Hey Phil, Your HOV suggestion about 3 months ago basically paid for my Philstockworld subscription for years to come. My average cost is about $1.
Ether
That was a quick double on the DIA calls. trailing stop in place.
Kwan
I have to thank you for excelling yourself during this past week. I have spent a good few hours going over your notes and comments and there are so many gems on repairing and rolling trades that I have been beavering away on paying special attention to my major positions and analysing them using your approach on Tuesday. Being able to look at a group of trades on the same underlying (in this case AAPL) and taking a detached view by assessing the impact of the underlying reaching different price points was extremely reassuring.
Winston
Phil – Great calls yesterday, you were in top form. As I was reading your postings, I had hindsight of what the day brought. The calls were uncanny!
Jfawcett
Praising PSW for enlightenment is a bit akin to praising the Pope for being holy. I've been reading PSW for about two months now and have learned more about investing technique and the world in general than I've learned from the books and seminars I've paid for. Thanks for the enlightenment, the education, the guidance and the truth, which is not a commodity these days, but a virtue in short supply.
Andy Morris
Wow, Phil, we pretty much made your levels.
Your levels:
Dow 7,404, S&P 775, Nas 1,466, NYSE 4,839 and RUT 402
My sceen is showing:
Dow 7,404, S&P 777, Nas 1,462, NYSE 4,868 and RUT 404
Jordan
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
HOTT / Got great trades with it: Enter 6.75 at open, out at 7.18 (avg) at 10:13
Reentered at 7.00 and out all 7.11 few minutes ago- Was a small play but I collected enoght for next month PSW subscription.
Spider
Well that was a fun day. Cashed out my GS 140 calls for about 35% profit and my AAPL calls for 38% gain. Not bad for 40 minutes of work. Back to 85% cash.
Singapore Steve
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.
TokyoLife
Just closed out my V put for 50% in 24 hours thanks Phil!
Humvee
I have been with this site since the beginning and i have learned more the past 3 years than the previous 10. Information and great commentary are abound. The traders on the site are second to none and my portfolio has benefited greatly.
Kustomz
I picked up one of your recommended Gold plays, the July ABX 30s and sold the Feb 35s, which are now mostly intrinsic value. Is it time to roll these to the March 37.50s, or should I wait this spike out?
Bill Hoffman
Phil - FAS - I dont know whether to be happier I averaged down and sold calls or that I got myself out of FAZ the other day…thanks for that help
BCFla
Phil - I just referred 10 people. Last week was a 50% gainer for me. There are companies that want to sell mentoring service for thousands of dollars. This is far better of a deal with very good advice.
Steve
The best play I made this year was PSW. Will renew my membership tonight. Looking for the same trading profit percentages next year, but will have an advantage from the compounding, and much better skills acquired from you and the many skilled PSW co-pilots. Thanks!
Gel1
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
Market manipulation…. One of the things I've gained from this site is the concept of market manipulation. I never thought it was so prevalent, but now I know it is. I actually consider its effect when I make trades. Several days ago, when AAPL was moving toward 220 I sold 210 calls. My reasoning was that they will probably pin this month at 210. They came in big time as the stock moved ever closer to 210. I agree with Phil's comment that one of the things we need to do is find out what they are manipulating, and how, and hitch a ride. They are doing this with several equities. I've actually seen one article describing several equities that were being manipulated to pin at expiration each month, and describing how it was done, and of course Phil has described it well. In some ways it's easier to figure this out than it is a ‘normal' market behavior, and thus easier to make money in certain equities.
Iflantheman
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
Fed days are fun! Just for grins I decided to see how much money I could make in two clicks. I bought DIA calls right when the surge started and then sold them the minute they hit my account. Net gain of 20% in 20 seconds. Can't do that very often…
MrMocha
I like the retirement picks too. The futures trading is certainly more sexy, but the boring retirement picks are the ones that consistently make me money.
jjennings
I have definitely learned to take smaller wins early and be happy with that. Lately, I've aimed for $250 profit per day. Doing that daily/weekly x 48 weeks (assuming I take some time off) works out to 60k per year. That's a lot of money!! $250 moves happen all the time if you just wait for them.
