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
I have followed a lot of Phil's picks over the last several years and made money using the exact option strategies he outlines. Of all the contributors on SA, he offers the most actual and ready to implement advice that has put money in my account. Many of us on SA actually are sad when we don't see Phil's postings for an extended period.
Brenteaz
Wishing Phil and all fellow PSW members a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous New Year 2017! Thanks to all of you for your insights and comments which help make me a better investor every day. Wishing everybody the best of luck for 2017
Learner
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
I took $2 (up 133%) and ran on those USO puts, quite a bit more than the 20 you played in the $25KP. Thank you once again for turning a bad market week into a great personal week. You will be happy to know I am back to cashy and cautious with a few of your favorite longs into the weekend. Thanks to Phil, JRW and all the members who share their knowledge here.
Dennis
Oxen (directly) and Wilkinson (indirectly) are making me a great day trader! Props to Andrew for another little nugget last night: HIG. $20 Dec calls paid 6% quickly this morning. And helloooo STJ - a few days, but nice pick nonetheless - esp with early cover premium.
Dstillwe
I love volatile days like this when you can make a bunch of money on these big swings. As long as you have Phil on your side calling the bottoms and the tops of course.
craigsa620
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
Peter D: great write-up for Short Strangles, Part 1, looking forward to Part 2, particularly the adjustment part.
RMM
Being a bear is easy (and I am not convinced we are doing all that well on the whole as an economy), but one cannot fight the trend (didn't Phil say that a while ago)? Just cover, make 5-10-15-20% and move on. It really does add up by chipping away. All I can say is I am back to 2007 levels in my account b'f the crash with this run up and some very nice help on this board….so kudos to us (and me!!)…
Pharmboy
Phil / TNA – On Monday you put out the TNA BCS 41/47. As I mentioned I work during market hours so on Tuesday morning on my way out the door (premarket) I put in an advanced TOS '1st trigger sequence' order to fill the BCS. I can control the entry using this method vs. the vertical entry that TOS allows for the BCS. I filled the June 41 long call but never filled the 47 short call. I let that ride into today. OMG ..TNA popped 7.5%!… the $3.60 entry is almost a double! Tomorrow will be a OCO bracket to get out of TNA before Ben speaks. I should be able to preserve 85% – 100% on the trade. For the income portfolio plays in my IRA's, doing very well… I do like collecting premium! Well done and thanks!
JFawcett
Way back did 20 of your suggested short BP Jan 11 26 P @ 4.3 now .85 — sold half. this am —
paid for a years sub AGain!! thank you very much!
Ban2
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
What a quarter! (AAPL, etc.) "People react; PSW'ers anticipate." Thanks everyone for a vibrant board.
Silentstorm
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 - 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
Phil- I want to let you know that you really helped me make some money this morning when I probably would have lost on my own. I was stuck in doctors waiting rooms most of the morning starting at 8AM. By following the game plan you laid out and using my smartphone, I went short on oil whenever we got to 61.50 and long at 61 waiting for the spikes ahead of inventory. When 10:30 rolled around I was out after selling longs at 61.60 a few minutes earlier. I went short at 61.75-61.80 and voila, rode it down to 60.60 or so. Thank you.
craigsa620
Phil, I have the SRS 2011 $7.50 short puts you recommended awhile back. I sold them for $2.20 and now $1.51 (up 31%) although SRS has been down since inception. This was a nice mellow way to play it like you said, thanks.
Jomptien
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
Phil – I wanted to tell you how much of a privilege it is to learn from your every day. You are a shining beacon in the life of so many investors. You have assembled probably the best group of people in the history of financial blogging and you, yourself have done more to help investors in the last 6 months than all previous financial advisors combined.
StJeanLuc
Phil: UNH, hedged stock position, doing great, up over 50 %,
RMM
You may wonder if anyone gets anything out of you seminars (or may not wonder). Anyway, I almost never day trade because of my job. Today, I was home due to the snow and since I was behind by 2 weeks on watching your recorded seminars I though I would watch one of them. I set up my pivot point charts in TOS to match the ones in your seminar and made the QQQ trade from this morning. I only bought 5 puts. While I watched the seminar, I would pause then switch back and forth and watch the live QQQ chart. I ended up stopping out for a $170 gain, but it was pretty cool to have the dip and recovery at the same time I was learning the art of stopping out when a pivot line was taken out.
rj_jarboe
I'd like to wish Phil and everyone else that contributes to this board a very Merry Christmas and happy New Year. The wealth of knowledge on here is incredible, and it has greatly contributed to my understanding of markets, politics, and the world in general. This year was when Phil's teachings all seemed to click in place, and my portfolio's performance shot up, and for that I am very grateful. Thank you!
