Phil - Rode the /QM down from 99.65 at 7pm and now I'm taking your advice, taking the $$ and going to enjoy a restful night sleep. I don't post often so I want to say thanks for sharing your incredible market acumen with all of us. Your site has a unusually talented group of investors (and some characters) and I enjoy my days trading more because of it.
DaveW
I've recently done exactly what Phil described. I upgraded my ability to trade the IRA acct. by transferring acct. from TDA to TOS. TDA would not allow spreads; TOS does. Neither will allow naked options. With spreads I am able to buy calls or puts several months out then sell front month calls or puts over and over. This allows me to collect premium, which is, of course, the goal. This wasn't an original idea. Phil put me onto it. Since the transfer I've substantially increased my performance in the IRA!
Iflantheman
Phil: UNH, hedged stock position, doing great, up over 50 %,
RMM
Thanks for the USO mention, Phil, 140% on my USO lottery ticket in 12 hours, and no hesitation in taking the money and running — you have trained us well. Sometimes it's teaching, but with this kind of stuff, where you get whipped like a dog if you let 250% profit melt away, it's definitely training. Happy Fourth!!!
Zeroxzero
Don't expect to get rich quick here, but you can get easy 30 - 50 % per year, just by buying good stocks at discount (as we often discuss), selling monthly premiums of calls and puts.
Tchayipov
Thx Phil. Lightly moving in the bullish direction. Took PFE for $14.35 and sold the Jan 11 C/P for $2.85 giving me a net entry below Mar 09 low. And I bought back those calls on BTU and JPM I asked about the other day and am leaving them uncovered for now, so feeling better. Still just learning the rhythm.
In the three months I have been using your system, my little portfolio is up 9.9%, so not only am I learning, but I am APPLYING that knowledge, and it's paying off. Thanks.
Hoss
1,000% on SKF - It was a freakin' monster into the center field bleachers! I saw it play out live and squawked it from the StockTwits ID which 14k people follow: Home run trade of the week @philstockworld just knocked cover off ball w $SKF puts. http://bit.ly/piBL Great trade bud!
Phil Pearlman - StockTwits
I have to thank you for excelling yourself during this past week. I have spent a good few hours going over your notes and comments and there are so many gems on repairing and rolling trades that I have been beavering away on paying special attention to my major positions and analysing them using your approach on Tuesday. Being able to look at a group of trades on the same underlying (in this case AAPL) and taking a detached view by assessing the impact of the underlying reaching different price points was extremely reassuring.
Winston
Phil, I've got to give you props on the ICE spread play. Tremendous call! I jumped in on Friday when you made the recommendation and closed out today. Nice 57% return ($2,300) over a mere 3 trading days! This is why I dig your site!
Samlawyer
Boring trading – Phil/ Thanks to PSW, my yearly covered-writes are on pace for 15%. Add the long puts and well over 20%… and I look at it once a day and never lose sleep over it. Actually doing better than my trading account at this point (Thanks, summer 2013)
Anyway, the point is that anyone with enough money would be wise to do the 20% – 40% stuff and do trading as a hobby…
Arivera
I love it when a trade really comes together. After 4 DD's and a roll, I cashed out 16 times my initial position in TLT today for a 140% gain. Thank you Phil for the lessons in scaling in, and paying for position.
2Can
thanks for the DNDN recommendation last week phil. that was moneeeee….
Kwan
Hello Phil,
Thanks for the heads up on the comming sell off on friday, and the bs job yesterday. your our guiding light!
Microflux
PSW AC Conf: For those who may be on the bubble, I attended my first PSW LV in November. It was a real eye-opener. What I accomplished in a couple of days of exposure to Phil, Pharm, Craig, et al made my previous couple of years of hanging around the web site seem silly. If you are inclined in the slightest, you really should go. Just rubbing shoulders with other PSW members proved to be really valuable. Strictly on the basis of value, it's a great deal. You will have real time conversations with Phil and the gang and they will get to your questions and agenda items.
