I am about 1000 hours into learning about investing. While, I have tried other websites along the way, they don't teach or focus on selling premiums and certainly don't have your mindset. Anyway, I have a lot to learn and look forward to the new portfolios.
So, thank ALL of you for being patient and teaching others how to "Be the House and not the Gambler"!
GrassHopper67
Phil, thanks for the webinar and options subject…I wasn't shown as attending but I was there for most of it. Your memory amazes me, your speed on the computer amazes me, your math skills blow me away. coke
Coke
Phil, 26% on the week for the 20% I day-trade, and since drinking the kool-aid last fall, the whole portfolio has doubled. Have a great weekend !!
JRW III
Hey I just did a nice options trade on LL for $800 (50%) gain thanks to this site, so… not bad for my first day! An hour of reading you guys and I already paid for two months subscription! Thank you!
lchu
Your discussion during your web seminar on SPX and SDS today was great. It really let me see how you look at the numbers and use the 5% rule to see where inflection points occur and what the bands look like. This was incredibly helpful. I actually sold out of my small short position at a good profit ( which was more a bet on a short term fluctuation rather than a hedge after listening to you) and will look more deeply at my portfolio and how to hedge it. In addition your view on hedging was also very helpful looking at the leverage you can get w/ a small spread, and protect portfolio against a big move against me. Thank you for your sharing this. Very helpful.
Batman
Phil has some great insight into the market. He's given me a different perspective on the market and I know I'm a better trader/investor because of it.
I've been trading options since the late 80's and Phil is right. Unless you know what is going to happen (how can you, unless you have insider information), then do what the smart money does - be the house. Remember guys, we're allowed to sell options. If you're afraid to be short, then do a spread to limit your liability. When I think about the money I've made and lost on options, a good approximation is that I win 30% of the time when I do a straight buy; I win about 70% of the time when I do a spread; I win nearly 90% of the time when I sell naked.
Autolander
Phil/CLK4 – Perfect! Saw the answer 1 min after my post…out with $740 on two contracts. Thanks again for the education.
Jeffdoc2004
BTW Phil, I wanted to relate a conversation I had with my business partner yesterday. I told him that I have been much more relaxed about my investments ever since I joined your site. It's funny how a 15-20% cushion does to your nerves. My returns have increased dramatically and my risk diminished. Many thanks for the guidance and patience. Good thing I am doing better financially as you might have increased my life expectancy as well!
StJeanluc
Tesla et. al. – I've spent many months getting hammered shorting overvalued Momos, until, finally, I internalized Phil's message. Play small; give yourself plenty of room to double/move up the [lack of value] chain in terms of price. Play short; take [Musk's, eg.] latest bleep and sell the spike for a short time frame, because his tweets always come to naught. I've been coining money doing it, I just watch that premium melt away with scarcely veiled amusement. Swinging for the fences is for suckers [me, for a long time]. Those little gains really add up — $2k per week of evaporated premium and you could actually buy a Tesla by the end of the year!!
zeroxzero
Phil & Ephmen85: I hadn't thought about selling the covered calls. That should be the easiest strategy for me since I'm a beginner. Thanks a bunch!
JWick1981
Phil, thank you for all the education here. I've gained so much knowledge being a part of PSW.
Thanks to the rest of the members as well! I appreciate all of the contributions you make.
JeffDoc
Phil: UNH, hedged stock position, doing great, up over 50 %,
RMM
Phil...The hundred grand portfolio updates are helpful...Fun ..and have been profitable...really like em... made some nice entries into USB, KEY today... and I better add those FAZ calls tomorrow... Really glad you put that up this morning...
Becker
I am struck by several things over the last few days. First is how level-headed we all are as Greece and China develop. Second is how very helpful it is to see the different trading styles we have, partly because of personal preference and partly because of different stages of development and education. It's very helpful. Well-done, Phil, to have developed this community.
Snow
Nice intraday trading calls this week Phil. You have me hooked on trading SPY options analogously to your DIA moves. I paid some tuition the last few weeks but I think I have the hang of it. Don't be greedy and be happy with 0.05 to 0.10 and sometimes you're lucky with much bigger moves. Thanks for the training!
TmDecay
This is my first month here. Today was a money train with futures. I gained 7500 USD with KC, RB, CL, NG.
