Testy Tuesday – 1,975 or BUST!
by phil - October 7th, 2014 8:28 am
I told you it was going to be a wild week!
Not that you can draw any conclusions from yesterday's low-volume action. The Fed doves have their say for the next two days and then we go into a hawkish nosedive on Thursday and Friday, so this little drama is just getting started. All went according to plan yesterday – per our set-up in the morning post:
As a hedge, for our Member Portfolios, we're favoring SQQQ (now $36.55) and DXD (now $24.52) to protect us from another slide but the real tilt to hawkish doesn't start until Thursday, after the Fed minutes, so we can assume they will be spun bearish from there into the weekend and we'll look to take nice, short positions against any run-up that comes from doveish Fed statements early in the week.
As you can see from yesterday's action, that was the perfect way to play it and our short positions on the Futures gave us several quick victories as it was all downhill from the open until 1pm. Even our oil short gave us a nice $600 win – the one that was right there in the morning post at $89.60 and oil was below $89 by 10:45, less than 3 hours for that trade idea to play out!
That's good because we REALLY needed the money because GTAT, one of our good-sized positions in two of our portfolios, declared a surprise bankruptcy yesterday. Bankruptcies are not supposed to be surprising but this one was and GTAT dropped 90%, essentially wiping out a $25,000 position and costing us 1/4 of our year's profits in the Long-Term Portfolio.
There's an excellent article in Bloomberg and another one from Seeking Alpha outlining what happened and where it stands so I'll spare you the gory details other than to say that this is why we stress diversification and portion control in investing. Even so, GTAT happened to be a stock that got weak and, because management promised a turn-around, we added to our losing position on the initial dip and maxed our allocation and then got burned so quickly that we had…
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Technical Tuesday – Rejected, Rejected, Rejected!
by phil - September 23rd, 2014 8:07 am
So much for 2,000 holding.
Fortunately, our Big Chart kept us cautiously bearish into the weekend and the hedges in our Short-Term Portfolio functioned perfectly, gaining $13,000 on the day and completely offsetting the drop of $8,000 in our Long-Term Portfolio.
That's without our big hedge, DXD, kicking in yet, as the Dow is still over 17,000 but, should it fail, we'll see those STP gains multiply quickly.
For those of you who are not Members, and don't have access to our various Member Portfolios (and you can by subscribing here), we have done our best to prepare you for this drop as well. Last Thursday, right in the morning post, I shared our short stance with the general public, saying
It's going to be crazy into the weekend but, in our Live Chat Room this morning, I said to our Members:
Futures pumped back up to yesterday's highs at 17,125, 2,001.50, 4,080 and 1,156.5 so I like shorting below 17,100, 2,000, 4,075 and 1,155 – short the laggard, out of any of them cross back over – very simple!
That's our plan into the weekend. As I've mentioned before, we're also using DXD ($24 at the time), TZA ($14.68) and SQQQ ($35.26) to hedge our long portfolios – just in case things unravel over the weekend. We also discussed FXI ($40.30) puts earlier in the week as a play on China melting down so PLENTY of ways to profit from the downside.
This morning, the Futures are 17,050 on /YM (up $375 per contract), 1,979 on /ES (up $1,125 per contract), 4,035 on /NQ (up $900 per contract) and 1,116.50 on /TF (up $4,000 per contract) – so that strategy went pretty well.
In last Wednesday's post, we also shorted Oil Futures at $95 and oil fell to…
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Fabulous Friday – Our AliBaba Play Pays off Big!
by phil - September 19th, 2014 7:26 am
We're already up over 100% on Alibaba.
How, you may wonder? Well, two ways: Back in October of 2007, before Alibaba IPO'd in China, I was touting the company when it had an $8Bn valuation ($1.10 per share – pre-split). I was the first and only analyst in the US to point out the benefits of Yahoo's investment back then and our Members who play the Asian markets were able to take advantage of that and today should be the culmination of the white whale of investing – the 20-bagger as Alibaba is expected to IPO in the US at $160Bn just 7 years later.
YHOO, on the other hand, took the long and winding road but it should finally be getting to our $50 target and that's another 100% gain on the stock – though a very small consolation to those who didn't pick up AliBaba directly. Fortunately, at Philstockworld, we know how to BE THE HOUSE – Not the Gambler and, back in June, when the rumors of the AliBaba IPO began we came up with a way for our Members to make 400% playing YHOO into the AliBaba IPO.
From our Live Member Chat Room:
Submitted on 2014/06/30 at 12:03 pmYHOO/Albo – Why not just buy YHOO? YHOO is $35Bn and owns 22% of AliB while SFTBY is $91Bn and owns 33% of AliB, so you get a lot more bang for your buck with YHOO, whose forward p/e is only 19, than SFTBY, whose forward p/e is about 17 – so not all that significant. Of course, more significantly is the potential impact of (guessing) $50Bn worth of AliB on a $35Bn company!
So we don't even have to go crazy if we want to play the "YHOO is undervalued" game. The Jan $38/45 bull call spread is $1.60 on the $8 spread with 400% upside if YHOO gains 28%. I think that's worth $800 for 5 shares in the $25KP
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Which Way Wednesday – Fed Edition
by phil - September 17th, 2014 7:37 am
Wow, what a recovery!
And wow, what complete and utter BS it is. They NYSE is still below 11,000 (our Must Hold line) and the Russell is still below it's 50 dma and we up on less than 10% of the volume (total) that sold off for the last two weeks. But, who cares as long as it paints a pretty picture?
We can thank the Wall Street Journal's Fed Whisperer, John Hilsenrath with yesterday's rally as he wrote not one but TWO articles that whipped traders into a frenzy on his "insider view" that the Fed "may keep the words "considerable time" in its policy statement." Oh, be still my heart! More free money? Really? Will wonders never cease?
