Thanks for the USO directions today. Made it 3 times (up/down/up) for a very nice win.
Doro165
I enjoy your informative materials, Phil... as it is obviously beneficial to so many "styles" of trading the markets... long term, swing or day trading the market moves.
As a longer term trader, I really like you long term calls, as I for one recognize the difficulty of calling these, because the further out you go in time, projecting price movement becomes more difficult.
I have to congratulate you for your accuracy... You called the March 2009 market upward reversal almost to the day, and the AAPL reversal to THE day. Only one who has been a student of the economy and the markets over a period of time could have done this, and so many other accurate calls. I'm sure it was difficult and consistent work, but it did pay off... thanks from one who benefited big time !
1234Gel
Phil/BCS - Didn't realise they traded here. Should've known really. Thanks for the tip. managed to pick some up just before the close at a 15% discount to the UK closing price.
DB
Phil/ Thanks to your obsessive bearish anxiety over the last few weeks, I made money on the long side this month, phased gradually to bearish, came in net short today and managed to make money both long and short all week, ending today [and each day this week] in the green. I don't know how you do it, but thank you.
Zeroxzero
Simply the best blogger with the greatest group of members a person could surround himself with on trading day. I've been trading for quite some time now and the insights & suggestions offered by Phil and the members keep me on a continuous learning cycle.
DDay
Sold out my AAPL mar95 calls. Up over 100% today on them!
Singapore Steve
I have been a member for over six years and I still learn something new every day. This site gives you the skills to trade without having to be spoon fed. More importantly it teaches you about risk which is WAY more important than profit. Honestly, it is not a get rich quick scheme!
Malsg
Thanks Phil, for banging the table on getting short and getting to cash. Usually when this happens in the market I am freaking out but I actually made money this week thanks to you. That HOV trade was a great way to re-deploy some of my cash.
Julian
Hi Mr. Phill, I am a Venezuelan lady tormented by our politicall situation, who use to be an emerging market trader, and many other executive positins in the finance "arena" and now is trying to built a new concept and service for asset management for clients on my own, I am in the trial and learning process at the moment, I also invest for some friends and myself. I want to congratulate you , because reading you fill my days with a touch of irony (besides ,of course the spectacular market insight) that happens to give me energy, its a joy the remarks and comments even the pictures used, sometimes I just read it for the fun, I completily agree with your thouhts, though we belong to totally different cultures and enviorements and certanly realities Your readings is like a little hand helping me out to be in the market and fight for my devastated country where every single day we looe inches and yards of liberty. You shoul try to writte a book!
Mindeyes
It was a nice day thanks to your help! Made over $1100 shorting TF every time it came up near 1260 and even more by going long oil before inventory under $46 and then waited patiently for the spike up into the close where I shorted it at 47.70 or so. Phil you gave me a road map and I simply followed the signs along the way.
Craigsa620
Speaking of the "Man Who Planted Trees", it really works. I bought BTU back in March at $49.87. I practically bought it at the tippy top. However, I soon afterward found this site, started learning Phil's methodology(and those in the strategy section) and began selling calls/puts regularly against my bad position. As of yesterday, I still own the original 100 shares, but have brought my basis down by over $11.00. Couldn't be happier, what started out as a really bad entry, I have managed to work down to a good basis. Had I not watched that video and learned your system, I would sold out of the position, and been kicking myself for making such a bad entry.
Hoss
I have been around for many years now, was a modest inexperienced investor when I started, and I can honestly say I would not be at the point in my portfolio I am today without the guidance of Phil and JeanLuc and Yodi and all the others I've had the pleased of learning from and, on a few occasions meeting, over the years. Truly been a great experience.
RPeri
Phil I have been telling you for a while how I feel like I am really understanding you now and thanking you. Well today may have been my most successful futures trading day since I began here and the week has been spectacular! It has just seemed so easy when you give us a range and I execute properly. Thanks once again for teaching me to fish. My portfolio gained over 10% this week which is just amazing.
Craiga620
I'm just starting my second year as a member, and I'd like to thank all of you for sharing your trading ideas and insight, and especially Phil of course for great all-around investing advice as well as trades! In addition to learning patience and profit-taking, I think one of the most important things I'm learning here is to stick to stocks and trades that suit my temperament. And wow, I had NO idea how hard it was to learn patience. I should say "practice" instead of "learn", because it seems to be a constant struggle. Phil, please keep reminding us how nice CASH is!
