Monday Madness – G20 FinMins Set Two Week Deadline
by Phil - October 17th, 2011 8:01 am
Two weeks!
European leaders have two weeks to settle differences and flesh out a strategy to terminate their sovereign debt crisis as global finance chiefs warn failure to do so would endanger the world economy. “The risk of a recession would be increased dramatically were the Europeans to fail to accomplish goals that they’ve set for themselves,” Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said after the G-20 meeting on Saturday.
The Brussels meeting “has the potential to turn into a positive historic moment,” Joachim Fels, London-based chief economist at Morgan Stanley, wrote in a note to clients yesterday. “But it could also easily turn into a negative catalyst.”
Europe’s plan, which has still to be made public, includes writing down Greek bonds by as much as 50 percent, establishing a backstop for banks and magnifying the strength of the 440 billion-euro ($611 billion) temporary rescue fund known as the European Financial Stability Facility. “The plan has the right elements,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in Paris. “They clearly have more work to do on the strategy and the details.”
The G-20 officials — who met to prepare for a Nov. 3-4 gathering of leaders in Cannes, France (and we’re fondly remembering London’s 2009 meeting with the graphic on the right) — said in a statement that the world economy faces “heightened tensions and significant downside risks.” European authorities must “decisively address the current challenges through a comprehensive plan.”
The policy makers held out the possibility of rewarding European action with more aid from the International Monetary Fund, while splitting over whether the Washington-based lender’s $390 billion war chest needs topping up. Europe’s latest strategy hinges on putting Greece, whose government forecasts its debt to reach 172 percent of gross domestic product in 2012, on a sustainable path. Austerity has plunged the country deeper into recession and provoked civil unrest that threatens political stability.
My reaction to this in Member Chat this Morning was to call for shorting the jacked up Dow Futures (/YM) at 11,600, saying:
Speaking of the illusion of power – yet another G20 meeting ends with yet another plan to have a plan but this time, for some insane reason, they only gave themselves a week to fix everything. I’ll be writing about this this morning but the gist of it is the Finance Ministers have essentially sent their own
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DiggF’ing Thursday – Give Us a Break!
by Phil - August 11th, 2011 8:30 am
Holy cow – when will it end?
As I mentioned yesterday, we were expecting a whipsaw after the morning sell-off and we played that perfectly with bullish trades on the DIA and OIH and, as we move up, we took bearish plays on GLL, TZA and QQQ. All good so far but then we did a little bottom fishing before wising up and shorting USO into the close – just in case. The futures were up 2% this morning at 5am and I had to warn our Members:
Overall, this is too weak to get us over the hump and we are going to have to lean a little more bearish unless we can follow Europe up 2.5% or more. Our charts will turn from "spiking low on volume" to "consolidating for a move below 20%" very quickly if we don’t gets something bullish going by tomorrow.
The Dollar was at 74.64 at the time and it’s only 75.04 now (7:50) but the futures have gone from up 2% to down 1% in less than 3 hours – that is insane! How are retail investors supposed to play this market? The average person does not have the stomach for watching their virtual portfolio’s value go up and down 5% a day – at some point they are all going to pull the plug and walk away. Of course, as I was saying yesterday – that’s just what the Banksters want you to do, assuming they know QE3 is right around the corner, accompanied by a 20%+ market rally into the year’s end.
Anyway, hope is NOT a strategy for the prudent investor so I published another set of Disaster Hedges this morning as it’s time to add a layer to our longer hedges (which are now deeply in the money). I hate to chase these plays but one thing we learned in 2008 is that there may never be a bottom (not in the short run) no matter how oversold you think things may be. Was the market wrong in 2008 to go below S&P 1,000? Well 3 years of subsequent trading seem to indicate that it was – but that did not stop us from dropping 33% lower, to 666 (the mark of the Blankfein!).