Palotay
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
Happy holidays to all members of PSW. Just completed my 6th year and still my favorite site to read. Thank you all for your contributions and support especially you, Phil!
DClark41
Phil - DIA 107 Calls. As suggested I am taking the money and running to home depot for some shelter supplies! This is the grand finale of several successful trades from you through this roller-coster and as you have further suggested it is time for me to sit back and relax in cash. May even be able to talk my wife into the premium membership after these intelligent trades in a stupid market.
DOStrade
I am not a user of phil's site now, but was for a couple years. His advice and information is excellent. Perhaps even better, you get access to real-time trades of additional traders on his site (OptTrader, etc) and the other members who post what they are buying and selling. Overall, its a very valuable information tool. Expensive, but paid for itself many times over. I did not renew my membership because I switched jobs and did not have time to trade nearly as much.
XRTrader
Oil – thanks Phil,
got in late at 0.53 on the 38p today, set a sell for 0.75 and took the dog for a walk – 70% gain and more than enough $$ to buy dog food. TZA Aug 35/40 BCS – closed out for a 100% gain in under a month – thanks again for introducing me to these trades.
CanuckBob
As a retired stockbroker from a major Canadian brokerage firm, I can tell you I would never had access to these type of trade ideas, especially the hedges.
Just closed out a July TZA 40/45 call spread today for a 271% gain in less than a month. I would have normally let that run but yesterday Phil commented to another member something to the effect that "you put down a $1 for a $5 upside, now that you are up 250% you have $2.5 in and you are hoping for a double."
Just closed out a USO July $38 put that Phil suggested yesterday for a 49% one day gain.
Thanks,
Bob
RJK
Phil – great calls this past week, esp. friday and monday. in the old days I would have let Prechter et al scare me into trimming my longs and going short at just the wrong time. your feel for the markets is Tiger-esque. CHK, HOV, BX, TLT and XLF are big winners for me today. My biggest up day in a long time. Thanks!
The Big Money economy is booming. According to a new Commerce Department report, third-quarter profits of American businesses rose at an annual record-breaking $1.659 trillion – besting even the boom year of 2006 (in nominal dollars). Profits have soared for seven consecutive quarters now, matching or beating their fastest pace in history.
Executive pay is linked to profits, so top pay is soaring as well.
Higher profits are also translating into the nice gains in the stock market, which is a boon to everyone with lots of financial assets.
And Wall Street is back. Bonuses on the Street are expected to rise about 5 percent this year, according to a survey by compensation consultants Johnson Associates Inc.
But nothing is trickling down to the Average Worker economy. Job growth is still anemic. At October’s rate of only 50,000 new private-sector jobs, unemployment won’t get down to pre-recession levels for twenty years. And almost half of October’s new jobs were in temporary help.
Meanwhile, the median wage is barely rising, adjusted for inflation. And the value of the major asset of most Americans – their homes – continues to drop.
Why are America’s two economies going in opposite directions? Two reasons.
First, big profits are coming from overseas sales of goods and services made abroad, not here. The world’s fastest-growing markets are China and India, whose inhabitants are eager to buy “American” products, and just as eager to work for the American companies that sell them. The U.S. market is barely moving.
Increasingly, American corporations are able to extract healthy gains from their global operations without adding much in the United States except executive talent.
Second, American businesses are boosting productivity by having U.S. employees do more work for less pay. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between the third quarter of 2009 and the third quarter of 2010, productivity rose 2.5 percent, output increased 4.1 percent, the number of hours worked was up 1.6 percent, and unit labor costs dropped by 1.9 percent.
In other words, American workers are losing even more bargaining power as a sizeable chunk of corporate profit goes into software and digital equipment that can do what people used to do – but more cheaply.
So what is Washington doing about all this?
Making the tax code more progressive so more Americans reap…
High fructose corn syrup, enriched bleached flour, and "natural flavor" is to bread like CDOS, subprime loans and reverse convertibles are to finance. – Ilene
I just read Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and what struck me was the parallels between the evolution of food and the evolution of finance since the 1970s. This will only confirm my critics’ belief that I see the same thing everywhere, but bear with me for a minute.