Jerseyside
What a great post today, Phil. A veritable feast of ideas! I've been reading your posts for years and have modeled my whole trading style after yours. You should be taking 2 and 20 off of me at this point ????
Jablams
SPY/Phil, I took a big swing on January 26th following your advice to another member and bought 1615 contracts of Mar 185/190 BCS on SPY that will expire ITM today paying $290,700 on the $500k bet. I thought it might be fun to see what a winning trade looks like. Great call on your part and looking back it seems pretty obvious.
Sibe14 (premium)
Phil, I've got to give you props on the ICE spread play. Tremendous call! I jumped in on Friday when you made the recommendation and closed out today. Nice 57% return ($2,300) over a mere 3 trading days! This is why I dig your site!
Samlawyer
Phil - I celebrate today, having reached my goal for the year, trading in sync with your education and guidance, of 1 million in profit. I learned a lot, achieved much, and am profoundly grateful. To be honest, when I set the goal I thought it was daunting, as I have for many years been an investor in equities but did very little with options. Learning and doing has for me been a blast!
I reached my goal by following Phil's strategies - lots of Buy/Writes, covered calls on equities , naked put entries for income production. I did it with 2.5 mil and kept 600,000 in cash in case I got in trouble. I concentrated on stocks (many of my own choosing) that had decent dividends and wrote front month calls against (OTM) which has worked well in this market run. 25% of my gain is in dividends and premium selling, with the balance in appreciation.
Gel1
Thanks Phil, I have adjusted my position by getting rid of the IYF puts, and selling the FAZ puts. You have so many of these awesome little tricks in your playbook that it really amazes me. I toally love your analogy by the way: Do you want insurance that you have to pay for, or do you want insurance that pays you?
Craigzooka
I subscribed to Phils Stock World full service for a year or so and found that it was extremely helpful. Now I just get the Stock World Weekly summary, which I find invaluable.
Phil does not baby people and certainly can't make someone into a successful stock operator who does not make the effort on their own behalf, but he is extremely generous with his time in answering newbie questions.
Although I found it difficult to follow and implement all his trades in real time, what I did find was that once you got the hang of his methodology and way of thinking, you could work out your own trades and be quite successful. Even just using his patent Rule Number One* alone is worth its weight in gold. Rule Number Two is even better.
Rookie IRA Investor
PSW – Price/Value; The value of PSW on a regular basis exceeds by far the price of the annual subscription. The edition of February 26 'Which Way Wednesday – Popping or Topping?', – priceless for the serious investor.
Winston
Hey Phil -- I want to thank you every chance I get for helping me to grow my previous portfolio to being profitable enough to pay off some debts my family had and left me with $1,000 left to use in the markets. You should know that your premium membership is amazing on many levels, You and your readers offer a ton of economic and statistical analysis that I was able to use in my clerical level job in finance. It's a shame that someone as talented and honest as you is not on television each night providing a true service to the investing public and not the clowns and hucksters that are talking up their books to dump on retail investors. Sorry for the long post. I had to say something to you that I never thought I would have the opportunity to. You helped put my family in an almost debt-free life through the stock and option plays that I made during my time as a customer of your service and that has made us very happy. You are a good man and I wish you and your family many years of joy and happiness. I wish I could do ads for you!
DaveJ
I love it when a trade really comes together. After 4 DD's and a roll, I cashed out 16 times my initial position in TLT today for a 140% gain. Thank you Phil for the lessons in scaling in, and paying for position.
2Can
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
Every time I read Mr. Davis' market analyses and reports about his super profitable trades I feel admiration mixed with envy for the overall brilliance of this man, intellectual and verbal, his extraordinary savvy in the exotic art of options and, last not least, his moral passion with which he writes, even if in passing, about the darker aspects of capitalism.
RussianBear
Dear Phil, I have followed along with your commentary and alerts and have been flabbergasted at your quick analytical skills and your journalistic skills to explain it clearly. In a little over three weeks I have cleared almost 1000.00 dollars and got an intensive education at the same time. I would like to immediately upgrade my membership. It is hard for me to follow all evening as I am in Tokyo but I can join you at the beginning of the market and read the next day.
Tokyolife
Phil/USO Adjustment~~ Thanks for showing us the make it even (maybe even profitable) tricks for 'fixing' a losing position. I would have never known the trick if you didn't explain it. The option adjustment techniques are very helpful. Trading stocks would probably never offer that kind of flexibilities! Thanks!