JeffDoc
Phil – just wanted to say a sincere thank you for teaching me how to offset, hedge, roll, and not panic. My account is up 10% in the last two weeks, and far from panic, this is becoming great fun. Thanks again,
Deano
Newer member here, but just wanted to say thank you too. I've learned so much and I hope you'll be around for a long time helping us learn along the way.
Where
USO, QQQ- Phil, thanks for these plays. Out of USO for about 65% gain today and just keeping 1/4 QQQ.
Ksone88
Phil, I wanted to thank you for all of your teaching, advice, and guidance. Because of you I don't chase, don't worry about missed chances, and play things much more selectively. Yesterday's /ES and /TF and today /CL are my first futures plays of the month. Thanks Phil. (Out of /TF and /ES yesterday with a nice gain)
Japarikh
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
Its been a "perfect" month. Every stock I wrote calls against looks like it will be called away next week, every put I wrote will expire worthless. Thanks Phil, now I need some new buy/write candidates, or the new 100K portfolio….
Barfinger
I have been trading for quite a few years and in good years made about 25%. After joining PSW, I followed closely the PSW strategy and my trading profit for this year is close to 70% to date. For fun, I like to mix in a few "Hail Mary" plays that really worked out well, but overall the simpler Buy/Write strategy, as presented by Phil so often, created the majority of the profit.
Gel1
Phil - I followed your great pick re F and sold short the 1011 2.50 puts (200 contracts) and paid for the next 10 years of membership fees…. Thanks!
By now it is more than obvious except to a few economists (yes, we realize this is a NC-17 term) that QE2 will be an absolute and unmitigated disaster, which will likely kill the dollar, send risk assets vertical (at least as a knee jerk reaction), and result in a surge in inflation even as deflation on leveraged purchases continues to ravage Bernanke’s feudal fiefdom. So all the rational, and very much powerless, observers can do is sit back and be amused as the kleptogarchy with each passing day brings this country to final economic and social ruin. Oddly enough, as Paul Farrell highlights, the list of objectors has grown from just fringe blogs (which have been on Bernanke’s case for almost two years), to such names as Buffett, Gross, Grantham, Faber and Stiglitz. And that the opinion of all these respected (for the most part) investors is broadly ignored demonstrates just how unwavering is the iron grip on America’s by its economist overlords. Which brings us back to the amusement part. Here are Farrell’s always witty views on the object which very soon 99% of American society will demand be put into exile: the genocidal Ph.D. holders of the Marriner Eccles building.
Warning, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s foolish gamble to stimulate the economy will backfire, triggering a new double-dip recession. Bernanke is “medding” too much in the economy, say Marc Faber, Bill Gross, Jeremy Grantham, Joseph Stiglitz and others.
The Fed is making the same kind of mistakes Japan made that resulted in its 20-year recession. The Washington Post says Larry Mayer, a former Fed governor, estimates that to work it would take QE2 bond purchases of “more than $5 trillion …10 times what analysts are expecting.”
Bernanke’s plan is designed to fail. And, unfortunately, that will make life far more dangerous for American investors, consumers, taxpayers and voters.
“I’m ultrabearish on everything, but I believe you’ll be better off owning shares than government bonds,” said Hong Kong economist Marc Faber at a recent forum in Seoul. He sees a repeat of dot-com-bubble insanity today. Faber publishes the Gloom, Boom & Doom Report.
Investing is, up to a point, gambling. Most of us don’t think of it in that way but if we conceive of the universe of stocks as a gas of randomly moving particles buffeted this way and that by forces largely beyond their – and certainly beyond our – control then there’s no other conclusion that can be drawn.
However, we don’t really believe this. What we generally believe is that although randomness is pervasive in stocks there’s a pattern that lies beneath the surface which we, in spite all evidence to the contrary, can pick out. For the idea that there are repeatable patterns hidden within apparently random games of chance we can thank one of our more unlikely heroes. Meet Girolamo Cardano, medieval physician, professional gambler and mathematician extraordinaire.
