Monday’s Mixed Signals – Time to Dress the Windows?
by phil - September 29th, 2014 8:27 am
Wheeee, what a ride!
We're up, we're down and over and out – but That's Life in the markets, right? Life is being good to our Short-Term Portfolio, now up 59.2% for the year as we caught the bearish move very nicely. Because our STP was up, we have, so far, been able to ride out our long-term positions but we're certainly concerned about a major breakdown possibly in the works.
As noted by Dave Fry in his SPY chart, that 50 dma is a big point of contention now and of course we're going to get a bounce off a line like that. In fact, the new lows we hit at the end of the week led us to recalculate our bounce lines for this week and now we are looking for:
- Dow - 17,000 (weak) and 17,100 (strong)
- S&P 1,975 (weak) and 1,985 (strong)
- Nasdaq 4,475 (weak) and 4,500 (strong)
- NYSE 10,760 (weak) and 10,820 (strong)
- Russell 1,125 (weak) and 1,140 (strong)
We weren't too convinced by Friday's low-volume rally and we aren't going to be convinced by anything that happens on the last two days of the month (window dressing) but clearly any failure of those weak bounce lines is going to have us racing back to some bearish bets into the start of October (and earnings season).
Speaking of earnings - the CEO of Macy's, Terry Lundren is not too enthusiastic about Q4. After…
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Monday Market Outlook – Finally Over S&P 2,000 – Now What?
by phil - September 22nd, 2014 7:29 am
2,000 finally held!
It was a really ugly hold but we did hold 2,000 on the S&P all day long on Friday and that, as I've said for a long time, is finally a signal we need to do a little bottom-fishing. We have already been picking up some material stocks in our Live Member Chat Room, including adding BTU ($13.29) on Friday morning to our Income Portfolio, despite a Goldman Sachs downgrade that cost them 5% pre-market.
Coal has been getting a bad rap this year as China has slowed down and, of course, its environmentally unpopular (and 300,000 people marched in NYC this weekend for action on Climate Change) but the reality is, coal use isn't going away anytime soon.
In fact, 65% of China's energy comes from coal and, for the first time ever, China passed the EU in pollution levels per capita with each person in China producing 7.2 tons of carbon dioxide on average compared with 6.8 tons per European and just 1.9 tons per Indian.
Of course, none of them hold a candle to the US, where we proudly produce 16.4 tons of CO2 per person!
Still, with 1.3Bn people, China has now passed the US in overall carbon emissions, contributing to a new Global Record of 40Bn tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere in 2014. According to a recent UN study, at this rate, the theoretical limit for carbon in our atmosphere (before irreversible damage sets in) will be hit in just 30 years. But don't worry folks, that's just science and we can always vote Republican and ignore it. 
Remember – we ARE Koch!
Emissions grew 4.2 percent in China, 2.9 percent in the U.S. and 5.1 percent in India last year. The EU’s pollution level declined 1.8 percent because of weaker economic growth. So coal is not going away as soon as people think and we have been literally burning off the surplus this year. In Europe, utilities are switching back…
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Testy Tuesday – 50 DMA Spectacular!
by phil - August 19th, 2014 8:06 am
You've gotta love those trend lines.
Chart people sure love them and we love chart peopel because they are SOOOOOOOO predictable and predictable behavior is behavior we can bet on and that makes us happy. Today we'll be seeing the 50-day moving averages on the Dow, the NYSE and the Russell all tested at the same time – what happens next will tell us a lot about this rally.
As I pointed out to our Members in our Live Chat Room this morning, though we may be past our bounce levels and though we are now challenging the 50 dmas, we still have 3 of 5 of our Must Hold levels red on the Big Chart – that's not too impressive. Consider what a 50-day moving average is. It means that, over the last 50 days, half the time the index has been above the line and half the time it's been below – so how impressive should it be to see the index back in the middle?