Our entire goal in a sell-off like this is to simply preserve our cash. The lower we…
Fully “Fixed” Friday – Extend and Pretend Edition
by Phil - July 22nd, 2011 8:22 am
All fixed!
Greece is getting another $229Bn at 3.5% with about 30 years to pay it from the EU (ie. Germany and France) and private bond-holders will share about 1/3 of the pain by "voluntarily" renegotiating their own notes. Sounds like a really great offer, right? BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Another $630Bn of already promised emergency aid has now been places into a very slushy fund that will now allow the EU to throw money at any nation that so much as sneezes – WHETHER OR NOT THEY ASK FOR ASSISTANCE. This will allow them to play economic Whack-A-Mole, putting out all the little Euro-zone fires until that money runs out (about 6 months at the EU’s current burn rate).
All this fantastic news from Europe has sent the Dollar down to test the 74 line and that was down from 75.37 just ahead of yesterday’s open and that’s a 1.8% drop so we would expect our indexes to go up at least 1.8% – BUT – none of them did. In fact, the Nasdaq only gained 0.72% and the Russell was up 1.07% and the Dow was up 1.21% and the S&P was up 1.35%. The NYSE, which had been our perennial laggard, did the best yesterday – gaining a close, but still no cigar 1.57%.
Will we make it up today or is this an indication that things may not be quite so good as they seem? After the close yesterday, I did a news round-up for our Members and there is still plenty to worry about and we took a stab at some SPY Weekly (today) $135 puts at .79 for our aggressive $25K Virtual Portfolio on the off-chance they "fix" the US debt ceiling and accidentally make the Dollar strong again. At the moment, we are still playing our short lines in the futures, where we’ve been scalping nickels and dimes since my 3:23 am Alert to Members (if you are not a Member, you can sign up here), where I said:
I like shorting the Futures here: S&P (/ES) at 1,346, Nas (/NQ) 2,415, Dow (/YM) 12,720 and Rut (/TF) 842.6 – as long as 74.20 hold on the Dollar, we should get a bit of a sell off so these are levels to look for as the Dollar heads back over that line but we can scale
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Make Billion$ With StockTwits (and Win a Free Quarter!)
by Phil - July 9th, 2011 4:34 pm
Billions!
That’s right, if you followed Philstockworld on Stocktwits this past month and followed our trade ideas, you could have made Billions of Dollars. Not bad but that’s only a tiny portion of what you get at PSW every day. Needless to say, we’ve had a good month but it’s no fun being right if nobody knows it so let’s review a month of Tweets and also make it worth your while to send others to Our StockTwits Link and follow us there.
For the month of July, every new follower will be entered in a random drawing and one will be selected to win a free 1-year subscription to the PSW Report – our twice-daily Email that gives you access to all of our non-Premium posts as well as Stock World Weekly. If you are already a paying PSW subscriber and win this drawing, we will give you a 3-month extension of your Current Membership Level instead added to your current subscription.
If you are a Member and your friends subscribe and tweet us your name – one of those named members will also be the winner of a 3-month extension of that member’s current level. The more friends you have, the better the chances to win!
We’re doing this because we need to build up our social networking presence so I’ve been tweeting more in June. You can go to our StockTwits site and see all 45 Tweets posted since June 1st (there are many also before that) but I’m just going to review the ones that were less generic (we auto-tweet my posts) to give you an idea of what kind of value your friends can get out of this free service:
philstockworld Phil Davis
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Stock World Weekly: Fireworks! Our 12 Dow Plays Make $6,720 in 2 Weeks!
by SWW - July 3rd, 2011 11:54 am
$6,720!
Not bad for our little newsletter… On June 19th, we published this list of 12 bullish trade ideas on the Dow in the weekend edition of Stock World Weekly that are already up $6,720 in just two weeks! How’s that for value?