Investwizard
Hi Phil,
Thanks for the free disaster hedge ideas. I implemented variations of two of them on SDS bull call spreads and EEM bear put spreads (haven't done the TZA yet) and they really hedged my short term longs nicely today. Makes it seem a lot less like gambling.
You are the man (of the people)!
Howard Roake
Thanks to Phil (again) for the lessons on the art of the roll, selling premium and hanging tight under fire (particularly in the first hour of trading-MADNESS). Watching you manage the $25KP has really helped my trading in a big way.
Oknoman
Thank God for Phil.
A few months ago (April) I didn´t even know what hedging was, and someone recommended I should check out some of Phil´s plays, especially on the retirement portfolio. When I first started to read it, none of it made a blind bit of sense to me, but I stuck with it and gradually began to work through some of the trades to see how it worked. Now I am putting on 5:1 SPY backspreads combined with bear put spreads, entering and leaving positions after consulting the VIX, and engaging in other esoteric maneuvers that are keeping my portfolio above water.
Eric King reports the breaking news that in a letter obtained by Ted Butler, the DOJ’s Antitrust department is considering launching an investigation into silver market manipulation by JP Morgan. Should an announcement of a full formal probe of manipulation by JPM follow, it would be tantamount to a confirmation of what numerous individuals have been claiming over the years, that JP Morgan, the LBMA, the CFTC, various banks, and even that kindly old grandpa who was so much against derivatives except when he was about to lose money as a result of regulation that he is spending the whole weekend telling his investors in Omaha to run, not walk, to Borsheim’s, and buy all their massively overpriced trinkets (you can’t be a quadrillionaire without first being a trillionaire), are nothing but a borderline criminal cabal that traffics in wealth extraction courtesy of a few monopolist players. As Eric King discloses in its letter the Anti-Trust division announces that "it will carefully consider the issue of silver market manipulation by JP Morgan and other traders. Generally the CFTC investigates these types of market manipulations. However, the suggestion that JPMorgan Chase may be signaling other traders, warrants further analysis. The DOJ will carefully consider the issue you raise, and you can be assured that if we conclude that silver traders have engaged in anti-competitive conduct, we will take appropriate enforcement action."
Ted Butler, always cutting to the point, says: "It’s about time a major government organization stepped up to end what has been a very serious crime in progress that has basically covered two decades…[JP Morgan's] level of concentration only exists in the silver markets. Concentration is the hallmark of manipulation or a monopoly. Our markets are supposed to be free markets, they are not supposed to be controlled by anybody. Right now the silver market is a monopoly, the chief monopolist is JP Morgan, and the only entity that can step up to JPM is the Antitrust division of the DOJ…If you want to put it into perspective, more important and more serious than what is currently happening with Goldman Sachs. This is a crime in progress, this is an allegation of current market manipulation. This is as serious as you get. You don’t get bigger than market manipulation."
And, as a scheduled daily reminder to Christine Varney: if you are evaluating JP Morgan…
First, before you read the WSJ bit, check out this video. It will put everything into context nicely.
(is that Eddie Murphy as Br’er Fox?!)
Finding out that a lather can easily be worked up in response to a regulatory bitchslap, the Department of Justice will be next to line up against Goldman Sachs, sort of like the couples skate of regulation. Awww!
Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its mortgage trading, people familiar with the probe say.
The investigation from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is at a preliminary stage, stemmed from a referral from the Securities and Exchange Commission, these people say. The SEC recently filed civil securities-fraud charges against the big Wall Street firm and a trader in its mortgage group. Goldman and the trader say they have done nothing wrong and are fighting the civil charges.
Prosecutors haven’t determined whether they will bring charges in the case, say the people familiar with the matter. Many criminal investigations are launched that never result in any charges.
Line up and get a piece while rage against the big bankers has reached its breaking point: the regulators are so desperate to get your respect back, they’re trying to take down the largest piece of prey they can find.
Before you let them park a wooden horse in your driveway, make sure you check the trunk for termites.
More twilight zone material: progress from the Pinto case stalled at the mercy of the "Too Big To Fail" doctrine. Undoubtedly backed by the misguided "rational human economic model." In the Pinto case, punitive damages were awarded to prevent future corporate decisions to measure cost/benefits by putting a price tag on tag on human life…. Ilene
Before the Ford experts left Washington to return to drafting tables in Dearborn they did one other thing. They managed to informally reach an agreement with the major public servants who would be making auto safety decisions. This agreement was that "cost-benefit" would be an acceptable mode of analysis by Detroit and its new regulators. And, as we shall see, cost-benefit analysis quickly became the basis of Ford’s argument against safer car design.
