TGIF – Can We Stop The Week Before Our Indexes Fail?
by phil - May 9th, 2014 8:29 am
Look at the Russell!
Look at the Nasdaq! Are you seriously still holding onto your Dow, S&P and NYSE stocks? That's exactly what people did in 2008, when they were so used to the markets being saved whenever they dipped, that they ignored all the warning signs – until it was too late.
I know that I've been sounding like a broken record and you can call me Chicken Little but cut me a little slack as we are protecting profits here.
We have 5 virtual porfolios we track for our Members and the $100,000 Butterfly Portfolio is up 19.4% ($19,000), the $500,000 Long-Term Portfolio is up 9.6% ($48,000), the $100,000 Portfolio is down 5.8% ($5,800), the $500,000 Income Portfolio is up 6.4% ($32,000) and our $25,000 Portfolio is up 15.4% ($3,850). Overall, that's a gain of 8.8% on $1.225M deployed in 4 months.
The Short-Term Portfolio is a hedge to the Long-Term Portfolio, so we haven't cashed those in but the Income Portfolio doesn't have an external hedge, so we moved to cash on that one last month (BEFORE the Nas and Rut started crashing off decade highs) and the Butterfly Portfolio is self-hedging while the $25KP has just one position left.
Perhaps I'm wrong and the Nasdaq and the Russell will recover and the other indexes will all move up to new highs. Even if they do, our worst case is we miss a bit of a rally. If we're breaking out to new all-time highs from here – there will be plenty of money to be made. BUT – if I'm right and the market drops 5-10%, then our taking 110% off the table at the top means that when we buy stocks again at 90%, we are buying 120% of what we could have bought had we not wisely cashed out in the rally.
The REWARD for being cautious is owning 20% more shares if we're right, owning maybe 2.5% less shares if we're wrong or owning the same amount if the market stays flat. It doesn't take a degree in statistical analysis to see why I…
The $25,000 Virtual Portfolio – Stepping Our Way to a 10-Bagger!
by phil - January 31st, 2011 6:50 am
I can't believe we're doing this again!
Thanks to FINALLY getting out of the damned DIA Feb $122.75 puts at $5.15, we're up to around $35,000 virtual Dollars on June 11th's $10,000 Virtual Portfolio (and we ran through the preliminary results last Friday, where we also predicted "Alpha 2 says "Cliff Ahead"). As I said in yesterday's post "once more into the breach, my friends" and we're going to put our profits to work with the fairly ambitious goal of getting to $100,000 by December 31st.
This virtual portfolio will be available to Voyeur Members but trade ideas during chat will have their usual 1-hour delay. Premium members will get the trades with no delay and hopefully Matt will have a new system running that will allow Basic Members to see $25KP comments with no delay as well. New trade ideas and updates will be copied into the comment section of this post or, assuming I write one, the updates of this post. If you are not a Member yet, now is a good time to join. Check out the subscription page – Our EXAMPLE trade on C just closed up 200% and our ENP example returned 137% – not bad for free samples, right?
We didn't play the $25KP this week but Monday's DIA play in Member Chat was a good example of the kind of trades we'll be looking for. The trade idea there was:
DIA $117.75 puts should give good bang for the buck at $1.06. If I had the new $25KP up and running I’d go for 10 with a DD at .86 and a stop at .76 for a $400 risk on the first trade.
As you can see from the chart below we didn't get our chance to Double Down until Wednesday and there was a brief and scary dip Friday morning that touched our .76 level but, of course, my Friday morning Alert to Members went with 2 aggressively bearish plays (TZA and QID) so we were clearly not going to let a little flush scare us.
This is why we AVOID hard stops! When you put in hard stops…