Pollan’s account, grossly simplified, goes something like this. The dominant ideology of food in the United States is nutritionism: the idea that food should be thought of in terms of its component nutrients. Food science is devoted to identifying the nutrients in food that make us healthy or unhealthy, and encouraging us to consume more of the former and less of the latter. This is good for nutritional “science,” since you can write papers about omega-3 fatty acids, while it’s very hard to write papers about broccoli.
It’s especially good for the food industry, because nutritionism justifies even more intensive processing of food. Instead of making bread out of flour, yeast, water, and salt, Sara Lee makes “Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread” out of “enriched bleached flour” (seven ingredients), water, “whole grains” (three ingredients), high fructose corn syrup, whey, wheat gluten, yeast, cellulose, honey, calcium sulfate, vegetable oil, salt, butter, dough conditioners (up to seven ingredients), guar gum, calcium propionate, distilled vinegar, yeast nutrients (three ingredients), corn starch, natural flavor [?], betacarotene, vitamin D3, soy lecithin, and soy flour (pp. 151-52). They add a modest amount of whole grains so they can call it “whole grain” bread, and then they add the sweeteners and the dough conditioners to make it taste more like Wonder Bread. Because processed foods sell at higher margins, we have an enormous food industry pushing highly processed food at us, very cheaply (because it’s mainly made out of highly-subsidized corn and soy), which despite its health claims (or perhaps because of them) is almost certainly bad for us, and bad for the environment as well. This has been abetted by the government, albeit perhaps reluctantly, which now allows labels like this on corn oil (pp. 155-56):
“Very limited and preliminary scientific evidence suggests that eating about one tablespoon (16
Most economists ignore the behavioral side of finance. They tend to stick to their models, equations and textbooks. This is, in large part, what makes economics such a frustrating endeavor for so many people. They tend to ignore the simple fact that there is an unquantifiable variable in the equation – human emotion. And no matter how much we evolve and advance technologically this variable will always be the most important piece of the puzzle.
Over the last few years I have argued that much of what the government planned to do would have destructive psychological ramifications. Unfortunately, this appears to have come true as no one truly trusts the stock market these days. Small business sentiment shows a total lack of faith in the government. Consumer confidence remains abysmal. This is all very disconcerting because a deflationary environment has a way of snowballing and becoming self destructive. It can eat at a society from within as they become discouraged. The following story nicely summarizes the damaging impact of deflation:
“Once upon a time it was announced that the devil was going out of business and would sell all his equipment to those who were willing to pay the price.
On the big day of the sale, all his tools were attractively displayed. There were Envy, Jealousy, Hatred, Malice, Deceit, Sensuality, Pride, Idolatry, and other implements of evil display. Each of the tools was marked with its own price tag.
Over in the corner by itself was a harmless looking, wedge-shaped tool very much worn, but still it bore a higher price than any of the others. Someone asked the devil what it was, and he answered, “That is Discouragement.” The next question came quickly, “And why is it priced so high even though it is plain to see that it is worn more than these others?”
Because replied the devil, “It is more useful to me than all these others. I can pry open and get into a man’s heart with that when I cannot get near him with any other tool. Once I get inside, I can use him in whatever way suits me best. It is worn well because I use
With the sound on, his words hung in the air with all the force of a fundraiser for your local public access TV station. Everything seemed to be in the passive tense. He had authorized deepwater drilling because he “was assured” it was safe. But who assured him? How does he feel about being so brazenly misled? He said he wanted to “understand” why that was mistaken. Understand? He’s the President of the United States and it was a major decision. Isn’t he determined to find out how his advisors could have been so terribly wrong?
Tomorrow he’s “informing” the president of BP of BP’s financial obligations. “Informing” is what you do when you phone the newspaper to tell them it wasn’t delivered today. Why not “directing” or “ordering?”
The President distinguished what has happened in the Gulf of Mexico from a tornado or hurricane because they are over quickly while the leak is an ongoing crisis, lasting many weeks and perhaps months more. He likened it to an “epidemic.” But the real difference has nothing to do with time. Tornadoes and hurricanes are natural disasters. Epidemics occur because germs mutate and spread. The spill occurred because of the recklessness and ruthlessness of a giant oil company in pursuit of profit.