The July $119/116 bear put spread was still at .90 on Monday, well after we flipped bullish (the "Bernanke Bottom" was called by Phil on Thursday Morning, June 22nd and reported in last week’s SWW) so a nickel loss on that side (5% or $50 on 10 contracts), which was well offset by the following gains:
- AA July $15 puts sold for $0.63, now $0.09 - up $540 (85%)
- BAC 2013 $7.50 puts sold for $0.60, now $0.61 – down $10 (1.6%)
- CSCO Jan $14 puts sold for $0.92, now $0.60 - up $320 (34%)
- DIS July $37 puts sold for $0.55, now $0.06 – up $490 (89%)
- GE 2013 $15 puts sold for $1.40, now $1.16 – up $240 (17%)
- HD Aug $32 puts sold for $0.82, now $0.17 – up $650 (79%)
- HPQ Jan $31 puts sold for $1.60, now $0.93 – up $670 (41%)
- INTC Jan 2013 $20 puts sold for $2.71, now $2.24 – up $470 (17%)
- MMM July $87.50 puts sold for $0.71, now $0.07 - up $640 (90%)
- MSFT 2013 $22.50 puts sold for $2.75, Now $1.94 - up $810 (29%)
- VZ 2013 $35 puts sold for $5.10, now $3.82 – up $1,280 (25%)
- WMT Jan $50 puts sold for $2.05, now $1.43 – up $620 (30%
That’s a total profit of $6,720 on these 12 positions in just two weeks. As our daily readers know, Phil called for cash on Friday so short-term bullish plays like these were taken off the table as we flirt with potential disaster next week.
If, however, the weekend goes smoothly and the markets maintain their bullish bent – we have all this lovely cash to deploy next week (and there are two brand new bullish trade ideas in this weekend’s edition of Stock World Weekly) and that BAC play still hasn’t made it’s money yet while GE is up "just" 17% so far – so both of those trade ideas are still ripe for new entries but, as Phil likes to say:
"Never worry about getting back to cash – I’m sure we’ll find something to trade tomorrow."
Click here for the latest Stock World Weekly: Fireworks
We hope you and your family have a very happy holiday weekend.
All the best,
Ilene & Elliot
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Thursday Thump – The Bernanke Bottom
by Phil - June 23rd, 2011 8:28 am
Well that didn’t take long, did it?
On Tuesday I suggested selling into the day’s rally, saying: "so it’s back to cash as we wait for the crash" and it wasn’t a very long wait as the Greek euphoria wore off quickly and there was nothing from yesterday’s FOMC statement (see Member Chat for details) or Bernanke’s press conference that was supportive for the bulls. In fact, I sent out a Member Alert on the Fed statement right at 12:38 warning: "Dollar poking back over 75 but little reaction overall but this is bearish with the Fed recognizing inflation in their changed language (no QE3)." That led us to grab the QQQ weekly $55 puts at 12:39 for just .30 and they finished the day up 55%.
Of course we had to shake off the fake rally first as the markets topped out around 2:20 but, fortunately, we called that right too as I said to Members: "Fake rally – Sure, what do the minutes say that is bullish? The Fed recognized that inflation is taking hold, they do not intend to extend QE2 and they are downgrading their view on the economy. WHERE’S THE BEEF?" In that comment we also hit the SCO July $46/50 bull call spread at $2, selling USO Aug $35 puts for .96 for a net $1.04 entry on the $4 spread. With USO taking a dive today (but just down to $36.50), SCO should be flying well over $50 – see how that works?
Of course our real play of the day was my morning call to short oil again as they tested the $95 line. At 2pm in Member Chat, ahead of The Bernank (and again at 2:31, while he was speaking), I reiterated the Futures Short to Members at the $95.50 line and we got a drop all the way to $94 last night but it didn’t stop there and this morning we’re down to $92.50.
I don’t advocate holding oil Futures overnight so we’ll just call that a $1.50 win on 345,000 contracts for $517.5M of potential gains so congrats to those who got their share (at a rate of $1,500 per contract!) as we continue to stick it to the bastards at the NYMEX by calling their bluff when they pretend to want to buy barrels for inflated prices.
