Phil - Wow…wow. The vision and inate grasp of the options world you posess is rather staggering. It's this type of experience that I really hope to develop. I'm afraid I still can't see the moves, but I WILL learn. I cannot thank you enough for the patience, knowledge and effort you put into this place. Please keep it going!
Where
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
Phil, I meant to post over the weekend, but I was busy having fun . Last week was a very nice week for me, and I wanted to thank you for all that you do. I am pretty much back to cash and really feel like I am learning. I have out performed the $5kp by a very large margin. Thanks again for the service you provide.
Scotbraze
Phil, I have the SRS 2011 $7.50 short puts you recommended awhile back. I sold them for $2.20 and now $1.51 (up 31%) although SRS has been down since inception. This was a nice mellow way to play it like you said, thanks.
Jomptien
HOTT / Got great trades with it: Enter 6.75 at open, out at 7.18 (avg) at 10:13
Reentered at 7.00 and out all 7.11 few minutes ago- Was a small play but I collected enoght for next month PSW subscription.
Spider
Well that was a fun day. Cashed out my GS 140 calls for about 35% profit and my AAPL calls for 38% gain. Not bad for 40 minutes of work. Back to 85% cash.
Singapore Steve
Thanks super helpful re: UGN example…..other inflation/market-correction-defensive-related play you threw out that has jammed UP in less than a month is TITN 6/14 $15 puts, up 40%. Excuse my enthusiasm but haven't had those types of gains in multiple plays in years let alone days doing it on my own…….maybe I should host the PSW infomercial!!!!
stevegeb200
Phil is a fundamentalist to his fingertips. His ability to value a stock goes well beyond p/e, as he understands the essence of many businesses, what gives them value and how they make their money. As such, his recommendations are invaluable to a investor who takes a value-oriented approach.
Zeroxzero
I picked up one of your recommended Gold plays, the July ABX 30s and sold the Feb 35s, which are now mostly intrinsic value. Is it time to roll these to the March 37.50s, or should I wait this spike out?
Bill Hoffman
I think that Phil is super, I am up 39.3% YTD. Thank you for your kindness and the opportunity to observe Phil from February.
KMisko
Thanks for all the work you put into this site. I have looked at a few other option advisory or "mentoring" services this year, but no one offers even a fraction of the content or the level of services you provide at PSW!
Jelutuck
Praising PSW for enlightenment is a bit akin to praising the Pope for being holy. I've been reading PSW for about two months now and have learned more about investing technique and the world in general than I've learned from the books and seminars I've paid for. Thanks for the enlightenment, the education, the guidance and the truth, which is not a commodity these days, but a virtue in short supply.
Andy Morris
TBT - Many thanks, Phil. I join you in your opinion favoring the Jan expirations. That's a great play. I can never thank you enough for what I have gained educationally as well as monitarily. Here it is late Sunday evening and I am able to get world class advice, just by asking for it. I feel like I am staying in a 5 star hotel, and room service is just a telephone call away!
Gel1
Phil/ Thanks to your obsessive bearish anxiety over the last few weeks, I made money on the long side this month, phased gradually to bearish, came in net short today and managed to make money both long and short all week, ending today [and each day this week] in the green. I don't know how you do it, but thank you.
Zeroxzero
Phil: Thank You!
Scaling, Scaling, and Scaling… then patience, patience, patience I'm 2 to 1 short and even on a day the broad market is up I had my largest one day gain in years. The last 6 weeks in fact have been great. I really feel I've learned to use some tools that will enable me to deal with the turbulence ahead. Selling short calls is definitely my preferred approach. Even allowed me to play golf this afternoon while the premium melted away and shoot a career low round. I owe you man!
Lincoln
Hey Phil,
You called all the trends and market movements with perfection this week. I enjoyed it! Thanks for keeping us sane!
GClay
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
A truly great website with a lot of information for investors. Whether you are a novice, seasoned, or a professional there is a lot to be gained about stock options and options trading from this very informative website.
ZKatkin
I am a Registered Nurse, so is my wife. We work hard to take care of seven kids that are the joy of our lives. The cost for a basic membership is ALOT from our our monthly budget of spending and saving…but well worth it! Phil has allowed me to really ramp up the savings we put away for our children's college funds and our retirement.
David
Way to go Phil! Have I said how much I appreciate your site lately! Your ability to teach and your willingless to give others a forum to demonstrate their own skill sets makes your site remarkable. I got great help from you, jmm1951, and Iflantheman (special thanks!) today. Hell, if I have many more days like this I may even be able to sign up for a full year rather than doing it just quarterly. Tomorrow is another day but, fabulous job today!
dclark41
Great call on expe Phil! Went long 50 shares and sold for a nice profit! And Great call on the nkd shorts as well. I didn't use a stop that tight and was able to cover for a $400 gain. Works been keeping me pretty busy and I'm jealous of all the members who are able to check in here more often! It's almost always quite profitable! Looking forward to Vegas!