I took RB almost every direction up and down. And I only used 1 contract or maximum 2.
Thank you. I think it was a good investment to subscribe…
Kgabor
Phil: I loaded up big time yesterday on your suggestion of the AMZN September 75 naked puts. They are up 43%!
Gel1
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
Phil,
thank you for the thorough response(s). I joined this group last week to take my education to the next level. the school i am involved with very good at calling out levels but very little live trading and little help in managing a position going against you.
I like the combo of knowing where the major levels are coupled with your approach to getting in. learned a lot this week.
thank you!
DawnR
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
Best day ever trading the futures, thanks to Phil's excellent call this am, and his "play the laggard" instruction. Well done Phil!
Deano
Phil, I followed your investing ideas in LTP quite closely. It seems your insightful fundamental analysis knowledge serves you v. well. I get entertained and they are profitable.
Investwizard
Phil I have been applying your arsenal (matresses, Edz plays, Ugl verticals etc.) to my gold holdings . So a big thank you for "teaching me how to fish" rather than just giving me the fish...
Magret
Thanks, after years of blood and blunders, I have reached a significant milestone – I don't lose money. Net net, I rarely have a losing week, market up, market down. And that I owe to you. Balanced positions. More premium sold than bought. Fundamental criteria applied to good companies, not momentum/ news headlines/ stock du jour/ triangle squeezies. But rather earnings, P/E, dividends, competitive position — the boring stuff that takes study, thought,….and patience. You have been a great teacher, and I have embarassed myself repeatedly day with how slowly I learn.
And it's a funny thing – if you don't lose, the gains start to pile up. The arithmetic is cruel to the downside, and becomes a gift in the other direction. And I'm in this for the long run, having made myself unemployable through a need for diversification. Moreover, what I've learned here has also elided into other areas, including real estate and ex-U.S. investment. Pretty cool. Have a great weekend.
Zeroxzero
Phil: I have 263 positions - 70% in options ( balance stocks) in three portfolios with a value of 3 mil. YTD profit is about $750,000. Thanks!
Gel1
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, you are the man. My positions in ABX and CLF are up massively this year, and doing very nicely with USO and UNG. TSR is another winner. Just waiting for the TSLA short now!
Rookie IRA Investor
You are doing a fantastic job. I think most of us our very well balanced and consequently have learned how to manage through these ever so short declines in the market without panic.
Dclark41
The wonderful resource that Phil has created for us and nourished by its members is so powerful in what it can teach us going forward, but also what we can learn from the past. I never say it often enough, but Phil – thanks for all the work you do for us.
Winston
Phil: well, often you say, just for FUN, great comment, TXS,
closed 2 SKF positions, one with 10 % , the other with 6 % gain,
Sometimes sacrificing American goodwill, Google has tried to develop a lasting business relationship in China, complying with the stringent censorship demands of the Chinese government.
From buying stakes in Chinese startups to going through the tough Chinese bureaucracy to open local headquarters, the Google journey in the communist country has been marred with roadblocks.
HUGE quarter. Revenue of $9.9 billion blows away whisper of $9.4 billion. EPS of $1.82 blows away whispers of $1.65-ish.
iPhone sales of 7.4 million in-line with estimates despite supply constraints. Mac sales huge. iPod sales not as bad as many had feared.
Upside appears to have come from Macs and margins. The Mac resurgence is great news. This business had stalled, and Apple has a huge opportunity to gain share in the PC market.
December guidance comically conservative, but not alarming.
Overall: Wow. Apple is on its way to becoming the defacto platform standard in mobile. And the crumbling of Microsoft’s Windows monopoly has opened a huge window on the desktop. The company is galloping after both opportunities.
5:07: Macs. 3.05 million, up 17% Biggest ever by 440k. Growing faster than market 19 of last 20 quarters. Best user experience. 17% growth compares to 2% market growth = huge market share gain. laptops 74% of mix and all of the growth. Successful back-to-school. 12% growth to education. 50,000 Macbooks to Maine (lucky bastards). 3-4 weeks inventory at beginning and end of quarter.
5:10: iPods. 10.2 million, down from 11 million. iPod touch up 100% y/y, driven by back to school and App store. Share of US market still over 70%. Top-selling and continued to gain share year over year. Began and ended with 4-6 weeks of inventory. iTunes another great quarter. Largest music retailer, 11 million songs, 7500 movies.
