we were ready to switch off our brains and BUYBUYBUY the rally and our breakout levels did all hold yesterday but I decided, in Member Chat, that we needed to raise the bar slightly before we started shutting down our thought processes into the weekend. We simply used the 2.5% lines of Dow 9,297, S&P 1,000 (interesting!), Nas 2,017, NYSE 6,438, Rut 562 and SOX 308 in my 10:16 Alert as our official buying breakouts but those same levels gave us a great indicator to get out of our longs and press our shorts as they ALL failed by 11:09.

It is going to be very much up to the GDP report and we have a pretty low-bar expectation of -1.5% but that’s a heck of an improvement over last quarter’s -5.5% and this earnings season has been nothing if not a celebration of "getting worse more slowly." As we all know, personal consumption makes up 70% of the GDP while government is about 18% and business investment just 12%. Durable goods are only 8% of the GDP while consumables (which includes clothes and, obviously, food and fuel) are 20% and 40% is "services" but 1/4 of that number is Real Estate so that’s a little confusing.

As we know, not much is actually getting better but that’s not the issue with GDP as we are measuring "growth" compared to the prior 4 quarters and our prior year was a disaster! This is like when a raging fire causes a house to collapse and you stand there looking at the wreckage and say "at least most of the fire is out now."
The good news is the comps just keep getting easier and easier the worse things get so, at some point, you are bound to improve! As you can see from Briefing.com’s Real GDP chart on the left, there’s a pretty wide disparity between the Real and Nominal GDP and that’s because the Real GDP meansures the production of goods and services valued at constant prices. So we aren’t producing that much less, we’re just getting less for it…
We’ll get the scoop at 8:30 but our global partners weren’t waiting with…

Tags: CHINA, DIA, FSLR, GDP, GMCR, Personal Consumption, S&P, SOX, SPY, SRS
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February 11th, 2012 8:20 pm
Submitted by Mark Hanna
Courtesy of MarketMontage. View original post here.
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
...
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February 11th, 2012 8:05 pm
Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.
Submitted by Tyler Durden.
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 ...
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February 11th, 2012 6:46 pm
It's Well Past Time for Plan Z
Courtesy of The Automatic Earth
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...
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February 11th, 2012 5:35 pm
Courtesy of Doug Short.
Advisor Perspectives welcomes guest contributions. The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of Advisor Perspectives.
It's interesting to watch some of the terms bandied about in headline news. For example, the LA Times headline reads S&P says student loan debt could be next financial bubble.
Next? Could Be?
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.
From the article:
"Student-loan debt has ballooned and m...
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February 11th, 2012 12:00 am
Top 5 RisersStockRatingAnalysis
ICABUYThe 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....
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February 10th, 2012 6:20 pm
Courtesy of Benzinga.
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.
...
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February 10th, 2012 4:11 pm
Courtesy of John Nyaradi.
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:
SPDR Dow Jones Industrial ETF (NYSEARCA:...
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February 10th, 2012 1:40 pm
Reminder: David is available to chat with Members, comments are found below each post.
Click here for the full report.
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free report from All About Trends - "How To Outperform 90% Of Wall Street With Just $500 A Week." Tell David PSW sent you. -
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February 10th, 2012 1:22 pm
Today’s tickers: TRLG, KR & IGT
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February 6th, 2012 9:02 am
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.
To learn more about the swing trading virtual portfolio (strategy, performance, FAQ, etc.), please click here
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February 5th, 2012 5:19 am
NEW: Elliott and Ilene are available to chat with Members regarding topics presented in SWW, comments are found below each post.
Here's the latest Stock World Weekly, called "The Relentless Pursuit of Meaningless Metrics."
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January 30th, 2012 7:22 am
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...
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January 18th, 2012 1:09 am
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 ...
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