Jromeha
I've been trading/investing since the early 80's (my dad started me out young). I've had seven figure accounts (in the past) and I've done lots of trading, so I can say that I'm a well seasoned investor. Phil is the real deal. His trades make sense and his strategy is sound. He sees things that others miss and he's one of the best at finding price anomalies. When he makes a mistake, he has an exit strategy already planned. He hedges very well and he has an instict which tells him to go to cash or to be all in.
Autolander
Phil is a master at keeping you laughing, as well as making you money. - It is like " laughing all the way to the bank!"
Gel1
I must add yet another paen to Phil's "cash and short" call, as my TZA shorts are past paying for Similac and Pampers and have now covered all doctors and Mt. Sinai hospital bills for young Charlotte, as TZA took the portfolio up 10%.
Zeroxzero
Market manipulation…. One of the things I've gained from this site is the concept of market manipulation. I never thought it was so prevalent, but now I know it is. I actually consider its effect when I make trades. Several days ago, when AAPL was moving toward 220 I sold 210 calls. My reasoning was that they will probably pin this month at 210. They came in big time as the stock moved ever closer to 210. I agree with Phil's comment that one of the things we need to do is find out what they are manipulating, and how, and hitch a ride. They are doing this with several equities. I've actually seen one article describing several equities that were being manipulated to pin at expiration each month, and describing how it was done, and of course Phil has described it well. In some ways it's easier to figure this out than it is a ‘normal' market behavior, and thus easier to make money in certain equities.
Iflantheman
Phil - I caught the interview…. terrific!. Your host recommended that the viewers should " go to your site, as you will be entertained ". That is for sure if you consider entertainment is laughing while you read, learn and make unbelievable leveraged profits that you never thought were possible. That is my kind of entertainment !
Gel1
I must give kudos to Phil for changing my way of thinking. I'm a gambler by nature and used to just play the indexes with 3x etf's… well I still do, but the options give far better returns than I ever dreamed of. With these wild swings I've been catching 50-100% winners in days.
Mkucstars1
100KP dividend plays - FYI, I'm loving them...thanks, Phil!!! Including the $0.848/share dividend, I am up 100% on my $2.38 net entry on LYG...that's pretty cool!
SSDirk
Phil – I think I finally figured out your "crystal ball" time frame. You're about 5-14 days AHEAD of what the market is going to do. It's taken me a long time to realize this, but boy it's been profitable. I go in when you recommend something at about 25% allocation, and then add to it each day it "goes the wrong way" Then BOOM, one day it's all good…. The long put list was literally exact in it's timing.
Burrben
Thank you Nantucket. It is hard to be a complete beginner in the market with this complicated, fast moving, and very advanced group. Phil is the Great One, but the membership is absolutely amazing! Had I known this ahead I would probably log in as "awe struck" everyday.
It’s time again for the weekend update of our "Real" Mega-Bears, an inflation-adjusted overlay of three secular bear markets. It aligns the current S&P 500 from the top of the Tech Bubble in March 2000, the Dow in of 1929, and the Nikkei 225 from its 1989 bubble high.
This chart is consistent with my preference for real (inflation-adjusted) analysis of long-term market behavior. The nominal all-time high in the index occurred in October 2007, but when we adjust for inflation, the "real" all-time high for the S&P 500 occurred in March 2000.
Here is a nominal version to help clarify the impact of inflation and deflation, which varied significantly across these three markets.
Introduction: Richard Davis is President of the Consumer Metrics Institute (CMI). At the Institute, Rick measures real-time consumer transactions as an objective indicator of consumer demand and the associated health of the US economy. In this interview, we explore the history behind the government-published numbers and the reasons prompting Rick to devise better ways to measure the state of the economy.
History
Ilene: Rick, what got you interested in measuring economic numbers?
Rick: I first became frustrated with the current state of economic data after learning about the history of the collection process and the government’s continued reliance on 70 year old concepts. The government began collecting economic data during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) second term, around 1937. There was concern that the recovery from the 1937-1938 recession (i.e., a recession nested within the Great Depression) was stalling. The economy had been improving significantly from early 1933 through 1936 before the wheels came off the recovery in mid-1937. FDR’s administration realized it did not have adequate data to monitor the economy and the administration asked the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to look into this problem. Wesley Clair Mitchell set out to find data that would help FDR’s administration address its concerns about the U.S. economy.