And what has the nation learned from all this? The same lesson we’ve known for decades, according to the President. We must end our dependence on oil. But if we’ve known this for decades, why haven’t we done anything about it? The President endorsed the cap-and-trade bill that emerged from the House (without calling it cap-and-trade) but didn’t call for the only thing that may actually work: a tax on carbon.
I’m a fan of Barack Obama. I campaigned for him and I believe in him. I think he has a first-class temperament. I have been deeply moved and startled by his ability to speak about the nation’s most intractable problems. But he failed tonight to rise to the occasion. Is it because he’s not getting good advice, or because he’s psychologically incapable of expressing the moral outrage the nation feels?
Or is it something deeper?
Whether it’s Wall Street or health insurers or oil companies, we are approaching a turning point as a nation. The top executives…
October saw U.S. consumers’ outstanding credit balances fall by 3.25%, the ninth straight month in a row balances have fallen. It seems clear now that Americans have learned that "credit" is not synonymous with "free money."
Mark suggests that Japan’s poor demographics are the cause of its "death spiral," whereas Ambrose Evens-Pritchard argues that too much government spending resulting in too much debt is at the heart of the problem. Could it be combination rather than an either-or? – Ilene
While Evans-Pritchard is one of my favorite writers, at the end of the article he comes to the wrong conclusion about what the West should learn from Japan. Evans-Pritchard suggests that too much government spending resulting in too much debt is the root cause of Japan’s problems and that the West needs to take notice and get government spending under control. While Evans-Pritchard is correct that Japan’s debt habit is unsustainable, the country’s debt problems are the result of its population imploding and the fuse finally burning out on its demographic time bomb. The Land of the Rising Sun is in trouble because it suffers from an insular society that discourages immigration and implicitly encourages low birth rates. For the last 50 Japan has been slowly committing demographic seppuku and now the inevitable is taking place, i.e., Japan’s population is crossed the tipping point so that its work force is both relatively old and shrinking and as a nation Japan can’t sustain its standard of living.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Japan is facing deflation, falling domestic demand, stagnant to shrinking GDP and, as of recently, a low national savings rate. They are all the result of Japan’s bad demographics.
Virtually all economics students learn that when the work force of a nation shrinks it is difficult if not impossible to sustain economic growth and a vibrant economy. Also, retirees tend to consume less than families that are raising children and as each generation ages towards retirement it tends to consume less and less causing domestic demand to shrink. Aging populations also have low savings rates because most retirees continue…
A successful career on Wall Street is as much about the failures as it is about the wins. Anyone who tells you differently is either hiding their past mistakes or is about to experience their own epic collapse, made even worse by the fact that it will be wholly unexpected to them.
This is good to remember the next time you hear any of the following terms assigned to a Wall Street professional…
Guru – As in “Options Guru” or “Trading Guru”. These days, robes and a beard are optional as investors are more than willing to lavish the appellation Guru on virtually anyone who can get themselves on television. This term typically precedes the name of someone who would like to sell you a set of instructional videos. example: Lenny Dykstra (TheStreet.com’s ex-options expert)
Rock Star – Anytime someone involved in finance is called a Rock Star, you can turn on the bull$#*t meter and pretty much just leave it running. “Rock Star” is what they called Erin Callan, Lehman’s CFO just before the end, whose main role at the company was the application of lipstick to herself when the cameras were rolling and to their pig of a balance sheet when the Korean sovereign wealth funds were in town. example: Erin Callan (former Chief Obfuscation Officer, Lehman Brothers)
Wiz – Similar to Guru, although with the added implication of supernatural talent or skills. Those on The Street who are referred to as “a Wiz” will likely end up in handcuffs before long. example: Bernie Madoff (the most consistent generator of returns in the history of investing…until someone needed money back)
Wunderkind – Typically reserved for someone who runs a hedge fund and puts up incredible numbers within the first year or two out of nowhere. Much like your average American Idol winner, the “Wunderkind” rides this initial wave of success until his many new investors find out how rarely any one strategy works consistently in back-to-back years. example: Thomas Hudson Jr. (Pirate Capital)
Prodigy – Similar to wunderkind, those in finance who are called “prodigy”…
John asks: "Why is the government trying to spread its public health message through children rather than parents?" Perhaps because a significant proportion of the nation’s parents distrust it and the pharmaceutical companies, so going straight to the kids may be a viable option. – Ilene
Remember when tobacco companies were accused of targeting children with advertisements and promotional items featuring cartoons?
