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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Thrill Ride Thursday
by Phil - December 17th, 2009 8:30 am
Wheee - this is fun!
Everything went according to plan yesterday as the very fake pre-market pump I warned you about in the morning post very quickly turned into a day of carnage for the markets. Sure we only ended up down 10 points, but it was down 100 from the open.
Fortunately, we have learned how to ride this bull and we grabbed the DIA $105 puts at a .55 average per my 9:47 Alert to Members and we cashed those out at .90 (up 63%) in the afternoon. We also had a quick 20% winner on Dec QID calls and we kept the Jan QIDs as our continuing bearish bet as we didn’t want to risk a possible overnight pump job taking the markets back up with open Dec calls. Still, we weren’t worried enough to cover our longer DIA puts so we were very bearish but, as I said yesterday: "We have neglected to do is play the futures pump for the past week as we keep expecting something very bad to happen and boy would we feel silly if we were just 55% bearish when this house of cards comes tumbling down."
It has been volume, volume, volume that kep me questioning the rallies this year - the fact that all the up moves come on very thin volume (ie. manipulated) while all day long the insiders sell to the suckers who are draw in by the futures action and stick saves (it’s a team effort). This chart from Ron Greiss illustrates what’s wrong with our rally on a more macro level:
While we are certainly not ready to do a bearish victory dance on this tiny little correction, we certainly feel a heck of a lot better about our decision to stay bearish. In addition to adding bearish DIA and QID plays yesterday, we (of course) added more SRS at our target bottom, took the money and ran on EWJ, shorted XTO (rumors XOM may walk), got more UUP and shorted V. Our long covers were TOL and the VIX but it was a very bearish day of picks, especially considering our already bearish stance (see Weekend Wrap-Up - Too Bearish or Just too Early?).
Also a little too early was our positioning for an up move in the Dollar, which began in early November when I wrote a lengthy article on the Dollar, Gold, Oil, The CRB and the Fed and why I felt we were reaching the…
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Wells Fargo Put Spreaders Back in Town
by Andrew Wilkinson - November 11th, 2009 4:27 pm
Today’s tickers: WFC, AMR, PG, DRYS, DTV, M, EMC, WYNN, TOL & SFD
WFC - Wells Fargo & Co. – A popular option strategy frequently employed on Wells Fargo, the ratio put spread, appeared once again in the January 2010 contract. The bearish play was initiated despite the more than 2% rally in shares during the trading session to $28.75. The ratio spread involved the purchase of 7,500 puts at the January 27.5 strike for an average premium of 1.60 apiece, marked against the sale of 15,000 puts at the lower January 24 strike for 67 cents each. The net cost of the protective play amounts to 26 cents per contract. Thus, downside protection will kick in if shares decline beneath the breakeven price of $27.24 by expiration in January.
AMR - AMR Corp. – American Airlines operator, AMR Corp., attracted a large bullish play by one investor targeting the January 2010 contract. Shares of AMR are up more than 4% to $5.83 with just under one hour remaining in the trading day. An AMR-optimist initiated a call spread by purchasing 15,000 calls at the January 7.5 strike for an average premium of 35 cents each, marked against the sale of 15,000 calls at the higher January 9.0 strike for 10 cents premium apiece. The net cost of the bullish transaction amounts to 25 cents per contract. Profits are available to the call-spreader if shares of AMR rally at least 33% to breach the breakeven point at $7.75 by expiration. Maximum potential profits of 1.25 per contract for a total of $1.875 million are attained by the trader if shares surge 54% to $9.00.
PG - The Proctor & Gamble Co. – Options activity in the January 2011 contract on the consumer products company today indicates one investor expects little fluctuation in shares over the next 14 months. Shares of PG are slightly up by less than 0.25% to stand at $61.90. The trader initiated a sold strangle by selling 2,000 puts at the January 60 strike for 5.73 each, and by selling 2,000 calls at the higher January 65 strike for a premium of 3.82 apiece. The gross premium pocketed on the sale amounts to 9.55 per contract. The strangle-seller retains the full premium if shares of PG remain ‘strangled’ within the parameters of the strike prices described. The investor will benefit from lower option implied volatility on the stock, as well as from the…
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Wild Weekly Wrap-Up - August in Retrospect
by Phil - August 29th, 2009 8:28 am
It has been a crazy few weeks!
I went back over our Long Shots list from August 9th, thinking all our picks must be doing great but really only C, with a 67% gain, is really outperforming. Long spreads on UYG and BHI are on target for nice gains but haven’t moved much. Looking at our original picks in Pharmboys Phavorites from the same week, GSK is on track and up nicely already, our AZN cover is up 45% and MRK flew up 19% already. On the riskier Biotech side, ARIA’s stock is up 16% and our spreads are all performing well, ONTY has been flat, OGXI is up 33% and the Jan $17.50s are up a rockin’ 63% with that "cautious" spread up a surprising 75% already.