Mjjwo9b
I have learned more about options in the past 2 weeks as a full PSW member that the previous 5 yrs of making more bad than good option plays. The educational material alone is worth several times the price of admission. I have had an expensive education on what not to do- what is past is past- I am looking forward to profitable/fun future.
Pstas
Just closed out my V put for 50% in 24 hours thanks Phil!
Humvee
Brilliant covering of the arcane, the profane , but never the mundane!
Easy to understand the reason for your huge following, Phil, and why you have become a must read on my daily agenda. Please accept my complete appreciation.
Seeking Truth
Great calls this week!
SNS1
Phil.... I remember back in March of '09, you stated " Unless you think the country is going to hell in a hand-basket, NOW is the time to do your buying". Do you remember ?
I took your advice, and bought leap $2.00 calls on F, approximately 200,000 shares using the options, for just pennies. Now that was the best Ford I ever owned.... made over $1 mil - thanks go to you Phil. I now drive a Mercedes but still "love" the Ford.
1234Gel
Phil, have to thank you for saving me today. I think the discipline I have learned from this site has helped me as much if not more than the actual picks.
Rustle123
GLD I took out my callers and rolled down my longs this morning, woo hoo!
Ephmen85
I really would like to meet all of the posters here who seem like an intriguing bunch of intelligent, opinionated (without being obnoxious or condescending most of the time), and well spoken people. Not so easy to find in this age of instant gratification and me first attitudes. Usually this results in groups where misinformation is used to gain an advantage, or whatever it takes to beat the other guys. I love the one for all, all for one vibe here, sharing your best ideas and helping each other work together for a common goal, to be successful investors!
craigsa620
Gel1…..I've been here 6 months, mostly watching and learning. Lots of smart people on the site and I've learned a lot from Phil and many others. //// Inflan - I have to trump your sentiments regarding the wisdom of the board. I have to thank Phil and the many contruibutors for a 80% profit for 2009. I have learned a lot and am still learning ( even occasionally about political issues - ha! )
Iflantheman & Gel1
Here I have learned and look differently at things. Over the years being with PSW I have first of all learned and gained in knowledge of trading. This to me is one of the biggest gains. I still remember the play on Caesar Palace, paid my trip to Atlanta!
Yodi
New members – a word of advice: you should check out the track record of Phil's last few trades of the year, and what the return would be if you just rolled all the gains into the next years trade of the year. Remember – trade of the year is one he's virtually sure of, and he rarely misses on those
Deano
Phil / TNA – On Monday you put out the TNA BCS 41/47. As I mentioned I work during market hours so on Tuesday morning on my way out the door (premarket) I put in an advanced TOS '1st trigger sequence' order to fill the BCS. I can control the entry using this method vs. the vertical entry that TOS allows for the BCS. I filled the June 41 long call but never filled the 47 short call. I let that ride into today. OMG ..TNA popped 7.5%!… the $3.60 entry is almost a double! Tomorrow will be a OCO bracket to get out of TNA before Ben speaks. I should be able to preserve 85% – 100% on the trade. For the income portfolio plays in my IRA's, doing very well… I do like collecting premium! Well done and thanks!
JFawcett
WOW!!!!!!!!!!!! How will I ever do anything else in my life that will compare to the wild ride you get trading an ultra etf in the most volatile sector in the stock market the day before option expiration?
Matt1966
Personally I admire and respect you disciplined approach to investing. My style is at the extreme side of aggressive and I have to learn how to be less that way. If I yell " Let it Ride" at my house, no one says a word so I can't use that to temper my behavior. Phil has done a pretty good job of knocking some of my potential moves and as a result, I have increased my portfolio value by almost 25% since late July.
DoubleD
Simply the best blogger with the greatest group of members a person could surround himself with on trading day. I've been trading for quite some time now and the insights & suggestions offered by Phil and the members keep me on a continuous learning cycle.