We added the…
Testy Tuesday – Dow 12,000 or Dow 11,500?
by Phil - June 14th, 2011 8:26 am
Are we "still too heavy"?
That was what I said about valuations back on May 4th, when we set new watch levels. $96 was our goal on oil, we hit that and went long yesterday. Of course, in our upside-down Wonderland Market, falling oil prices are somehow BAD for the Transports and we thought we accounted for that with our 2,448 target but they failed that last week and fell another 125 (5%) since then. Similarly (easier to write than say), the Nasdaq blew through our 2,700 line and bottomed out at 2,639 yesterday (-2.25%) but the Russell has been the biggest surprise, leading us all the way down to 773 in yesterday’s action before bouncing back to lucky 777.
As we expected yesterday, the Dollar was sacrificed on the altar of keeping the markets from going to Hell in a handbasket – dropping all the way from 75.20 to 74.80 (0.5%) which gave us only a flat market but the 74.60 line held in overnight and we’re back to 74.80 and now the pre-markets are wondering why they gained 0.75% in overnight trading. Oil popped all the way back to $97.80 before failing spectacularly back to $96.50 but we have stayed on the sidelines so far, waiting to see if we can establish a new (hopefully lower) range to trade in.
We did take a poke at higher oil prices with the USO July $39 calls at $1.10 and they finished the day right at $1.10 so very dull so far but we figured oil might be good for a pop into Wednesday’s inventories. We also shed most of our bearish bets on yesterday’s dip and flipped fairly bullish but we haven’t done a lot of bottom fishing yet as our main plan is to use a fake market rally to cash out the longs we have left and flip short into the holiday weekend. As the moment though, I have noticed that the Dow has been holding up much better than it’s peers and we have that lovely 12,000 line to use as a stop so let’s construct a short hedge that pays big bucks below 12,000:
Notice how the Dow is holding up better than the other indices. Part of that is a flight to safety as several Dow components are considered "safety stocks" like KFT, MCD, JNJ… But, in the long haul, they all fall down eventually so we…
Wednesday: Wiping Out All of 2011′s Gains!
by Phil - June 8th, 2011 7:54 am
S&P 1,260. That’s the line we need to hold.
That’s where we started the Year on January 3rd and we finished that day at 1,271, beginning a fine tradition of making almost all of our gains on the first day of the month, continuing a very disturbing (and very fake) year-long trend that I am calling "sell the next day (of the month) and go away." (chart by Bespoke).
Notice that this trend became very disturbing at the same time Uncle Ben announced his fabulous QE2 plan that showered money on his fellow Banksters according to a nice, predictable schedule that allowed them to lever up their investments to inflate stocks and commodities, trapping index fund investors (especially the working poor who make monthly contributions to IRA and 401K accounts in a nice, predictable and controllable fashion). It’s a simple plan, index fund managers get your pension money at the end of the month, they are required to buy baskets of stocks to balance their funds and that action can be manipulated by clever bankers who jack up the prices and then sell into the fake demand they created – effectively stealing tens of Billions each month out of the paychecks of working Americans. Just another one of those great crimes they commit where they steal a little bit of money from everyone, every day.
Speaking of robbing from the rich to give to the poor (see "The Dooh Nibor Economy"), it’s time we said happy 10th anniversary to the Bush/Obama tax cuts that have, as Barry Ritholtz put it: "driven the balanced budget he inherited from President Clinton deep into the red." So deep in the red, in fact, that even now Congress is still debating about extending the $14.5Tn deficit that the Congressional Budget Office says will double over the next 10 years if these cuts remain in place.
That’s right, those same tax cuts that are "off the table" in negotiations in Congress are, other than war spending, the sole cause of our nation’s deficit. This country does not have a spending problem, it has a collecting problem! As Mike Konczal, a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, noted: "It’s not like this has unleashed a wave of productivity, or better incentives, or increased work output. It’s mostly just rich people got a lot more money."