God’s Will
For a very long time in human history there was no appreciation or investigation of probability, the mathematics that lies behind assessments of risk. For the most part people didn’t believe in chance: stuff happened and that was God’s will. The idea that there was some order in the chaos either seems not to have occurred or to have been literally unthinkable.
Gamblers, however, did have some vague understanding that there were patterns in the randomness and quite a lot of self-interest in figuring these out. It’s no surprise that gambling figures quite large in early accounts of advances in probability theory. In Cardano, who seems to have been addicted to gambling, the will to understand and the ability to do so came together.
Elementary Probability
In many ways what Cardano figured out is today regarded as almost trivial, but at the time it was revolutionary and it allowed him an insight into why and when he should take a risk and when he shouldn’t. Perhaps the simplest example is to do with dice. At the time it was regarded as a bit of a mystery why, when three dice were rolled, the sum of face-up numbers came to ten more often than nine, despite the fact that there were six ways of summing possible numbers to both.
The answer to this conundrum is almost childishly simple to our eyes. There are twenty seven ways of combining the possible sums to ten while there are only…
Stock traders can play the idiot from time to time. How do I know? Because you are reading the work of an idiot. That’s right, I am an idiot. I have a degree from IDIOT UNIVERSITY and I have been considered the university’s commencement speaker par excellence on numerous occasions. I do not speak to an empty house, for IDIOT UNIVERSITY has many graduates and the current semester is booked. Here are just a few of the courses offered, all of which I have had the pleasure of taking and passing. Once you pass and move on your trading will never be better. Maybe you can say the same.
1. LOSS AVERSION 101: In this course we study the consequences of not taking a small loss. There is a laboratory session once a week to study the effects of small losses vs big losses and the difference between the two. Lab coats and goggles are required and provided for the occasional tossed keyboards, computer monitors, and cans of soda.
2. BLOW UP 000: How to blow up your account in one trade. No weekly quizzes just one major exam. You either pass it or fail it. You do not get another chance.
3. PROFIT TAKING 101: Determining adequate profit targets without greed or fear. Meets directly across the hall from LOSS AVERSION but on a different day. It is usually recommended to take both courses during the same semester. This course is a prerequisite for RISK VS REWARD 201.
4. STOCK TRADING MATH 201: Study here revolves around understanding what NET PROFIT is and how to calculate it. GAINS – LOSSES – COST OF TRADING – TAXES = NET PROFIT. There, I just gave you the Cliff Notes version.
5. DOLLAR COST GAMBLING 200: Purely a “hands on” class wherein the student buys and sells indiscriminately without the benefit of rules. The odds of making money in this experiment by the end of the semester is about 1 in 1,200,456. The course is a prerequisite for STOCK TRADING MATH 201.
6. RISK VS REWARD 201: Learning the difference between 1:3 and 3:1. The final exam is one essay question wherein the student explains the difference between the two equations in 100
Excellent article. I recommend reading the whole thing… Matt tells the story behind the sabotage of real financial reform as reflected in the final bill. – Ilene
But Dodd-Frank was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America’s financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn’t have the stones to wipe out our country’s one dependably thriving profit center: theft.
[...]
All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?
In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story.
[...]
Both of these takes were engineered to avoid an uncomfortable political truth: The huge profits that Wall Street earned in the past decade were driven in large part by a single, far-reaching scheme, one in which bankers, home lenders and other players exploited loopholes in the system to magically transform subprime home borrowers into AAA investments, sell them off to unsuspecting pension funds and foreign trade unions…
Here are some Gerald Celente quotes from his interview by Bill Meyer on April 26, 2010.
"Median household income is below 1999 levels. What kind of imbecile is out there saying we have to raise taxes to keep things going more?"
"This is a stimulus recovery. They are printing phantom money out of thin air based on nothing, and producing practically nothing. It’s digital money not worth the paper it’s not printed on."
"It’s not only the US by the way, and that’s why I want to make this clear. It’s China, It’s Japan, It’s Indonesia, It’s Australia. It’s the UK and all of Europe."
I do not care for Celente’s views on hyperinflation or the US breaking up, but the 48 minute long interview is interesting.