DDay
I enjoy your informative materials, Phil... as it is obviously beneficial to so many "styles" of trading the markets... long term, swing or day trading the market moves.
As a longer term trader, I really like you long term calls, as I for one recognize the difficulty of calling these, because the further out you go in time, projecting price movement becomes more difficult.
I have to congratulate you for your accuracy... You called the March 2009 market upward reversal almost to the day, and the AAPL reversal to THE day. Only one who has been a student of the economy and the markets over a period of time could have done this, and so many other accurate calls. I'm sure it was difficult and consistent work, but it did pay off... thanks from one who benefited big time !
At the time of writing at least 100 people have lost their lives and a further 4,000 have been wounded following an explosion in the Port of Beirut. While the actual cause remains uncertain, the tragedy calls to attention the tremendous consequences of a lack of port security.
The explosion, on August 4, at around 6pm local time, appears to have been fuelled by 2,750 tons of the highly reactive chemical ammonium nitrate. The chemical had been the cargo on a ship, the the MV Rhosus, which entered the port at Beirut in 2013 due to a lack of seaworthiness and was prohibited from sailing. After the ship’s owner abandoned the vessel soon afterwards, the ammonium nitrate remained in a storage facility in Beirut’s port.
While the disaster itself was exceptional, the events leading up to it were not. Hazardous material is shipped across the world’s oceans on a daily basis. It is often mishandled or illegally traded. Abandoned containers of hazardous goods are found regularly in ports.
While maritime security tends to focus on preventing high-profile events such as piracy, terrorism or cyber-attacks, all too often it is daily mishandling that makes disasters possible. Part of preventing disasters such as what has happened in Beirut will mean strengthening port management and addressing crimes such as smuggling and corruption.
Abandoned ships
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has recorded 97 cases of abandoned ships and crews since 2017. Ships are abandoned by their owners if a vessel is no longer lucrative to maintain, or perhaps if the ship has been stopped by authorities and fined. While the situation of the seafarers aboard these ships is often tragic, as they may receive little pay or even food for months, what happens to the load of the vessels is often unclear.
And the IMO number only reflects the cases of ships – we know little about how many containers stand abandoned in…
Donald Trump’s threat to ban TikTok, a video sharing app owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, on August 1 is only the latest in a series of clashes between the US and China. With each of these events – from the US ban on telecoms company Huawei to the US response to events in Hong Kong and the continuing escalation of the trade war which stretches back formally to 2018 – one has to remember that there are several different conflicts taking place between the world’s largest and second-largest economies. It is important to work out which of these the TikTok issue belongs to.
Ostensibly, the main reason for a ban is national security concerns. Trump administration officials say TikTok could pose a security threat by giving the Chinese government access to vast amounts of US citizens’ data. Yet there is little evidence for these claims, nor how Trump’s proposed solution of selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft would solve the problem.
Similar issues were raised by the ban on Huawei, and the operations of other major Chinese corporates in the US. They even predate the Trump presidency, reaching back to the mid-2000s when Congress vetoed Chinese involvement in energy company Unocal, and raised questions about tech company Lenovo’s purchase of the US IBM ThinkPad brand.
A strange security risk
TikTok seems to pose a strange kind of security challenge, given that most of its content is silly viral video memes. With Huawei there were more complex matters to verify, such as how to check the reliability of its hardware. TikTok doesn’t involve these to such an extent. So why the focus on this company?
Reaching beyond the realm of security, therefore, we must venture into that of trade and technology. TikTok’s greatest problem is that it manifestly demonstrates Chinese success beyond the borders of China. This is not as common as it might seem. Chinese companies which are genuinely internationally successful are few and…
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other institutions recently published a study which estimated that the true number of people infected by COVID-19 could be six to 24 times higher than the number of confirmed cases. Melissa Hawkins, professor of public health at American University, explains what this large undercount means and why insufficient data is hampering the U.S.‘s ability to control the pandemic.
