Will We Hold It Wednesday – 1,333 or Bust (as usual)
by phil - July 20th, 2011 8:13 am
Here we go again!
We blew right though our expected bullish levels of Dow 12,500, S&P 1,317, Nasdaq 2,775 and Russell 825 but failed to make 8,300 on the NYSE so, as usual, our biggest and most difficult to manipulate index is holding us back – flashing a warning sign while the other indices scream for us to "party on." Fortunately, as I mentioned in yesterday’s morning post, we had already gone aggressively bullish with the SPY Aug $128/131 bull call spread at $1.83, selling the Sept $120 puts for $1.57 and that net .26 spread is already net $1.86 – up 615% since I posted the trade idea at 12:53 in Monday’s Member Chat.
It’s good to have a few aggressive trades like this to take advantage of market bounces. Before that we had taken the SSO Aug $51/53 bull call spread at $1.05, selling the Sept $44 puts for $1.07 for a net .02 credit at 10:46 in Member Chat (the SPY play was for late-comers who missed out on SSO). The Aug $51/53 spread finished the day yesterday at $1.35 but the real win comes from the short $44 puts, which fell to .70 so the .02 net credit is now a .65 net credit for .67 total profit, up 3,350% in less than 48 hours. See, options are fun!
The only other trade ideas from Monday were a long-term bullish play on RIMM (selling 2013 $22.50 puts for $4.20) a long futures play on the Russell Futures (/TF) off the 810 line (now 835) and I reiterated our bearish spread on CMG as I felt they would disappoint on earnings (they did). Yesterday we picked up a long-term longs on GLW, RYAAY and WFR, half covered our FAS longs (iffy so far), took a poke at shorting the DIA that worked for a quick 10%, shorted oil with a DUG spread (futures too scary) and picked up another short spread on CMG – selling 3 Aug $330 calls for $16 ($4,800) against 2 long Dec $360 calls at $18 ($3,600) for a net $1,200 credit – those should be nice winners this morning!
In the afternoon we flipped more bearish and picked up 10 SPY weekly $133 puts at $1.15 ($1,150 of our virtual dollars) for our $25,000 Virtual Portfolio and those are probably going to hurt this morning as the Dollar…
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Toppy Tuesday – Happy Anniversary Bull Market!
by phil - March 9th, 2010 8:26 am
It's hard to believe that just one year ago today investors thought the world was ending!
Well, not all investors – we were BUYBUYBUYing at the time, as I recapped back in September whan we did our "Market Crash – Year One Review." Click on Cramer's picture for the Daily Show's March 4th, 2009 review of the magical moments that led us down to the bottom and here's another great video from the evening broadcast on March 9th and, of course, there is my own legendary appearance on LiveStock from March 6th, but that's summarized in the crash link, so save yourself 3 hours, although the first 10 minutes are worth it for people who want to learn about our buy/write strategy as I explained the logic of it as I recommended FAS at $2.41 using those hedges.
And what a wild year it has been as we've made an epic recovery. The only question is – have we come too far too fast? Should we be up 75% from our March 9th lows? We are still down 25% from our highs but let's keep in mind that we made those highs thinking AIG was MAKING money, that FNM and FRE were great stocks for your retirement virtual portfolio, that Kirk Kirkorean was going to rescue GM, that BZH wasn't some kind of scam, that BSC, LEH et al were "the smartest guys in the room." I urge you to click on Cramer and listen to the idiocy of the analysts who would tell you everything is all right even as it was all falling apart around them – why does everyone suddenly trust them again?
How could we not love this market? Markets do this sort of thing all the time don't they? It's all part of the "efficient pricing model" that always lets you know what a stock is truly worth like when GE was "worth" $30 in 2008 and "worth" $6 in 2009 and is now "worth" $16. This is not some biotech folks – this is GE, they've been around for 100 years and they have $170Bn in global sales. Did they really drop 80% in value in 2009? No. That's why it was easy to pick a bottom – the valuations got ridiculous and, as fundamentalists, we siezed…
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America’s Commodity Crisis – 2010 Edition
by phil - March 5th, 2010 7:07 pm
Ouch!