Nonetheless, Chart People believe it's some mystical symbol that gives them a rally signal and half the time they are right – so the religion of TA continues to prosper! As you can see from Dave Fry's SPY chart from yesterday, 75% of yesterday's gain came on no volume as we gapped up in the Futures and the rest of the day's trading was one of the lightest of the year.
The reason I like Dave is because he's one of the only TA people who actually pay attention to volume and this volume is total BS. Still, it's enough to stampede the retail suckers back in and God bless them because they throw money at us to sell them the things we liked when they were out of favor.
In May and June, for example, we compiled a Buy List for our Members, which had 29 trades we liked for the rest of 2014. Here's a few that we are done with already:
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Monday Market Movement – Do We Ever Go Down?
by phil - July 21st, 2014 8:31 am
We all go down for a piece of the moment
Watch another burn to the death to the core
And the roadshow thrills pack the freaks and the phonies
Sing: now is now, yeah! – Rob Zombie
There is just no way to win betting against this market!
Well, actually, there is one way and that's betting that each pop is nonsense and tends to have a subsequent pullback intra-day but, long-term, the cumulative effect of all that low-volume pumping has been a rousing success, to say the least.
As you can see from Andy Thrasher's S&P chart, there has been some amazing underlying deterioration since the July 4th weekend with the Advance/Decline line falling back to trend and stocks above their 200-Day Moving Average dropping 15% in 3 weeks. Stocks above the 200 DMA is a fantastic leading indicator for downside move – ignore it at your own risk.
People are panicking into bonds, dropping the 10-Year Yield 20%, from 3.1% to 2.45% this year but it doesn't matter because Central Banksters are pumping SO MUCH MONEY into the Global Markets that there's enough to buy all asset classes simultaneously – something that is unprecedented in Financial History – what could go wrong?
Well, one thing that could go wrong is you putting your money into Mutual Funds. As it turns out, in an S&P study of actively managed Mutual Funds, only 2 (two) out of 2,862 actually beat the S&P over ANY of the fund's lifetimes (limited to 12 months or longer).
That's even worse than the average performace of hedge funds, which only averaged a 0.59% annual loss when compared to just putting your money directly into the S&P.
This dovetails with a conversation we were having this weekend in our Member Chat Room, where I identified 4 trade ideas for a $50,000 Portfolio that only used 1/4 of the buying power to generate $365,512 in projected profits over the next 15 years using CONSERVATIVE options strategies designed to MATCH the S&P, not beat it.…
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Which Way Wednesday – Finally Fed Up?
by phil - June 18th, 2014 8:36 am
It's a Fed day today!
That, of course, means MORE FREE MONEY and the markets are giddy with anticipation ahead of the meeting – especially since we had more poor housing data yesterday and that's exactly the kind of bad news that is good news as it keeps the Fed in easy-money mode a little longer.
As you may have guessed, we shorted oil this morning. The July contract (/CLN4) expires on Friday and, as you can see from the chart, we continue to find great profits in the sell-off that we predicted would come last week. We went over some Futures Trading Tips in yesterday's live Webinar as well as the new, bullish positions we've added to our Long-Term Portfolio. Much as we rail against what we firmly believe will ultimately be a disastrous policy – you simply can't fight the Fed and we're not trying to – it's much more profitable to go with the flow.
Going with the flow is exactly what we're doing with our oil trades as they STILL have 103M barrels worth of FAKE orders open for July delivery (actually, about 20M will actually be delivered so "only" 80M are fake at the moment) and that is down from the 172M FAKE orders that were open on Friday morning (see chart on Friday's post).
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Toppy Tuesday – S&P 1,950 Edition
by phil - June 10th, 2014 8:34 am
Here we go again!
As you can see from Dave Fry's S&P chart, we're back in the top of the channel on a Tuesday and I will refer you to April 1st's "Triple Top Tuesday" and December 31st's "Terminal Tuesday" – both of which were points we thought the market was topping out before.
Actually, in both cases, we did have a mild pullback, but nothing that broke the trend – so far.
Back in that December post, we were playing gold (/YG) bullish at $1,185 to finish the year, based on our premise of MORE FREE MONEY in 2014 keeping the markets afloat. We also went bullish on SHLD at $40, which is like $30 post-spit.
In the April post, it was our 3rd try at 1,880 on the S&P and we had just cashed out our Income Portfolio and I we lost $10 betting the Nasdaq would be above 4,200 at April expirations on a TQQQ spread (now 4,350 – so bad timing) but our support held and kept the damage to a minimum. We also (in the morning post) called for selling the AAPL Jan $450 puts for $5.90 to pay for those spreads and AAPL just split 7:1 so those are now the $64.29 puts at .25. 7 x .25 = $1.75 so up $4.15 (70%) already on that play.
We also had bullish trade ideas for HOV, CHL, FCX, ABX and RIG – right in the morning post! Our best play, however, was shorting the Russell Futures (/TF) at 1,180 in Member Chat at 10:53 – as that was the beginning of an $9,000 per contract pullback on that index – all the way back to 1,090 (where we went long).
As you can see from Dave's Russell chart, we're just playing a channel with our trades – it's really not that complicated. Yesterday the Russell hit 1,180 and – guess what – we shorted it again! Now you are catching on to our "secret" strategy!
Already this morning the Russell Futures are down to 1,170, which is +$1,000 per contract from 1,180 but our…
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The Buy List – 20 Great Trade Ideas for the Rest of 2014 (Members Only)
by phil - June 7th, 2014 8:24 am
What a rally!
While stocks certainly aren't "cheap" by any measure, we've been able to identify 20 that are still good values. We've been compiling this list and going over trade ideas for playing them in our Tuesday Webinars since May 13th and, of course, we've been posting them in our Live Member Chat rooms, so this is just a review to consolidate our trade ideas.
We cashed in our Long-Term Portfolio last week at what we thought was a top but so far – so wrong on that call! Since it's up 19% in just 6 months, we're not going to cry about missing the last 400-point move on the Dow (2.5%) – we'll just have to look ahead to deploying our cash again, following the same strategy that was so successful in the first half of the year, which was, essetially, our "7 Steps to Consistently Making 20-40% Annual Returns" system:
As we did in building our Long-Term Portfolio, we're not going to rush in and buy everything. We will do exactly what we did in January where, following our Fall Buy List, we simply added stocks from our list whenever they became cheap. While our Members are able to pick up our trade ideas as they are released, we don't always add them to our virtual portfolios right away. As with the first half's Long-Term Portfolio, we will track every entry and exit in both our Live Weekly Webcasts, as well as in our Live Member Chat Room and alerts will be sent to our subscribers (you can join here, Basic and Premium Members get full access).
Our picks were originally grouped by industry sectors but, for reference purposes, I'm going to list them alphabetically below – these are the original trade ideas (the Webinar dates where we discussed our picks are next to the symbol), most are still playable but some have already taken off :
ABX (5/28) we featured in our June 3rd post - obviously one I like. If you don't want to buy the stock for $15.90 (and we NEVER pay retail at PSW!), then you can sell the 2016 $15 puts for $2.05,…
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Testy Tuesday – 1,920 or Bust!
by phil - June 3rd, 2014 8:25 am
That's 2 closes over 1,920.
It's almost enough to make us regret cashing out our Long-Term Portfolio last week. We didn't expect to call a perfect top, when you have a large portfolio it can take days to unwind your positions and, despite the very low volume – we'd like to thank all the retail bagholders who bought our shares at top dollar in the last few days.
Thanks Dave and Bill and Jack and Joe and – well, that's about it as volume is so low, there can't be more then 3 or 4 guys trading in this market!
Last June started off with low volume too – as well as record highs – and then we dropped 5% into July. We're simply taking our 119% cash and waiting for the dip – is that so bad?
Yesterday was only the 3rd lowest volume day of the year and the action was wonderfully fake around a PMI report that was released, revised and then revised again – all in the same morning!