(With apologies to the person who posted it on TF under that title before I got to Tickering this – heh, I had to go get my teeth cleaned, so give me a break already! )
But in fact Krugman hasn’t found his nut(s), although he should check. He’s groping around down there…. perhaps he could come up with something if he’d just take the next logical step from here:
The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private.
No Paul, that’s not reality either. Your liberal mind just can’t get its tiny little wings around what really happened, so let me help you.
You can start with my Ticker entitled "The Audacity of Synthetics", in which I explain to the proletariat what any self-respecting "economist" (or "economic reporter") should already know about, but which I’ve yet to hear you opine upon:
But this leaves open the question of whether it is fair, just, or even legal to create a synthetic security that at it’s core comes into existence because someone believes that the reference is going to detonate, and then sell off pieces of that security to investors without prominently disclosing the source of the funding of the cash flow, that they proffered the criteria for inclusion in the reference and that the INTENT of their funding was to profit from an EXPECTED detonation of the reference securities.
It also leaves open the question of laying off that risk on an insurance company (whether in a regulated subsidiary or not) without similarly disclosing the above to them up front! That is, is it fair, just (or even legal) to buy fire insurance on a property when you have been told that someone expects a fire in that structure based on what they believe is credible analysis (e.g. a look at the
Imagine you’ve lost your job. You have some money saved, and a chance to double it with a gamble. But if you lose the bet, you’ll forfeit everything. What would you do?
Most people would not gamble their savings, according to Benedetto De Martino of California Institute of Technology, author of a study published February 8 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. People tend to choose avoiding losses over acquiring gains—a behavior known as loss-aversion.
But people with damage to the amygdala—an almond-shaped part of the brain involved in emotion and decision-making—are more likely to take bigger risks with smaller potential gains, De Martino’s study found. Two women with bilateral amygdala damage showed a dramatic reduction in loss aversion compared with age-matched control subjects on a series of experimental gambles, despite understanding full well the values and risks involved.
Democrats as far as San Francisco are freaked out by the fact that a fellow party member could lose in Massachusetts.
Mayor Gavin Newsom told the San Francisco Chronicle: "We better get our act together – and quickly… (voters) are so angry. They don’t feel that we’re paying attention to their needs, in terms of their jobs, and what’s going on at the grassroots, in their neighborhoods."
It’s actually not all bad for Dems. A Coakley loss is an early wake-up calll, and there are several months before November elections for them to turn things around and get their message right.
No doubt the Democrats wish that in 1994, they’d had a similar warning. After all, they were largely blindsided by the Republican revolution of that year, predicting with only weeks to go before the election that they’d maintain control of the house.
Meanwhile, Martha Coakley is down to 31% on InTrade, which is around the odds that Nate Silver called for.
Interesting results found while studying gambling apply to investing, and life in general. But you can’t walk away from life as easily as you can from the poker table. (My highlighting.) – Ilene
You can learn a lot about gambling if you’re willing to analyze 27 million hands of online poker. Don’t have time for that? No worries; sociology doctoral student Kyle Siler of Cornell University has done it for you. His counterintuitive message: the more hands you win, the more money you’re likely to lose — and this has implications that go well beyond a hand of cards.
Siler, whose work was published in December in the online edition of the Journal of Gambling Studies and will appear later this year in the print edition, was not interested in poker alone but in the larger idea of how humans handle risk, reward and variable payoffs. Few things offer a better way of quantifying that than gambling — and few gambling dens offer a richer pool of data than the Internet, where millions of people can play at once and transactions are easy to observe and record.
To gather his data, Siler used a software system called PokerTracker and directed it to collect and collate information on small- medium- and large-stakes games. He limited the games to no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em with six players in order to eliminate at least some extraneous variables. It was in the course of crunching all that information that he found the strangely inverse relationship between the number of hands won and the amount of money lost. He also noticed that it was novice players who lost the most.
The reason for the paradoxical results was straightforward enough: the majority of the wins the players tallied were for relatively small stakes. But the longer they played — and the more confident they got — the likelier they were to get blown out on one or a few very big hands. Win a dozen $50 pots and you’re still going to wind up far behind if you lose a single $1,000 one. "People overweigh their frequent small gains vis-à-vis occasional large losses," Siler says.