Everyone thought it was terrible because children could be convinced smoking was cool by cartoons.
(Or something. This never made a whole lot of sense since we’ve never really had a child smoking problem in the United States. Sure sometimes kids will take a puff or two as an experiment but real smoking didn’t stop until much later and there was never any evidence that teenagers were convinced to start smoking because of cartoons.)
The thing that really creeped most people out was that the use of cartoons seemed aimed at undermining parental authority and influence, getting between kids and their mom and dad. Oh, and the fact that most people are convinced that smoking is deadly.
So what should we make of this advertisement promoting flu shots? Believe it or not, flu shots are pretty controversial. There are a lot of people who believe that serious health issues are associated with the shots, although the evidence for this seems scant. Many more people just don’t think the risk of childhood flu is really worth the quite common side effects, limited risks and cost of getting the shot.
And a few of us have figured out that you can pretty effectively be a free rider when it comes to vaccinations. When my brother enrolled his daughter in pre-school, he was told that chicken pox shots were mandatory. As a Roman Catholic, he objected to the vaccine on pro-life grounds (lung tissue from aborted fetuses are used to generate the vaccine) and pointed out that if everyone else at school was vaccinated, there’s no way his daughter would catch or spread the chicken pox. She was effectively but indirectly vaccinated.
In any case, the risks and benefits of getting a flu shot seem to be something that should be left up to parents rather than decided by bureaucrats. Certainly, the image of the
Last night PBS’s Frontline aired a new documentary called The Warning. If you missed it, you are in luck. We’ve got it right here.
Here’s how Frontline describes the documentary.
"We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"
In The Warning, airing Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), veteran FRONTLINE producer Michael Kirk (Inside the Meltdown, Breaking the Bank) unearths the hidden history of the nation’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. At the center of it all he finds Brooksley Born, who speaks for the first time on television about her failed campaign to regulate the secretive, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market whose crash helped trigger the financial collapse in the fall of 2008.
"I didn’t know Brooksley Born," says former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, a member of President Clinton’s powerful Working Group on Financial Markets. "I was told that she was irascible, difficult, stubborn, unreasonable." Levitt explains how the other principals of the Working Group — former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin — convinced him that Born’s attempt to regulate the risky derivatives market could lead to financial turmoil, a conclusion he now believes was "clearly a mistake."
Born’s battle behind closed doors was epic, Kirk finds. The members of the President’s Working Group vehemently opposed regulation — especially when proposed by a Washington outsider like Born.
"I walk into Brooksley’s office one day; the blood has drained from her face," says Michael Greenberger, a former top official at the CFTC who worked closely with Born. "She’s hanging up the…
On Monday the Wall Street Journal ran an article that described the end of the golden era for oil refiners. It is a great article that, unfortunately, was published many years too late to be considered news. Just as gravity is a force that brings all objects to earth, public policy that destroys the demand for gasoline will hurt the refinery business. Not surprisingly, President Obama’s public policy initiatives that increase car and truck fuel efficiency have the side effect of hurting oil refinery and distribution businesses.
Just to be clear, I am not against the Administration’s effort to increase fuel efficiency in the vehicle fleet. Quite the contrary, it is a matter of national and economic security that we burn less imported fuel. Increasing transportation fuel efficiency is a “must” for the United States. However, I don’t think that it is realistic to believe that the energy industry is act like an old trusted dog that knows when it it time to walk into the woods and die. And, it isn’t fair to the refinery and distribution businesses to ask them to effectively subsidize the rest of the economy’s shift to more fuel efficient vehicles and alternate energy without compensation.
The Wall Street Journal reported that over the next few years there is going to be global overcapacity among oil refiners. Not only is demand being reduced for refined products (particularly in the U.S.), but there is a lot of new and efficient capacity that is coming on line in Asia and the Middle East. That isn’t a prescription for a lot of new investment in refinery capacity or for good returns for existing refiners.
I have a couple of news flashes about the future of oil refinery and distribution that I am pretty sure are big news scoops (at least for most major media outlets).