SPPI had a wild ride (as we predicted with TSCM’s failed assassination attempt) and the buy/write is already up 24%, the Feb vertical is up 50% and the naked Jan put sale is up 27% and our Feb hedge play is right on track so all good there and a fine example of how following Cramer and his lackeys and and doing the opposite of what they say can be very profitable! Congrats to Pharmboy for a very fine set of picks, proving once again that there is room for research and fundamentals - not a single loser in the bunch in a choppy market! It was very timely as I had mentioned just that week in my interview with AOL Finance that XLV was my favorite sector and our IHI pick of 8/10 is up 28% on the naked Feb $45 put sale while the Feb $45 calls have already jumped 16%. It was a great call as IHI outperformed XLV and all our major indexes.
So our energy service pick (BHI) and overall financial pick (UYG) have not done much in 3 weeks and those were our leading sectors into my call to cash out our exposed long calls on Aug 13th, ahead of expirations. The Dow was at 9,400 on that day and now, a bit more than 2 weeks later, we’ve gained another 144 points but to listen to the MSM, you would think you are missing the rally of the century the past couple of weeks. This is one of the reasons I’ve gotten a bit more cynical about the rally - there is so much hype and so little actual progress, something must be wrong.
Back on Thursday, Aug 6th,…
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GDPhursday - Jobs, What Jobs?
by Phil - August 27th, 2009 8:24 am
Does it matter if we have a good GDP and no jobs?
That’s a question that will have to be considered today as the powers that be try to make a big deal of the fact that we are getting worse more slowly, even as the Q2 GDP report is expected to be 60% WORSE (-1.6%) than last quarter (-1%). It’s very possible we get a small beat today (it will be tragic if we don’t) as crude oil prices jumped 25% in May and June (forcing Americans to spend money - yay GDP!) and exports nearly doubled, non-defense capital goods gained about 5% and, of course, the stock market jumped 15%. In the 3 months of Q2 we lost 1.3M jobs and the average workweek for those lucky enough to still be working dropped by 4% AND their pay dropped 1.5% but hey, who cares, AIG’s stock is up!
My daughter has it all figured out, she lost a tooth last night and got a visit from the tooth fairy and at breakfast she was speculating that the little pixie is probably using all those teeth to build houses for homeless people. I didn’t have the heart to tell here that, at $5 per tooth, it was probably cheaper to stick with lumber but she may be on to something as TOL blew through $472M in their last quater, losing $2.93 a share on the sale of just 792 homes in the entire United States of America (about 5 homes per month per state). That’s almost 100 Million teeth! Maybe my daughter is onto something with this tooth house idea as clearly the wooden ones can’t be sold profitably…
TOL isn’t the only one running on empty last quarter. We all know that the GDP is currently being boosted by the largest government stimulus package in history. Government spending this year is trending to 30% of GDP, that compares to 12% at the height of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Of course we don’t actually HAVE 30% of the GDP - we were running a huge deficit before the government had to jump in to "help" and we are now borrowing almost 40% of our spending and really we’re borrowing 62.5% of what we spend because WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED to be using Social Security and Medicare money to pay for current programs.
That of course, went out the window when we gave George Bush II the keys to Al Gore’s lock box but no…
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Weekly Wrap Up
by Phil - April 5th, 2009 7:32 pm
Another week, another 5% gain - isn’t the stock market easy?
We’ve gained 1,400 points in 4 weeks from our March 9th low of 6,600 - pretty impressive on the whole - but we have suffered a serious decrease in upward momentum since March 23rd, when we finished at 7,775. That’s 1,175 points in 10 sessions followed by just 225 over the next 9. It’s a little hard to reconcile this very toppy sort of action with the "bull market" mania that has swept the media this past week. We’ve been bracing ourselves for a slap of cold water all week that never really came although this weekend the WSJ ran this nasty unemployment graph along with an article titled: "Time to Brace for Trouple as Profits Debacle Starts" which reminds us why we went into the weekend 55% bearish.
In last weekend’s post I warned: "Don’t forget I was looking for something like a 5% pullback and "all" we got was 2.5% so far" and it only took minutes out of the gate on Monday morning to give us the rest of that 5%. I reposted our target levels on Monday morning of Dow 7,636, S&P 805, Nas 1,525, NYSE 5,075 and Russell 420, which were well tested Monday and Tuesday until we got a proper breakout on Wednesday morning.
I was actually more optimistic on Monday than I am today as Monday our plan was we were hoping to hold our pullback levels and form a base we could build off. The problem was the way we did rally made no sense - we didn’t climb a wall of worry - we climbed a wall of ACTUAL bad news that gave us brand new reasons to worry. While the difference may sound subtle - it’s actually a big deal! As a UBS economist I quoted in Monday’s post said: "he housing market isn’t about to start booming, but the intensity of the pain will probably recede." This is the result of our abusive relationship with the markets as they declined over 50% in 6 months - the mere absence of pain is treated as pleasure.
We had 4 new trade ideas from the Weekend Reading post in HIG, ING, FXE and BLK with all but HIG solidly performing already. As with most of our stock entries, we have been hedging with puts and calls sold against to insulate us from another downturn - just in case… Monday we got…
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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
(