According to Citizens for…
Bullish Player Picks Up Verizon Call Spread
by Option Review - April 27th, 2011 4:19 pm
Today’s tickers: VZ, ALR, SIMG & NXPI
VZ - Verizon Communications, Inc. – Activity in Verizon LEAPS suggests one strategist is positioning for shares in the communications company to trade at a substantially higher price by expiration in January 2013. Verizon’s shares are currently up 1.75% today to stand at $38.29 as of 12:15pm in New York. The stock is hovering just $0.66 below its 52-week high of $38.95 this afternoon, one day before Apple’s white iPhone 4 comes out. The phone will sell for a suggested retail price of $199 for the 16gb model at Verizon wireless stores in addition to AT&T stores and Apple’s online store. In VZ options, it looks like one bullish player purchased a call spread, picking up 4,000 deep in-the-money calls at the Jan. 2013 $35 strike at a premium of $4.86 each, and selling the same number of calls up at the Jan. 2013 $45 strike for a premium of $1.11 apiece. Net premium paid to initiate the spread amounts to $3.74 per contract, and positions the investor to make money above a breakeven share price of $38.74 through expiration in more than one year. Maximum potential profits of $6.26 per contract are available to the call-spreader should shares in VZ surge 17.5% over the next 20 months to exceed $45.00 at expiration. Verizon’s shares last traded above $45.00 back in December 2007.
ALR - Alere, Inc. – The Waltham, MA-based medical supplies company with a focus in women’s health popped up on our scanners today after one trader initiated a large-volume spread in the January 2012 contract. Alere’s shares are down 2.6% at $37.57 just before 12:45pm. The company posted first-quarter earnings of $0.61 a share, which met analyst expectations, ahead of the opening bell this morning. It appears the investor responsible for…
Mega-Merger Monday – T Can Be “Heard Now” by 40%
by Phil - March 21st, 2011 7:47 am
Didn’t we break these guys up?
Oh anti-trust, anti-trust, wherefore art thou anti-trust? Don’t get me wrong, I love T as an investment, we just made a play on them last week with their big, fat, 6% dividend. Now they are using debt to finance a $39Bn purchase of DT’s T-Mobile division as the German-based company is sick and tired of getting paid in worthless dollars, which add nothing to their Euro-based earnings. Although one may think regulators would actually wake up and say "Huh?" to this deal – AT&T was confident enough to put up a $3Bn breakup fee and you don’t do something like that unless you’ve already spent $300M buying all the votes you need ahead of time.
"AT&T anticipates regulators will require it to divest wireless spectrum and subscribers as a condition for approval," said a person with knowledge of the situation. These things are all worked out long before they are announced but let’s hear it from the little guy anyway: "The combination of the second-largest wireless carrier with the fourth-largest is ‘unthinkable’,” Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a Washington-based advocacy group, said in a statement. “We know the results of arrangements like this — higher prices, fewer choices, less innovation.” Isn’t he cute?
In addition to surpassing Verizon Wireless, AT&T could leave Sprint Nextel Corp. (S) as a far weaker No. 3 player in the industry, said Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst for Stifel Nicolaus & Co. in Washington. “AT&T was broken up and now it’s back with a vengeance,” said Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, a Washington-based non-profit researcher that challenges what it sees as abuses of concentrated economic power. “We have to decide if we’re happy with the idea of going back to monopolistic treatment of the telecom industry. AT&T has come back to monopolistic power just like the Terminator.”
Is T calling a bottom to the dollar? Probably. You don’t spend $39Bn to buy a 40% market share in a country with declining revenues. T is also calling a bottom to lending rates and probably making a bet on inflation as well – all in all, pretty much exactly what we’re playing the market for so, from a T shareholder perspective – I love this acquisition. Nothing makes money like a monopoly (just ask Carlos Slim) and, as Steve Colbert illustrates above, AT&T has…
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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
(