Options Expiration Friday – Anything Can Happen
by phil - May 16th, 2014 8:08 am
Another crazy day ahead.
What else is new in this market? As you can see from Dave Fry's SPY chart, the pattern is holding up of high-volume (relatively) sell-offs following low-volume run-ups. This is how the Institutional Investors manipulate the markets to dump unwanted shares on retail investors. I've been telling you all week how it works and now we can see it in action.
Of course, it's nice to have this knowledge ahead of time – that's the edge we strive to give to our Members at Philstockworld. Even if you are just reading us for free and don't have access to our Live Member Chat Room, you would have done very well to follow our advice on Tuesday and go with the DIA puts at $166.80 and the DXD longs at $26.20 – it was right there on top of the morning post (which you can have mailed to you every day, pre-market by SUBSCRIBING HERE)! In our Member Chat, the previous day, our trade ideas were:
A 5% pullback on DIA is 8.3 points (830 Dow points), back to $158.40 from here. The June $161 puts are .95 so, if you have $100K to protect against a 10% drop, you can buy $5K worth of the June $161 puts and a 5% drop pays you back $8,000 and a 10% drop to $150 (15,000) would net you $11 per contract so a 10x return is $55,000 back – that's overhedged actually!
On DXD, the July $25/28 spread is $1.10 and is $1.25 in the money so you get all the upside on DXD up to a 140% profit on a very small move down in the Dow. We already have July $28 calls in the STP and it's a little too soon to roll but we will.
On a new trade – you can just get out if the S&P holds 1,900 for more than a day – that's not too far from here.
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Faltering Thursday – Trouble at the Top?
by phil - May 15th, 2014 8:42 am
Now what?
Options expire on Friday and last expiration day (4/18), we were 2.5% higher on the Russell and Nasdaq , which is about how much higher the Dow, S&P and NYSE are from where they were at the time.
It's been an interesting month watching our indexes diverge but, as we discussed in our Tug Boat Example last week, this sort of behavoir simply doesn't last very long. The end of that discussion (last Thursday) was:
NYSE 10,000 was clearly the right line and 10,500 is the 5% line and 10,750 is 7.5% with the NYSE now at 10,667. Another reason we don't move the Must Hold lines is the NYSE has given no indication at all that it will be able to go over 11,000 (10% line) and we're back the tugboat that holds the others back.
RUT 1,100 is the 10% line and 1,200 is the 20% line and the RUT moves like the only thing trading it is a computer running on the 5% Rule. Complete obedience of the lines makes it fantastic to trade – except the direction it moves is quick and seemingly random! Still, 1,100 is a very good floor (so bullish above) and 1,200 has been too hard to hold (so short below) and, at the moment, it's fallen into the lowest quadrant of that range – not able to stay over 1,125. That indicates a downward bias as it makes a triangle squeezy thingy down there (and it's below the 200 dma at 1,115 at the moment).
So, either the RUT comes out of the triangle squeezy thingy to the downside and drags the others with it or the Dow, NYSE and S&P pop over their resistance and bring the RUT along for the ride. Interesting times indeed…
As you can see from Dave Fry's Russell Chart, the RUT resolved it's triangle sqeezy thingy to the downside – after the requisite head-fake and now we're back to the…
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Who Cares About Put-Backs? All the Reflationistas, That’s Who.
by ilene - October 19th, 2010 11:56 pm
Who Cares About Put-Backs? All the Reflationistas, That’s Who.
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
The mortgage fraud cost estimates for banks are a bit like QB Ryan Leaf - all over the place and without any accuracy whatsoever.
We’re hearing estimates of anywhere from a few hundred million bucks to as much as $200 billion! And in the meantime, Bank of America ($BAC) is telling us that they’ve found nothing wrong in their foreclosure process and that after halting all activity in 50 states, they are now back in business in half the country.
There are currently 7 million foreclosures in the housing market that need to be worked through and any delay will be costly for large lenders like B of A.
Should the states or the courts decide that many of these securitized mortgage-backed bonds are structured fraudulently (no one knows which mortgage is owned by whom), there is a possibility that the banks may have to buy them back due to a clause on most of this paper called the Put-Back.
In the absence of anything even resembling a consensus on how big the costs of mortgage put-backs may be, the temptation is to simply say, Who Cares? Well, I’ll tell you who cares…
For starters, how about hedge fund manager John Paulson? With a stake in Bank of America of 167 million shares, Mr. Paulson has about 2 billion reasons to care about how big their put-back exposure is.