Melissa Hawkins explains the implications of the COVID-19 testing undercount.
What are some reasons for the large disparity between the true number of infected cases and the confirmed case count in the U.S.?
We just passed 4 million total confirmed cases and over 150,000 deaths. But those confirmed cases really only tell part of the story since we know the cases and deaths are undercounted due to lack of testing. Particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, only those with significant illness were tested and there were shortages and problems with the test.
We also know that there is a significant amount of asymptomatic spread that isn’t captured in those testing numbers, particularly in places that still lack access to widespread testing. Many researchers are attempting to model and estimate the true number of total cases and deaths. The CDC study that you’re citing – those estimates of a true infection rate range from eight to 10 times higher than the number of cases that are confirmed.
Were you surprised by the results of the study?
Testing is the foundation of a modern public health approach to controlling this virus. We have lots of tools in our tool kit, but at the very foundation is widespread testing. So is this surprise? No, because the U.S. has had problems with our testing from the very, very beginning and now we’re playing catch up.
Johnson & Johnson announced Wednesday that it will develop and deliver 100 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine for the U.S. in a deal totaling more than $1 billion.
The company’s experimental vaccine is currently in early-stage human trials and is expected to begin late-stage human trials in September, executives have previously said. The deal gives the U.S. the option to order an additional 200 million doses, according to the announcement.
This is really all that matters. Just about everything else is noise, because the virus being prevented will change it all. Therefore, if you just think and focus on this one thing, you’re saving yourself a lot of time.
There will now be a steady procession of vaccine related news each week into the actual FDA approval. My bet is that the first vaccine is approved this fall, before the election. I don’t know anything about vaccines but I know all I need to know about people and incentives.
Batches are already being produced for several of the leading vaccine candidates. Maybe more than one gets approved this year. You don’t need enough doses for everyone. You just need enough for people to feel like the problem has a solution.
The economy is going to roar if this happens. Roar. The stock market is sniffing this possibility out. So are the metals and other commodity prices.
If you’re hearing people saying boring, predictable things like “It’s going to be a long time before things get back to where they were blah blah blah” they’re absolutely clueless about how this stuff works. It’s not about the degree of recovery for the stock market, or some now-forgotten high watermark for a particular economic benchmark. Nobody gives a f*** about that. It’s DIRECTIONAL. That’s all that ever concerns the stock market. Which way are we going and at what speed?
Well, on a vaccine approval, we’re getting our lives back and all the activity around you is going up. And the speed will be breakneck. We just need to get through the air pockets between now and then.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell wants Americans to believe that the mega banks on Wall Street that hold trillions of dollars in federally-insured deposits, while peddling everything from high-risk derivatives to junk bonds to precious metals, “are a source of strength” during this economic downturn. The big problem for the Fed is the above two charts.
The chart data comes from BigCharts at MarketWatch, owned by Dow Jones & Company. According to the first chart, Citigroup has lost 90 percent of its share value since January 3, 2005. (It dressed up its share price in 2011, doing a 10-for-1 reverse stock split, meaning shareholders who had previously owned 100 shares, now owned just 10 shares at a higher price.)
Bank of America’s share price has lost half of its value and Morgan Stanley’s share price has been essentially flat for a decade and a half. Compare that to the Standard & Poor’s 500 (SPX) which is up more than 150 percent.
Since the age of five I’ve enjoyed peeing outdoors. Forty years later, peeing has become something I must do several dozen times a day, and I don’t like the outdoors. But life mimics math, and the product of two negatives is a positive. More math: grilled cheese or tomato soup as individuals I find boring. But together, they’re my favorite thing at the Crosby Hotel bar. God, I miss eating at bars alone, with strangers around me.
