Monday Mop-Up

Oh, so close!

We had it for a while on the S&P but there were too many Nervous Nellys out there (myself included) taking profits off the table to sustain the all-time high on the S&P.  Cramer got on TV tonight to tell his minions to BUYBUYBUY pretty much anything that wasn't nailed down, targeting another 1,000 points for the Dow by the year's end.  This is roughly in-line with less exact prediction of 15,000 by next summer but I'm still looking for a pullback along the way – Jimbo doesn't seem to believe in them.

I should be nice to Cramer though as he's got a great idea to do a "Daily Show"-style financial report, which I would love to work on so be careful if I start saying nice things about him as I may just be sucking up for a job!

He is right about AXP though (see, it's happening already!) and I've been moaning about it for quite some time as it has failed to keep pace with MA and, to me, is a better product.  Let's see if the power of Cramer can compel AXP to break out over $65 and I'm willing to give the July $67.50s a look at .75 and we'll thin about selling the June $65s if the market fades (currently .90) but we'll find out if Cramer's still has his stuff and can get us over the $65 mark this week.

Forget the Dow though, the Nasdaq made a very impressive power move today, which was ignored by everyone except Happy Trading, who sees even better days ahead:

I couldn't bring myself to add oil positions today as it jumped up another $1.33 but I did double down on most of the existing positions.  The July contract will open at $66.87 today and Brent Crude is holding $70 over in Europe and, for some reason, the markets don't seem bothered by this.  Rather than roll contracts of WTIC to July the NYMEX traders bit the bullet and cancelled 200M barrels of oil. leaving "just" 350M open barrels for July delivery, our lowest start since December. 

While you might think it's strange that NYMEX traders want less oil in the summer than they do in the winter that's because you think that the goal of the oil market is to supply you with oil rather than to create artificial shortages.  Here's a simple question Congress can ask energy traders:  You had valid contracts to have over 400M barrels of oil to be delivered in June at $60.85 on May 7th yet, with oil at $67 per barrel on May 21st, you have cancelled all but 57,000 of those contracts – please explain.

Once they explain that they can then explain why the BKX pulled back so hard in the morning, one would think brokers would love S&P 1,525.  Still, we got just the leadership we always wanted from the Nasdaq and the Russell but we forgot our SOX, which held 490 but fell 7 points in the afternoon:

We picked up a green on the Transports and the S&P moved to it's midpoint for our next goal.  The NYSE is tantalizingly close to 10,000 so we just need a strong move from the Russell and the SOX to kick us onto a new chart – I can see why Cramer is getting so excited!

We'll be excited too if we get some confirmation of the Dow's move but right now we're just hanging out and picking up a few positions and having fun day trading.  We caught GSK (thanks Kustomz) early in the drop today and, after taking half off the table, we have a free ride on our remaining puts and we had very good timing getting in GOOG July $490s at 2:04 and selling GOOG June $470s at  3:07 (thanks Phil and Happy) and buying them back at 3:45 for a very nice day's gain: