WTF Friday – Japan’s 80 TRILLION Yen Stimulus Dresses the Windows
by phil - October 31st, 2014 7:49 am
She knows how hard her heart grows under the nuclear shadows
She can't just escape the feeling repeating in her head
When after all the urges some kind of truth emerges
We felt the deadly surges discovering Japan – Graham Parker
Happy Halloween!
The shorts are certainly getting a scare this morning as the BOJ hands out another $124Bn (yes, we did the relative math in this morning's Alert to our Members) and that was more than enough to pop the Nikkei 5% in 90 minutes, with the /NKD Futures now testing 16,850 – almost catching up to the Dow for the 3rd time in 2 years.
Unfortunately, each time the Nikkei has matched up with the Dow's gains, it's marked and overbought top and led to a sell-off so we were forced to officially reverse our long call on Russell Futures (/TF) from yesterday morning's post and flip short at 1,169 (with tight stops over 1,170). That's OK though because a move from 1,132.50 to 1,169 on /TF is a profit of $3,650 per contract – not bad for a day's work, right?
See, I told you we could pay for your trip to our Las Vegas Live Seminar next week with a Futures trade!
Not that we advocate holding Futures positions overnight – it could just have easily gone the other way. That's what Wednesday's TNA spread was for – the longer-term long position on the Russell, which will pop TNA well over our $80 goal this morning – that trade has a 316% profit potential in less than a month!
Notice how we're popping out of the channel. It would be one thing if we were doing it based on US earnings but doing on Japanese…
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Will We Hold It Wednesday – Strong Bounce Edition
by phil - October 22nd, 2014 8:07 am
What an amazing recovery!
Just one week ago the World was coming to and end and now everyone has their rally caps back on. Investors really are sheep – except I think sheep have better memories… We're still right on plan of dropping 10% and then bouncing 4% (strong bounces) by Wednesday (today) that was initiated on October 6th by our friends at the Fed (see yesterday's post for the summary). For those of you keeping score, our strong bounce predictions for today were:
- Dow 16,466 (weak) and 16,632 (strong).
- S&P 1,878 (weak) and 1,903 (strong).
- Nasdaq 4,280 (weak) and 4,360 (strong).
- NYSE 10,360 (weak) and 10,540 (strong).
- Russell 1,104 (weak) and 1,128 (strong).
The Dow is just 17 points away from our goal and we'll just need the NYSE and the Russell to confirm their bounce lines and THEN we can get bullish again. Meanwhile, we actually got a bit more bearish in our Short-Term Portfolio (also in yesterday's post) as our Long-Term Portfolio popped right back to up 18.1% for the year so we wanted to lock those gains in with the STP, which finished the day up 81.8%, down from 92% in the morning as the markets rocketed.
If the rally is real, the Dow should have no problem at all popping our 16,632 line – after all, it jumped 234 points yesterday but stopped dead right at our strong bounce line. The…
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Testy Tuesday – 10% and/or Bust!
by phil - October 14th, 2014 8:13 am
How low can we go?
So far, the Russell is the only index that's gone through a full 10% correction – falling from 1,180 in early September to 1,050 yesterday – actually 11% – so far. According to our 5% Rule™, if the 10% line is going to hold over the long term, we should hold -12.5% on any additional move down – that would be 1,050 from the 1,200 line. Let's call that our line in the sand for now.
Meanwhile, as I noted in our Live Member Chat room – we're comfortable going long on the Russell Futures (/TF) over the 1,150 line, looking for a nice run back to 1,080 but THRILLED with 1,060 – as that's already +$1,000 per contract! Failing to get back over 1,060, however, will be a sign that there's likely more downside to come.
Of course, thanks to the 5% Rule™ and our Big Chart, we knew to get bearish as soon as 1,200 failed on the Russell, way back in July. In fact, on June 30th, I titled our morning post: "Monday Misgivings – CASH!!! Is King as we Begin Q3" saying:
I'm NOT going to depress you.
If you want to be depressed about the market, check out my Twitter Account, where I posted our Morning Alert to Philstockworld Members (and you can become one of those HERE) in which I aired my concerns with the Global Macros.
Last week we discussed the various forms of market manipulation that are keeping us at record highs and, on Friday, I asked "How Many Countries are Faking Economic Data?"
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Testy Tuesday – 1,975 or BUST!
by phil - October 7th, 2014 8:28 am
I told you it was going to be a wild week!
Not that you can draw any conclusions from yesterday's low-volume action. The Fed doves have their say for the next two days and then we go into a hawkish nosedive on Thursday and Friday, so this little drama is just getting started. All went according to plan yesterday – per our set-up in the morning post:
As a hedge, for our Member Portfolios, we're favoring SQQQ (now $36.55) and DXD (now $24.52) to protect us from another slide but the real tilt to hawkish doesn't start until Thursday, after the Fed minutes, so we can assume they will be spun bearish from there into the weekend and we'll look to take nice, short positions against any run-up that comes from doveish Fed statements early in the week.
As you can see from yesterday's action, that was the perfect way to play it and our short positions on the Futures gave us several quick victories as it was all downhill from the open until 1pm. Even our oil short gave us a nice $600 win – the one that was right there in the morning post at $89.60 and oil was below $89 by 10:45, less than 3 hours for that trade idea to play out!
That's good because we REALLY needed the money because GTAT, one of our good-sized positions in two of our portfolios, declared a surprise bankruptcy yesterday. Bankruptcies are not supposed to be surprising but this one was and GTAT dropped 90%, essentially wiping out a $25,000 position and costing us 1/4 of our year's profits in the Long-Term Portfolio.
There's an excellent article in Bloomberg and another one from Seeking Alpha outlining what happened and where it stands so I'll spare you the gory details other than to say that this is why we stress diversification and portion control in investing. Even so, GTAT happened to be a stock that got weak and, because management promised a turn-around, we added to our losing position on the initial dip and maxed our allocation and then got burned so quickly that we had…
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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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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.