Cost-benefit analysis was used only occasionally in government until President Kennedy appointed Ford Motor Company president Robert McNamara to be Secretary of Defense. McNamara, originally an accountant, preached cost-benefit with all the force of a Biblical zealot. Stated in its simplest terms, cost-benefit analysis says that if the cost is greater than the benefit, the project is not worth it—no matter what the benefit. Examine the cost of every action, decision, contract part or change, the doctrine says, then carefully evaluate the benefits (in dollars) to be certain that they exceed the cost before you begin a program or—and this is the crucial part for our story—pass a regulation.
As a management tool in a business in which profits matter over everything else, cost-benefit analysis makes a certain amount of sense. Serious problems come, however, when public officials who ought to have more than corporate profits at heart apply cost-benefit analysis to every conceivable decision. The inevitable result is that they must place a dollar value on human life.
Recent revelations about the lack of privacy protections in place at the companies involved in Facebook’s new Libra crytocurrency raise concerns about how much trust users can place in Libra. (Shutterstock)
The launch has raised questions about the difference between Libra and existing cryptocurrencies, as well as the implications of private companies competing with s...
Recent revelations about the lack of privacy protections in place at the companies involved in Facebook’s new Libra crytocurrency raise concerns about how much trust users can place in Libra. (Shutterstock)
The launch has raised questions about the difference between Libra and existing cryptocurrencies, as well as the implications of private companies competing with s...
I have been warning for months that the Fed would need new QE to counter the impact of massive waves of Treasury supply. I thought that that would come later, rather than sooner. Sorry folks, wrong about that. The NY Fed announced another round of new TOMO (Temporary Open Market Operations) today.
In addition to the $75 billion in overnight repos that the Fed issued and has been rolling over since Tuesday, next week the Fed will issue another $90 billion. They’ll come in the form of three $30 billion, 14 day repos to be offered next week.
That brings the new Fed QE to a total of $165 billion. Even in the worst days of the financial crisis, I can’t remember the Fed ballooning its balance sheet by $165 bi...
Skilled technical traders must be aware that price is setting up for a breakout or breakdown event with recent Doji, Hammer
and other narrow range price bars. These types of Japanese Candlestick patterns are warnings that price is coiling into
a tight range and the more we see them in a series, the more likely price is building up some type of explosive price breakout/breakdown move in the near future. The ES (S&P 500 E-mini futures) chart is a perfect example of these types of price bars on the Daily chart (see below).
Tri-Star Tops, Three River Evening Star patterns, Hammers/Hangmen and Dojis are all very common near extreme price peaks and troughs. The rea...
If one invested in the India ETF (INDA) back in January of 2012, your total 7-year return would be 24%. During the same time frame, the S&P 500 made 124%. The 7-year spread between the two is a large 100%!
Are things about to improve for the INDA ETF and could it be time for the relative weakness to change? Possible!
This chart looks at the INDA/SPX ratio since early 2012. The ratio continues to be in a major downtrend.
The ratio hit a 7-year low a few months ago and this week it kissed those lows again at (1). The ratio near weeks end is attempting to...
Do the cycles know? Funny how cycle lows attract the need for higher prices, no matter what the news is!
These are the questions before markets on on Monday 16th Aug 2019:
1) A much higher oil price in quick time can not be tolerated by the consumer, as it gives birth to much higher inflation and a tax on the average Joe disposable income. This is recessionary pressure.
2) With (1) above the real issue will be the higher interest rate and US dollar effect on the SP500 near all time highs.
3) A moderately higher oil price is likely to be absorbed and be bullish as it creates income for struggling energy companies and the inflation shock may be muted.
As evidence of cannabis’ many benefits mounts, so does the interest from the global pharmaceutical industry, known as Big Pharma. The entrance of such behemoths will radically transform the cannabis industry—once heavily stigmatized, it is now a potentially game-changing source of growth for countless co...
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.
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Before the Ford experts left Washington to return to drafting tables in Dearborn they did one other thing. They managed to informally reach an agreement with the major public servants who would be making auto safety decisions. This agreement was that "cost-benefit" would be an acceptable mode of analysis by Detroit and its new regulators. And, as we shall see, cost-benefit analysis quickly became the basis of Ford’s argument against safer car design.
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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