Wesley Clair Mitchell was a once-in-a-generation economic genius when it came to data collection. He collected over 500 interesting data sets measuring items such as sales, employment, railcar loadings--items that would allow him to constantly monitor the health of the economy. Most of these things are still measured, and the numbers have evolved into the core reports put out by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).
What frustrated me was that the data sets measured by Dr. Mitchell were developed in the 1930s and designed to capture those things that were important to the 1930s economy. They are not geared for today’s economy. Things that mattered in the mid-20th century simply cannot completely describe what is happening in the 2010 economy.
For instance, to find out what was happening in the music industry in 1950, someone could have gone to a neighborhood music store, counted the Doris Day 45’s in the retail bins…
Here’s another perspective on the comparison charts of the Dow Jones between the 1929 crash and recovery and the 2009 crash and recovery.
Let’s take a quick view of the line charts of the daily Dow Jones in 1929 structure and how it compares with today’s weekly Dow Jones structure.
First, the Daily Dow Jones: 1929 Crash and Recovery
I drew the numbers not so much as an Elliott Wave notation, but so that comparing key swing highs and lows would be easier.
The peak to trough crash lasted 72 days as the Dow Jones fell 47% (peaking in September 1929 at 386 and falling to 195 in November 1929). It unfolded roughly in a 5-wave progression.
The rally began off the November lows and lasted 155 days, peaking up 47% at 295 during April, 1930.
This shows an important principle in investing and trading, namely that if your account (or an index) falls 50%, then it would take a full 100% rally off the lows to recapture the prior highs, and not a 50% rally off the lows as seen above.
The rally phase took twice as long as the ‘crash’ phase and also unfolded in a 5-wave affair (with smaller waves).
I found it interesting that the daily chart showed an almost identical head and shoulders reversal pattern that failed – which is similar to the June/July failed head and shoulders pattern in 2009.
Because the 2008-2009 crash and recovery took longer, I am showing the weekly line chart of the Dow Jones.
Finally, the Current Weekly Dow Jones 2008-2009 Crash and Recovery:
Again, we see a similar 5-wave slow-crash down to the final March 2009 lows.
Price peaked in October 2008 at 14,198 and then fell 52% to the March 2009 lows of 6,469 – 72 weeks (510 days). The decline also fell in a similar 5-wave decline (with the 3rd wave ‘fractalizing’ into its own mini-five wave decline).
From the March 2009 lows, price has – so far – rallied 65% to the January high of 10,723 over the last 320 trading days… or almost all of 2009.
Again, despite the 65% rally, price is still 5,000 points lower than its 2007 peak.
The current rally also unfolded in a mini-five wave affair on a steeper…
It’s been 80 years since Black Thursday. On that day in 1929 stocks plummeted on record volume. Big banks got together and propped up the market by buying huge blocks of shares. That only delayed the pain, of course. It reminds me of our current short-sighted attempts to prop up the markets. More info.
In the spirit of “those who don’t learn from history…” I suggest watching The Crash of 1929, a great documentary from PBS. There are some fascinating first-hand accounts from the people who lived through it. Ignore the fuzzy image, that’s just Google Video being wonky. It’s a full 53 minutes long, and the picture isn’t bad. (For more historical perspective, see these cartoons from the Great Depression.)
In an UNBELIEVABLE move off the bottom over the past 6 months and one week, we have gained 58% on the S&P and have finally crossed into our 33% levels (from the highs) that we first set as upside targets back in our July Big Chart Review. At the time I said "I just don't see that happening without a pullback" yet here we are, with barely a wiggle down since I wrote that on July 27th and up 20% from our July 13th S&P base at 880.
Have we been too bearish? Is it now natural for the market to rise 20% in 2 months without a pullback? Are we really 20% better off than we were 2 months ago? History tells us not to mess with the 5% rule so we SHOULD encounter powerful resistance here as we approach the zone of a roughly 60% move off the March lows as well as 30% off our highs – it's going to be a rough 2.5% from here. As you can see from the above chart, we have already exceeded all previous recoveries by almost 100% at this point in the cycle. And why not, our government spent $9 TRILLION dollars to do it so we damn sure better have a pretty chart as a souvenir! The other rally that had a spectacular recovery was the the great crash of 1929 (the grey line).
In the 1929 crash, the stock market fell first, not the banks, which didn't begin failing until 1932 as lack of electronic data and next-day mail meant it took a lot longer for the late payment and foreclosure cycle to start impacting bank balance sheets. Also, of course, they were nowhere near as maniacally levered as today's institutions. In 1929 the banks did not play the market, they simply lent money to people who invested in stocks, businesses and properties that went bust so there were two distinct waves to the market crash in the Great Depression: First the people went broke, then the banks.