We did not expect to break higher this week. After a stellar week last week where we had 49 winners in 56 trades, I’m dreading this week’s review as I really feel like my picks were too bearish overall. Of course, the bulk of our trading is in bullish long-term positions that are doing very well but that doesn’t mean I don’t like to win the short game as well. As I said at the close of last week’s review: "I’ll be in a foul mood if we have a commodity rally that moves the Dow up on Monday but it will be my own fault – as I often say to members – CASH is so much more flexible!" And you know what – we did have a commodity rally and I AM in a foul mood!
Commodities are a TAX. They are the worst kind of tax because they flatly (not progressively) charge every man woman and child in this country more money for the same food, fuel, shelter and clothing that they had to have last week in order to live. It doesn’t matter if those people are trying to save or trying to tighten their belts or trying to get out of debt – high commodity prices are a shake-down that rips money out of the pockets of the middle class and funnels it to the very, very small class of commodity producers, commodity speculators and the people who finance them and collect the fees.
Over 99% of the people in this country do not own mines or oil wells (and I’m not counting small farmers because they are literally raped by speculators and bankers, often leaving them worse-off than the consumers) or huge plantations and they do not buy futures contracts on margin with cash they borrow at prime plus 0.5% nor do they own tankers filled with 2M barrels of crude that they arbitrage along the crack spread, looking for an opportune moment to deliver their goods (hopefully during a crisis) at a maximum profit.
So 99% of the people in this country don’t even own a commodity ETF – they have no way to profit from high commodity prices and they need to eat, and they need to buy clothing and have shelter and they need fuel to heat or cool their homes and go from place to place. There is…
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Thank Jobs It’s Friday
by phil - August 7th, 2009 8:23 am
Well, yesterday was fun!
As we expected, the massive pre-market pump job failed once again to push our breakout levels and that led to 6 of our 7 day trades coming out winners in Member Chat. We're still waiting on the 7th, our MOS puts that were meant to be a weekend hold anyway so not really a day-trade but it was lots of fun after sitting mainly on the sidelines this week waiting for a good opportunity to jump in. Our plan from the morning post to buy out our DIA putters worked perfectly as well and we even went bullish on the DIA's into yesterday's stick save so we're not even going to complain about that nonsense today!
It will take more than a stick to save the markets today if the jobs report is a disappointment. GS, BCS and JPM have all lowered their loss predictions from around 370,000 lost jobs to 250-275,000 job losses and DB has gone completely off the wall with a prediction of just 150,000 losses! As the US is gearing up for the 2010 census and as no one understands the mystical "seasonal adjustment" game and as GS pulls all the strings in government, we are hard-pressed to dismiss this seemingly ridiculous prediction. What do the big 3 market manipuluators have to gain by raising expectations so high just ahead of the actual numbers? Perhaps they have already finished their selling and have now fipped negative, looking to initiate a massive sell-off as jobs disappoint? Or, perhaps, they are brilliant analysts who are well ahead of a number that will, finally, give us our long-awaited break out.
![[Total workers on nonfarm payrolls]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MI-AY121_AOT_NS_20090806184812.gif)
If the figures do surprise, it won't be in a statistically significant way. A payroll decline of 450,000, which would mortify Wall Street, would mean a 0.3% decline in total payrolls. A market-friendlier decline of 150,000, on the other hand, would represent a 0.1% decline. Percentage-wise, the difference is a crapshoot. At some point, jobs data should improve meaningfully. The four-week moving average of new jobless claims is down 10% from late June. That translates into about 200,000 fewer job cuts a month, estimates High Frequency Economics economist Ian Shepherdson. "The risk of a substantial upward surprise on payrolls over the next few…
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Europe on the Brink
by phil - July 19th, 2009 7:42 am
Europe on the Brink
Globalization is a two-edged sword. On balance, it has brought prosperity to those who have embraced it, with rising lifestyles, better health, longer lives, and more. The more we need each other, the less likely it is that we'll shoot each other. Shooting your customers is not a good business strategy. And while the growth has not been even or smooth, only a Luddite would want to return to the early 1800s or 1900s, or even 1975.
The other edge of that sword? We are connected in so very many ways, far more than most of the world suspected. Who thought that insane lending policies at US mortgage banks would bring the world financial system to its knees, increasing unemployment and leading to a global recession? World trade is down 20% or more. US railroad shipments are down more than 20% year-over-year. Chinese (and Asian) factories have seen their orders drop, as US consumers have gone on strike. The US trade deficit was just $25 billion last month; and while our exports are still dropping, our imports are dropping more. Oil is becoming a…
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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.