I’m staying alone in Montauk at a friend’s house while he’s in Portugal (something about taxes and quality of life). After my morning coffee and power shake, it’s time to water the plants. Look, it's a bayberry plant, and there’s a crape myrtle. I hear something and startle. I just came from Montana, where everyone tells you to be mindful of bears. My fear escalates to DEFCON 2 when I see not a bear but five men standing in the backyard witnessing my divertissement. Four of them are wearing cargo shorts and could be quadruplets. The fifth is in a suit. The only guy that wears a suit on 92-degree Saturday morning is a real estate broker. Now I remember, the broker is showing the house this morning.
They act like my Vizsla when she’s done something wrong: freeze in their tracks and avoid eye contact. Who would blame them.
If I woke up from a 2020 Coma today and you showed me a chart of the Nasdaq I would have guessed that Apple cured cancer. It turns out Eastman Kodak was hired to cure COVID.
If I woke up from a Coma today and you showed me the headlines of 2020 and asked where the Nasdaq would be I would guess 4,000.
Here are the indexes this year (I substituted Nasdaq 100 for the Nasdaq which is 90 percent of what interests me day to day and now up 27 percent year to date):
This is why I love investing. You have to go beyond the headlines and noise and position for the future.
The seeds for Nasdaq 20,000 and beyond are being planted at an accelerating pace post the COVID-19 outbreak. March was horrifying and the news does not seem to be getting any better. But, the bad news does not show up in the pitch decks I am getting the last few months.
The difficulties to be faced in hiring, training, motivating and executing in a COVID-19 world are now being thought through more clearly and there is data that is encouraging some incredible people to begin again.
I mentioned a couple weeks ago on this blog that the decks and pitches I was receiving were amazingly good the last couple of months and the quality is still improving.
It makes sense to me.
Great people with great careers at great companies that have great visions would rather start fresh than work inside even the best organizations that have to deal with the hiring, training, motivating and executing (at scale) of hundreds and thousands of people.
A great salesperson, recruiter, marketer etc will look much different in a zoom world than a face to face world. People are moving and the money is now moving quickly as well.
In 1987 the adage we traders and investors thought was cool was ‘Greed…
Here's Trump's interview with Axios National Political Correspondent, Jonathan Swan, in case you missed it. Topics include COVID-19, COVID testing, Black Lives Matter, the November election, U.S. Foreign Policy and more.
For a handy fact-check of Trump's statements, read Seth Abramson's twitter feed:
(THREAD) This thread contains every lie Trump told to Jonathan Swan of Axios. The truth immediately follows each lie.
Please retweet this widely. America already knows its president is a liar, but now that he's losing his re-election campaign badly, he's taken it to a new level. pic.twitter.com/nrXpAVxSfU
Americans who lost their jobs because of the pandemic had been getting a US$600 bump on top of state benefits in their weekly unemployment checks since March. That ended on July 31, and lawmakers are debating whether to extend the program and if so by how much.
As an empirical economist, I wanted to see if their concerns about the disincentive were valid. So I analyzed data on earnings and unemployment benefits to estimate the share of benefit-eligible workers who could collect more on the dole than on the job.
Replacement wages
I started my analysis by looking at 2019 Current Population Survey data to estimate weekly earnings of private-sector employees, both nationally and state by state. I then adjusted the numbers for wage inflation and compared the results with jobless benefits and “replacement wages,” which vary from state to state.
Iowa is the most generous and replaces 49% of a worker’s weekly wages with a cash benefit when he or she loses a job involuntarily, while Alaska is the stingiest and replaces only 28% of income. I estimated that on average the replacement rate for all workers in the U.S. was about a third.
Once the $600 federal supplement is added in, the national average wage replacement rate soars to 127%. On an individual basis, I found that 56% of eligible workers would receive more in benefits than they would earn gainfully employed. Among those workers, the average excess benefit was $253.
This figure also varies in each state, depending on replacement rates as well as average weekly earnings. For example, benefits exceed their earnings for little more than a…
JPMorgan Asset Management’s new On The Minds of Investors piece takes a look at “framing”, a behavioral bias that affects our judgments about market prices. Where you choose to start counting from will have a big impact on how you feel and what arguments will appeal to you.