Unemployment in the US in 1930, a year after the crash, was only 8.7% - less than it is now. No one at that time thought it was important to help the average American get back on their feet after…
Dshort has an excellent chart out comparing the road to recovery using the rebounds that occurred following similar bear markets. Excluding the 1929 data, I’ve used the S&P 500 oil crisis recovery and the tech crash to calculate potential future returns. Assuming a total recovery of 61% (the average) from the bottom we can expect just 8.2% total returns in the coming 2 years after the incredible 5 month run we’ve already experienced. That’s a whopping 4% compound annual growth rate.
There is no doubt that the rally off the bottom has been swift and incredible, but now investors have to begin wondering whether or not the stock market is substantially ahead of itself in the near-term? 4% annual returns would certainly imply a very poor risk/reward environment which is in-line with our current thinking. Two pieces of data are by no means a solid scientific study, but the questions remain: is the stock market ahead of the road to recovery? Is it different this time?
Unfortunately, taking the long-term perspective comes to much the same conclusions. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the primary problems with bubbles is that the effect can often be as long and drawn out as the cause. The only reasonable explanations for a v-shaped stock market recovery would be either 1. a miraculously quick de-leveraging & turnaround in the U.S. consumer (which isn’t occurring) or 2. rampant inflation caused by the Federal Reserve. Unfortunately, the latter is unlikely to occur as borrowing remains extraordinarily low, banks continue to hoard cash and the consumer fails to recover quickly. The only logical expectation is that this recovery and stock market performance will be similar in terms of performance as all of those bubbles that preceded it:
In the last recession, GDP contracted by less than 5%, but the stock market fell 57% from peak to trough. Stocks reacted to economic conditions in a way the “real” economy did not.
In our present situation, Wall Street strategists are predicting a second quarter contraction for the economy of up to 30% (annualized), which the drop in stock prices have already achieved.
Michael and Ben sort out some important distinctions between the stock market’s historic reaction to recessions and the recessions themselves…
After Trump earlier said he was weighing enforceable quarantine order for all the tri-state area, late on Sunday he said that "on the recommendation of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, and upon consultation with the Governor’s of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut" he would not be imposing a quarantine.
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With COVID-19 infections now evident in 176 countries, the pandemic is the most significant threat to humanity since the second world war. Then, as now, confidence in international cooperation and institutions plumbed new lows.
Anyone holding bitcoin would have watched the market with alarm in recent weeks. The virtual currency, whose price other cryptocurrencies like ethereum and litecoin largely follow, plummeted from more than US$10,000 (£8,206) in mid-February to briefly below US$4,000 on March 13. Despite recovering to the mid-US$6,000s at the time of writin...
Psyched is a bi-monthly column covering the most important developments in the industry of medicinal psychedelics. We hope you follow us periodically as we report on the growth of this exciting new industry.
Champignon Brands Buys IP Company and Adds Ketamine and New Formulations To Its Portfolio
On March 19, Champignon Brands Inc. (CSE: SHRM) (OTC: SHRMF), a Canadian healt...
I put together this video that will calm you down, because knowing where are within the stock market cycles, and the economy makes all the difference.
This is the worst time to be starting a business that’s for sure. I have talked about this is past videos and events I attended that bear markets are fantastic opportunities if you can retain your capital until late in the bear market cycle. If you can do this, you will find countless opportunities to invest money. From buying businesses, franchises, real estate, equipment, and stocks at a considerable discount that would make today’s prices look ridiculous (which they are).
Take a quick watch of this video because it shows you ...
One of the broadest indices in the states remains in a long-term bullish trend, where a critical support test is in play.
The chart looks at the Wilshire 5000 on a monthly basis over the past 35-years.
The index has spent the majority of the past three decades inside of rising channel (1). It hit the top of this multi-decade channel to start off the year, where it created a monthly bearish reversal pattern.
Weakness the past 2-months has the index testing rising support and the December 2018 lows at (2).
Non believers of cycles become fast believers when the heat of the moment is upon them.
Just has we have birthdays, so does the market, regular cycles of time and price. The market news of the cycle turn may change each time, but the time is regular. Markets are not a random walk.
Success comes from strategy and the execution of a plan.
Changes in the world is the source of all market moves, to catch an...
By Jacob Wolinsky. Originally published at ValueWalk.
Indicating strong health of entrepreneurship, both entrepreneurial activity and established business ownership in the United States have trended upwards over the past 19 years, according to the 2019/2020 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Global Report, released March 3rd in Miami at the GEM Annual Meeting.
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...
In the 1929 crash, 
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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.