Small-stakes players also tend to do better with small-denomination cards. A pair of jacks may…
On average stock traders lose money. So do people who play the lottery. Yet both sets of people will often buy insurance as well. On one hand people are risk takers, engaging in risky and usually unprofitable activities, yet on the other they’re risk adverse, looking to protect themselves against possible, although often unlikely, losses.
Mostly we don’t find this particularly odd. Yet it poses a particular problem for economists and psychologists trying to disentangle the various threads that make up the skein of the human condition. They feel we should either be risk seekers or risk fearers: to be simultaneously both suggests something strange is going on. Stock pickers take note: sell insurers, buy lotteries. Or is it the other way around?
Markowitz’s Lottery Puzzle
One of the earliest researchers to note this gambling/insurance peculiarity was Harry Markowitz who we’ve met before in Markowitz’s Portfolio Theory and the Efficient Frontier. In the same year he published the paper that eventually led to modern Portfolio Theory, the efficient markets mayhem and a Nobel Prize he also wrote The Utility of Wealth in which he both described this confused risk model and sought to explain it.
It’s a bit of surprise to find the father of rational investing theories elaborating on a subject which describes how irrational people really are. However his two 1952 papers are linked. While The Utility of Wealth describes how people really behave Portfolio Selection describes how they should behave to maximise their wealth. We can’t blame Markowitz for the investment industry using his ideas with all the subtlety of a Mob family collecting a debt from the man who wasted their mother with a cheesegrater.
Models which really aim to describe the way humans deal with risk are deluded and denuded if they exclude the risk-seeking part of the human experience. Deluded because they ignore the evidence of everyday life and denuded because they strip away the essence of human experience. Humanity would still be trolling around on its knuckles in East Africa if curiosity about what was on the other side of the forest canopy hadn’t…
“The S&P 500 fund, SPY, has been up at least 0.5% for 5 straight days. That’s tied for the longest streak since its inception.”
I wasn’t taken aback because of how strong the markets have been recently, but that streak of five days sounded really small to me. I almost couldn’t believe it was right. But after looking at the data, the shock wore off.
The S&P 500 has gained >0.5% on 28% of all days (going back to 1993), so the likelihood of...
Yesterday, the Trump administration released a limited collection of data about recipients of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) assistance. The program has been rampantly mismanaged from the start, allowing big businesses and publicly-traded companies to exploit the program with little transparency or oversight. The data released yesterday has been riddled with errors, raising questions about the PPP’s integrity. All the while, actual small businesses – especially those run by people of color – have been left to struggle or close entirely.
The long-term trend for large-cap tech stocks remains strongly in place.
And despite the steep rally out of the March lows, the index may be headed 10 percent higher.
Today’s chart highlights the $QQQ Nasdaq 100 ETF on a “monthly” basis. As you can see, the large-cap tech index touched its lower up-trend channel support in March at (1) before reversing higher.
It may now be targeting the top of the trend channel at (2), which also marks the 261.8 Fibonacci extension (based on 2000 highs and 2002 lows). That Fib level is $290 on $QQQ.
If so, this upside target for $QQQ is still 10% above current prices. Stay tuned!
Every market corrects, maybe profit taking, maybe of allowing those who missed out, to get in!
The current open interest on the gold contract looks to high after a very fast price move, it looks like 2008 may be repeating. A quick flushing out of the weak hands open interest may take place before a real advance in price takes place. The correction may be on the back of a wider sell off of risk assets (either before of after US elections) as all assets suffer contagion selling (just like 2008).
This blog view is a gold price correction of 10% to 20% range is a buying opportunity. Of course we may see a very minor price correction but a long time correction, a price or time is correction is expected, we shall watch and...
The COVID 19 pandemic is, predictably, worsening again in much of the US. Only the Northeast, and to a lesser extent some Midwestern states, have been consistently improving. And that trend could also reverse as those states fully reopen.
The problem in the US seems to be widespread public resistance to recommended practices of social distancing and mask wearing. In countries where these practices have been practi...
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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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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