Mutual fund monster Bruce Berkowitz (Fairholme) has about 667 million reasons to give a damn (54 million shares held).
Hedgie David Tepper of Appaloosa Management, no slouch himself in the "reflation trade", has about 337 million reasons to care (27 million shares).
These three investors make up the Triumvirate of the Reflationista Trade. These are the ultimate Don’t-Fight-The-Fed-ers.
That they are all in the same trade, BAC, is not a surprise – it is the quintessential call option on housing and employment. But they may not have bargained for the foreclosure mess that has hit the media with the gale-force wind of 2007′s sub-prime storm. Whether or not this particular storm blows over – or spills over – is very much of interest to Paulson, Berkowitz and Tepper, make no mistake.
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Sure Thing?!
by ilene - September 29th, 2010 1:23 am
Sure Thing?!
Courtesy of Mish
Last week, David Tepper, a billionaire hedge fund titan and president of Appaloosa Management remarked on CNBC …
Two things are happening. It’s that easy sometimes. Either the economy is going to get better by itself, in the next 3 months and what assets are going to do well? You can guess what assets will do well – stocks are going to do well, bonds won’t do so well, gold won’t do as well. OR The economy is not going to pick up in the next three months and the Fed is going to come in with QE. Right? Then what’s going to do well? Everything! In the near term – Everything!
Video
Earnings vs. Share Prices
One might not be able to argue with Tepper’s past performance, but one sure can argue with his current logic. Stocks do not necessarily go up because earnings go up. Stocks rise or fall primarily based on sentiment.
Right now, sentiment is so bullish and earnings estimates so lofty there is room for hefty earnings expansion that falls short or estimates. Buying stocks that miss wildly optimistic earnings estimates is not likely to work out well.
Furthermore, even if earnings do come in on target, there is no historic guarantee that stock prices follow. For example, on March 31, 1973 the S& P was at 111.52 with trailing earnings of $6.80. Seven years later, on March 31, 1980 the S&P was at 102.09 with trailing earnings of $15.27.
Thus, over a span of seven years, earning rose 125% while stock prices fell 8.5%!
What happened? The PE ratio on the S&P fell from 16.40 to 6.68, that’s what.
Moreover, those were real earnings then. Now, corporations hide garbage in SIVs with the blessing of the Fed and analysts cite pro-forma earnings that throw out "one-time" charges that occur with increasing regularity.
Thus, anyone who says stock prices will go up because earnings go up, does not understand history. This does not make Tepper wrong, but it does make his argument fallacious.
What About Quantitative Easing?
Tepper also argues that everything will be good if the Fed falls back on quantitative easing. Really?
The Cleveland Fed has a series of nice charts on Japan’s Quantitative Easing Policy
Japan’s Quantitative Easing vs. Price Inflation
Japan’s Quantitative Easing in Trillions of Yen
After a series
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WHAT IF THE MARKET ISN’T A “WIN WIN”?
by ilene - September 28th, 2010 12:43 pm
WHAT IF THE MARKET ISN’T A “WIN WIN”?
Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Apparently I am not the only one who took issue with David Tepper’s comments that the
“Too bad we weren’t invited as a guest on CNBC last Friday to engage in a friendly debate with this portfolio manager because he didn’t outline the third scenario, either because he doesn’t believe it or he just plain didn’t contemplate it or he’s simply not positioned for it. That third scenario is that the economy weakens to such an extent that the Fed does indeed re-engage in QE, but that it does not work. So the “E” goes down and the P/E multiple does not expand. Maybe it even contracts since it already has spent the past number of years reverting to the mean as are so many other market and macro variables (for example, the dividend yield, savings rate, homeownership rate and debt ratios). In this scenario, the stock market does not go up; it goes down.
Is it possible that QE2 won’t work? The answer is yes. How do we know? Well, because the first round of QE didn’t work. After all, if it had worked, the Fed obviously would not be openly contemplating the second round of balance sheet expansion. If the objective was narrow in terms of bringing mortgage spreads in from sky-high levels, well, on that basis, it did help.”
I don’t entirely agree here. QE1 worked because we were in a different environment. The problem Bernanke was targeting in 2009 was one of bank balance sheets. Bank balance sheets were loaded with toxic assets so replacing these assets with cash was most certainly beneficial. It eliminated much of the risk associated with the banking system. As Bernanke said at the time, the point of QE was to alleviate pressures in the credit markets. As we can see from credit spreads he certainly succeeded in this regard. But this is no longer the environment we are in. As I said last week there are no bank balance sheets to fix. There is no…
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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.