5:11: iPhones. 7.4 million, up 7% (last year had 2mm inventory build). Sell-through up 38%. Widened lead in customer satisfaction. Start selling in China end of this month. Also expanding carrier relationship in UK and Canada. App Store: 500 million downloads in quarter. $2.3 billion in quarter.
5:13: Stores. $1.87 billion, vs $1.72 billion. 670,000 Macs vs. 576,000.
General Electric missed EPS expectations by two cents, reporting $0.22 for the third quarter. Revenue fell 20%, though this was largely caused by a 30% drop in revenue for the company’s Capital Finance segment as the company tries to pare back this troubled business’s operations.
While revenue fell for other segments as well, by a significant 9 – 18% each, margins improved substantially for all of them.
Overal operating profit fell 26% largely due to an 87% drop in profit from the Capital Finance business. Ex-Capital Finance, operating profit actually rose 4% to $4,179 million from $4,017 million.
It’s thus important to strip out the financial unit when judging the current operational situation, especially since it is being purposefully pared back.
Revenue fell by far less on this measure.
GE: Revenues were $37.8 billion, in line with our expectations. Industrial sales were down 13%. Industrial organic sales, which exclude the impact of FX and the 2008 Olympics, were down 8%. GE Capital Services (GECS) revenues declined 31%, driven by Capital Finance ending net investment reduction ahead of plan and the Penske Truck Leasing Co., L.P. deconsolidation.
While the financial arm still unfortunately poses an element of uncertainty for the stock, at least it didn’t post an operating loss.
The deal is significantly worse than expected for Yahoo, as the company will get no money upfront.
The deal is positive for Microsoft, but largely because Microsoft was nowhere in search without it. Saving the upfront payment is also a help.
Ironically, the deal will likely be positive for Google, which will now likely benefit from months of purgatory as Microsoft and Yahoo work to clear regulatory scrutiny and then go through the massive challenge of trying to integrate their sales forces and technology. Google itself will also now be able to argue persuasively that there is a big, viable (if discombobulated) competitor in the market.
Conceptually, the idea of Microsoft and Yahoo combining forces is smart. Neither alone has enough share of the search market to be a "must buy," and search relevance and pricing improves with scale. Both companies would likely just continue to lose share ad infinitum without a deal, so they have little to lose by working together. And Yahoo will gain some cost savings, at least for a while.
That said, we think the structure of the deal could end up being a disaster.
The deal calls for Yahoo to handle sales and Microsoft to handle technology. This separation of responsibilities is likely to create headache upon headache for both sides. When a Yahoo client is unhappy with the technology execution, will Yahoo salespeople call Microsoft engineers to complain? When Microsoft is unhappy with the way Yahoo is selling search, will Microsoft’s engineers call Yahoo to complain? When the combination misses targets, will investors call Microsoft or Yahoo to complain? (Both?) When Microsoft licenses Bing to Ask or AOL, will Yahoo’s salespeople sell premium search for those companies, too? What if Ask and AOL are unhappy? Who will they call to complain?
In our opinion, sales and technology are way too tightly linked in this business to split responsibilities between two huge companies that each have other things to worry about. We think the execution of the deal will be a nightmare.
The OS will initially be targeted to netbooks, then broadened to all PCs. It will be a combination of a Google Chrome browser and a Linux kernel. It will be a different project than Android. It will be designed to be simple and fast. It will also, presumably, be free.
Google’s blog post announcing the browser is below. A few points:
A year of development is a long time, and it shows how complex an undertaking this will be. Announcing the product a year early is also a major break with Google tradition and shows how much Google needs help from partners in this endeavor to be successful. (An OS that is distributed only by downloads won’t work. It needs to come loaded on the machine. This has been the big problem with Chrome so far, and Google needs to address it.)
Success is far from guaranteed. Google’s browser initiative, Chrome, has been a fun little science project, but as a product it has been a flop. The same can be said for almost all of Google’s non-search products. If Google wants to have a chance at success in this business, it needs to focus on it with the same intensity it once put into search. This will be challenging for Google, which, for the last several years, has had the luxury of dabbling in whatever it pleases.