For instance:
What level of returns should we expect from equity markets? The answer changes depending on the time period – when investors allow an incomplete picture to influence their decisions, it is an example of framing. While it appeared the market had climbed to untenable highs post-GFC (Exhibit 1), if we take a slightly longer view, the overall market return was actually flat between 2000 and 2012. During that time period, the market had an average annual total return of 0.6% per year and a cumulative total return of 6.8% – effectively a sideways market.
JPM’s Samantha Azzarello notes that if you were simply move the frame and look at returns from March 2009-March 2020, you’d see 18.5% annually for the S&P 500, a remarkable run compressed into that 11 year period of time – the opposite of the 2000-2012 experience.
So here’s our Chart o’ the Day for today:
Josh here – beside the framing issue, which allows you to win any argument with your friends that you’d like (it’s run too far! No, it’s got room!) what I find most interesting is the wide variety of market multiples since I began investing and trading in the late 1990’s.
I’ve seen forward PE’s for the S&P 500 range from a high of 27 early in my career to a low of 10! Which tells you that even if you could guess at the earnings of the market a year ahead of time, it would be impossible to figure out exactly what price multiple your fellow investors will put on that earnings number through the process of their buying and selling. And it’s not as though you could actually guess the earnings number anyway.
So now imagine how hard it is to calculate a year-end forecast, with those two variables sloshing around all year, one based on changing fundamentals and the other based on changing sentiment. Cannot be done!
Check out the analysis of this morning’s Gold and Silver charts by our own Chris Vermeulen, Chief Market Strategist and Founder of TheTechnicalTraders.com, to see what is in store for precious metals. Make sure you check out our Gold and Silver article from August 4th, 2020 for additional context behind our predictions and rationale for continued price appreciation.
Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other institutions recently published a study which estimated that the true number of people infected by COVID-19 could be six to 24 times high...
By Jacob Wolinsky. Originally published at ValueWalk.
A recent S&P Global Market Intelligence Trucost analysis found that Beyond Meat Inc., the maker of plant-based meat alternatives, has not disclosed the full extent of its environmental impacts. This includes the amount of greenhouse gases emitted or the volume of water discharged.
The U.S. Dollarran into a perfect storm in 2020: a pandemic (Coronavirus), an easy Federal Reserve, and trillions of dollars in government stimulus.
The result has been a steep decline in the greenback.
Looking at today’s chart, however, suggests that the US Dollar may be nearing a bottom. That is if recent history proves true.
The Dollar is testing its 9-year bullish up-trend support at (1) and US Dollar bulls are disappearing. In fact, investors are the least bullish the US Dollars (20% bulls) since 2011 at (2). Notice that each ...
Twitter suffered from a major hack about two weeks ago and has now said that its staff was tricked by "spear-phishing", which is a targeted attack to trick people into simply handing out their passwords.
Twitter staff were targeted through their phones, according to a new report from the BBC. The attacks then allowed hackers the ability to Tweet from celebrity Twitter accounts. Twitter has said it was "taking a hard look" at how it could improve its permissions and processes.
"The attack on July 15, 2020, targeted a small number of employees through a phone spear phishing attack. This attack relied on ...
The numbers of new cases in some of the hardest hit COVID19 states have started to plateau, or even decline, over the past few days. A few pundits have noted it and concluded that it was a hopeful sign.
Is it real or is something else going on? Like a restriction in the numbers of tests, or simply the inability to test enough, or are some people simply giving up on getting tested? Because as we all know from our dear leader, the less testing, the less...
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...
Johnson & Johnson announced Wednesday that it will develop and deliver 100 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine for the U.S. in a deal totaling more than $1 billion.
The economy is going to roar if this happens. Roar. The stock market is sniffing this possibility out. So are the metals and other commodity prices.
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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...
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