As gasoline demand drops refineries won’t be the only businesses whose investments are underperforming. There is going to be a lot of excess distribution and retailing capacity. So far the Wall Street Journal has only reported on excess refinery capacity. Distribution and retailing are the next segments of the industry that will experience overcapacity and the end of its
Spoiler warnings for Mr. Robot, Arrow and Blackhat
Technology is everywhere we look, so it’s no surprise that the films and TV we enjoy are similarly obsessed. That’s not to say they manage to get it right when it comes to portraying tech accurately however – and one of their worst areas is computer hacking.
Authored by Andrew Sheets, Morgan Stanley Chief Cross-Asset Strategist
Next week the US Department of Commerce reports its advance estimate of 2Q GDP. It’s likely to be a whopper. Our US economics team expects it to register at +4.7%, and given the unusually large number of moving parts at work this quarter, a 5-handle is possible. A few days later, the June reading of US PCE could show a slight downtick in core inflation. Robust growt...
The Dow is moving up the red Gann 1x1 line, so far the recent trend challenge has been over come. As price is near upper green dotted channel Gann angle from Oct 2007 price is now over bought. We can also see the very obvious Elliot 5 wave count from March 2009 lows, and a new Dow high would complete the 5 waves up.
The red line indicator below the Dow price chart is readtheticker.com RTT Flow Index.
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Gold (GLD) could not get over $130, so a reaction back to minor support at $115 was to be expected. Support should be found here, an...
Ken Griffin, the CEO and founder of the Citadel hedge fund, has reiterated his negative stance on Bitcoin (BTC) in an interview with CNBC this morning.
Speaking at the Delivering Alpha Conference in New York, ...
Instead of focusing on how value factors in general did in identifying attractive stocks, I rushed to proclaim price-to-sales the winner. That was, until it wasn’t. I guess there’s a reason for the proclamation “The king is dead, long live the king” when a monarchy changes hands. As we continued to update the book, price-to-sales was no longer the “best” single value factor, replaced by others, depending upon the time frames examined. I had also become a lot more sophisticated in my analysis—thanks to criticism of my earlier work—and realized that everything, including factors, moves in and out of favor, depending upon the market environment. I also realized...
By csinvesting. Originally published at ValueWalk.
Bear with me as I share a bit of my history that helped me create SkyVu and the Battle Bears games. The University of Nebraska gave me my first job after college. I mostly pushed TV carts around, edited videos for professors or the occasional speaker event. One day, Warren Buffet came to campus to speak to the College of Business. I didn’t think much of this speech at the time but I saved it for some reason. 15 years later, as a founder of my own company, I watch and listen to this particular speech every year to remind myself of the fundamentals and values Mr. Buffett looks for. He’s addressing business students at his alma mater, so I think his style here is a bit more ‘close to home’ than in his other speeches. Hopefully many of you find great value in this video like I have. Sorry for the VHS...
The definition of a bull market or bull trends widely vary. One of the more common criteria for bull markets is determined by the asset being above or below its 200 day moving average.
In my humble opinion, each index above remains in a bull trend, as triple support (200-day moving averages, 2-year rising support lines, and February lows) are still in play ...
Reminder: OpTrader is available to chat with Members, comments are found below each post.
This post is for all our live virtual trade ideas and daily comments. Please click on "comments" below to follow our live discussion. All of our current trades are listed in the spreadsheet below, with entry price (1/2 in and All in), and exit prices (1/3 out, 2/3 out, and All out).
We also indicate our stop, which is most of the time the "5 day moving average". All trades, unless indicated, are front-month ATM options.
Please feel free to participate in the discussion and ask any questions you might have about this virtual portfolio, by clicking on the "comments" link right below.
To learn more about the swing trading virtual portfolio (strategy, performance, FAQ, etc.), please click here
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Bill Olsen from NewsWare will be giving us a fun and lively demonstration of the advantages that real-time news provides. NewsWare is a market intelligence tool for news. In today's data driven markets, it is truly beneficial to have a tool that delivers access to the professional sources where you can obtain the facts in real time.
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America’s two economies are getting wider apart..jpg)
Second, American businesses are boosting productivity by having U.S. employees do more work for less pay. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between the third quarter of 2009 and the third quarter of 2010, productivity rose 2.5 percent, output increased 4.1 percent, the number of hours worked was up 1.6 percent, and unit labor costs dropped by 1.9 percent.
, and what struck me was the parallels between the evolution of food and the evolution of finance since the 1970s. This will only confirm my critics’ belief that I see the same thing everywhere, but bear with me for a minute.
Last night PBS’s Frontline aired a new documentary called 
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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