Assuming the OS is free to both users and OEM PC makers, Microsoft will need to soup up the free version of its own Windows 7 OS for netbooks (right now, Microsoft’s plan is to ship a crappy free version of 7 and try to get users to upgrade. Eventually, if Google starts to gain traction, Microsoft may need to panic.)
This is classic disruption. Disruptive technologies do not immediately replace existing technologies because they are better. In fact, in the beginning, they are worse. They’re just…
Rogue science strikes again: The case of the first gene-edited babies
Chinese scientists led by He Jiankui claimed they used CRISPR to modify human embryos that eventually were born as twin girls. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
The idea of scientists tinkering with the genes of babies was once the provenance of science fiction, but now it’s apparently entered the realm of reality: On Nov. 26, Chinese scientist He Jiankui reported the historic live births of ...
Soon US smokers could see the shocking visual warning labels on cigarette packets that Americans have come to identify with Europe. US health officials are making a new push to require graphic images to be placed on every cigarette pack by law across the US to discourage smoking, as the current mere textual warning hasn't changed since 1984. The Associated Press reported this week:
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday proposed 13 new warnings that would appear on all cigarettes, including images of ...
Negative yields are becoming common for many of the world’s most mature economies. The process of extending negative yields within these economies suggests that safety is more important than returns and that central banks realize that growth and increases in GDP are more important than positive returns on capital. In the current economic environment, this suggests that global capital investors are seeking out alternative solutions to adequately develop longer-term opportunities and to develop native growth prospects that don’t currently exist.
Our research team has been researching this phenomenon and how it relates to the continued “capital shift&rdq...
Plus Therapeutics Inc (NASDAQ: PSTV) is the latest and one of the most extreme recent examples of the powerful combination of low float and heavy trading volume.
Plus shares traded higher by more than 215% on Friday. The biotech stock more than tripled after the company reported ...
After a big day like yesterday, I like to get a little long term stock market chart perspective. (Yes, this stilted verbiage is for search engine optimization ).
We do that with a monthly bar chart, which I update when relevant in Lee Adler’s Technical Trader. That’s in addition to the regular daily bar/cycle charts covering the past year, and a weekly cycle chart covering the past 4 years.
I wrote on July 14, in reference to the price and indicator patterns on the weekly chart:
The market has overshot a 3-4 year cycle projection in terms of both price and time. There are no long term projections. A 4 year cycle high is ideally due now. A 4 ye...
Crude Oil has declined around 14% more than the S&P during this time frame. Yields have declined, even more, around 36%. The is a huge spread between these assets over this short of a time period.
Today's news from the US IRS has been blamed for the recent price slump, yet the bitcoin fractal like the gold fractal suggest the market players have set bitcoin up for a slump to $9000 USD long before the IRS news hit the wire.
Get the impression some market players missed out on the b...
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been on a persistent upswing this year, but they're still pretty volatile. But during a time when even some of the most developed economies in the word are watching their currencies bounce around like the Argentine peso (just take a look at a six-month chart for GBPUSD), New Zealand has decided to take the plunge and become the first country to legalize payment in bitcoin, the FT reports.
The ruling by New Zealand’s tax authority allows salaries and wages to b...
For most people, the purpose of investing is to build up enough wealth to allow you to retire. In general, that's usually enough money to reliably generate a year's worth of your average income, each year into your retirement so that that, plus you Social Security, should be enough to pay your bills without having to draw down on your principle.
Unfortunately, as the last decade has shown us, we can't count on bonds to pay us more than 3% and the average return from the stock market over the past 20 years has been erratic - to say the least - with 4 negative years (2000, 2001, 2002 and 2008) and 14 positives, though mostly in the 10% range on the positives. A string of losses like we had from 2000-02 could easily wipe out a decades worth of gains.
Still, the stock market has been better over the last 10 (7%) an...
Phil has a chapter in a newly-released eBook that we think you’ll enjoy.
In My Top Strategies for 2017, Phil's chapter is Secret Santa’s Inflation Hedges for 2017.
This chapter isn’t about risk or leverage. Phil present a few smart, practical ideas you can use as a hedge against inflation as well as hedging strategies designed to assist you in staying ahead of the markets.
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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Google Launching OS, Firing Torpedo Into Microsoft (And Apple) Hold (MSFT, GOOG, AAPL)
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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. She manages the site