In the end, they decided on 56.4, which was in-line with consensus but not before giving us a glimpse on how quickly this market can fail on bad news.
In our Live Member Chat Room, we took full advantage of the over-reaction on the bad news to go against the panicking sheeple and buy TNA (3x bullish ETF on the Russell) in a 9:57 Alert I sent out to our Members.
That trade was so obvious I tweeted it out as well (you can follow me here) saying:
Those calls came in cheaper (because our timing was perfect) at $1.50-$1.40 and they topped out at $1.70 and finished the day at $1.61 but should be cheap again this morning, which is why I'm mentioning them now as they make an excellent upside hedge – in case the market does better than we think.
Since we sidelined $598,000 last week ($98,000 in profits in less than 6 months), we decided to spend $3,000 on 20 of the above contracts – that way…
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Tempting Toppy Tuesday – 7th Time’s a Charm?
by phil - May 27th, 2014 8:34 am
Welcome back!
Not just from your holiday weekend but welcome back to the top of the S&P as we attempt our 7th breakout of the year. That's right, a month never goes by when we don't have a new rally that takes us back to the top of the channel, nor does a month go by when we don't re-test the bottom of the channel either – but let's ignore that as it's unpleasant.
Interestingly, as you can see from Dave Fry's S&P chart, there have only been 9 positive weeks out of 19 in 2014 but oh boy did they make them count – with almost every one of them setting a new record – before the selling resumed. Despite all these "records" being set, the average capital allocation strategy hasn't performed all that well in 2014, so far:
Thank goodness we're not pursuing any of those! Thank goodness also that we didn't give our money to any hedge fund managers, as hedge funds are off to their worst start of the year since the Financial Crisis. Not listed here is our "Be the House – Not the Gambler" strategy, which we will be reviewing live today at 12:15 EST in a Live Webinar (sign up here for free).
Selling risk to others in our Member Portfolios has given us 10%+ gains for year (so far). In fact, the only strategy we agreed with from the above chart was gold, which we bet heavily (along with DBA) at the beginning of the year. We were still knocking it out of the park in early May, with 40 of our 47 trade ideas in early may coming up winners already (see our May Trade Review).
Remember, this isn't about making good picks, per se – it's about having a good strategy that gives you a high probability of success – even when you are wrong about a trade. BEING THE HOUSE and selling risk (through options) to others is the closest thing we get to a "sure thing" in trading. It's not fast, it's not sexy - but it works!
Actually,…
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Too High Tuesday? 10 Bullish Trade Ideas that Made Over 1,200%
by phil - May 13th, 2014 9:27 am
This is ridiculous.
As noted on Dave Fry's chart, the S&P made a new record high with narrow participation and essentially all of the gains were one big move in the Futures to reprice the index. I said yesterday we have been getting 50% of the day's volumes in the close and yesterday was no different and that closing volume is all dumping into the ETF, IRA and 401K suckers that are forced to buy.
We took a couple of big bats against the Dow's move up yesterday, adding a DIA put at $166.80 (see yesterday's Member Chat for details) as well as going long on DXD at $26.20 – both with leveraged options plays, of course.
We still have plenty of bullish trades to protect but, when we bein to cash out our winners and start buying short plays on the index – you can tell the winds are changing. Our 500% trade on DDM from Thanksgiving was scheduled to top out in April anyway – and we sold in May to go away.
That trade was one of our "10 Trade Ideas That Can Make (and some have already made) 500% in a Rising Market" and I had just as much trouble convincing people to go long in November as I'm having convincing people it's time to cash out in May.
Not all the trades are done, but a quick summary of those positions is:
- ABX 2015 $13/18 bull call spread at $2.80, selling 2015 $15 puts for $2.05 for net .75, now $2.35 – up 213%
- 8 QQQ Jan 2014 $75/80 bull call spreads for $3 ($2,400), selling 1 ISRG 2015 $300 put for $23.50 ($2,350) for net $50, now net $2,600 - up 5,100%
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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.