Needless to say we took the opportunity to re-short the Dow Futures (/YM) at 17,050 and the S&P Futures (/ES) at 1,993 and the Nasdaq Futures (/NQ) at 4,060 and the Nikkei Futures (/NKD) at 15,950 – all of which we discussed in yesterday's Live Trading Webinar that was, sadly, a Members only affair (but you can join us here).
We also got a chance to short oil at $95 again (a level I published in yesterday's post) and we're thrilled with that and already this morning, it's back at $94.50 for $500 per contract gains. For non-futures players we grabbed the SCO Sept $30s at .25 as a fun play that inventories at 10:30 won't support $95 oil in much the way Fed policies at 2pm won't support these market levels. In fact, here's CNBC's Art Cashin telling you yesterday at noon what I told you pre-market, yesterday morning – BRILLIANT!
Art's actually one of the very few Wall Street analysts I respect (and not just because he repeats what I say), I've followed him since I was a kid – he's a fantastic guy and a lot of what I share with you – I learned from him. As you can see on the Big Chart, the Russell is the laggard and, if the indexes break higher – it's the index we'll go long on but our short bets…
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Which Way Wednesday – How Low Can We Go?
by phil - September 10th, 2014 8:32 am
What a fun market to play!
Yesterday, in our Live Member Chat Room (you can subscribe here), at 11:13, in anticipation of a wierd day, I put up a bullish and a bearish trade idea for our Members. The cool thing is, both sides won! Our two trade ideas (which we went over in our Live Webcast at 1pm) were:
If you want to play for an AAPL pop this afternoon, the QQQ weekly $100 calls are just .40 and QQQ topped out at $100.33 yesterday. Figure AAPL pops 2.5% and that pops the Nas and QQQ 0.5% so $100.50 + premium could be good for 50% if AAPL gets a good reaction – if not, it's probably going to lose less than a direct play on AAPL would.
TZA/Sn0 – Well TZA is only at $14.50 so the spread is half in the money at net $1.25 so it still has good upside if you add to it but I'd rather get the Jan $15/20 bull call spread at $1 as that gives you more time and more upside – if your TZA hedge goes in the money. That way, you can take $2 off the table on the Oct spread and know you still have plenty of upside if TZA keeps going up on you and also less downside exposure if it flips the other way.
When our 1pm Webinar started (at the same time Apple's conference started), the QQQ calls were just 0.42 and still playable and, as you can see on the chart, we even had a dip down to 0.30 briefly but that line held and we then jumped 100% back to 0.60 and then on to 0.72 before dropping back to 0.60, where we took our expected 50% gains and ran.
If you missed our Webcast yesterday, you should check out the replay because we discussed WHY we made that particular pick and HOW we selected it – very educational! That's because, at Philstockworld, our goal is to TEACH you to be a great trader – not just give you great trades.
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Monday Market Mayhem – Bombs Fly, Markets Fly – Why Not?
by phil - August 18th, 2014 8:11 am
From Ferguson to Fallujah, America has spent the weekend kicking ass and taking names with the National Guard rushing in to put down the 99% in Missouri while in Mosul, we're bombing the Middle East's 99% off the dams and picking off the stragglers with high-tech drones – F*ck Yeah!
That, combined with what we can politely call a non-escalation of tensions in the Ukraine has sent the price of oil tumbling by 0.75 this morning, good for $750 per contract from our Friday short (and now we're long at $94 on /CLV4 for October) - F*ck Yeah! Index futures were up slightly in Asia but gathered steam in Europe and markets there are coming out of lunch up over 1% – even as the cease-fire in Gaza is about to end.
Meanwhile, over in Hong Kong, we got a powerful lesson in numbers as the 1.3Bn population of China is able to overwhelm that Island's 7M people (0.5% of China's population) at will and that will was exercised this weekend as China staged "Pro-Beijing" rallies that protested the "Occupy Central" rallies the bottom 99% of Hong Kong had been staging. Can anti-democracy rallies be far behind?
The anti-Occupy Central campaign's focus on the impact of civil disobedience has appealed to the pragmatism of many Hong Kong people. While many support democracy, they also just want to live their lives and go to work unimpeded. "We can't be optimistic at all—the pro-Beijing camp will control the entire list of candidates," said Joseph Cheng, a political-science professor and convener of the Alliance for True Democracy, a coalition of democratic parties supporting Occupy Central.
In short, while China did promise to give Hong Kong the right to vote – they never said they wouldn't stuff the ballot boxes or put up candidates that were nothing more than two different flavors of the same puppets. "If we are buying fruit, don't give us three rotten oranges to choose from," one of the activists said. Oh wait, that might have been our own election coverage – it's so hard to keep these totalitarian regimes straight…
Still it's VICTORY…
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Technical Tuesday – Weak Bounce Sucks in the Suckers Once Again
by phil - August 5th, 2014 7:40 am
Actually it's a rule of thumb at PSW that dip buyers need to get burned 3 times before they wise up to a proper correction, so they still have at least another try in them before they finally walk away from this crazy market. As you can see from Oppenheimer's S&P chart, 56% of the S&P has plunged back below their 50 dma in the past 30 days.
This is EXACTLY what I've been warning you about. At the same time the indexes LOOKED like they were rallying, MOST stocks were actually being dumped while a few (AAPL, for expample) were kept aloft to maintain the ILLUSION that the market was still strong. That's how they keep the retail buyers moving in while the institutional investors head for the hills. Yesterday's action was nothing but another low-volume bounce – the kind we teach our Members to ignore:
Short-term, we're certainly oversold but we'll be very critical of a low-volume recovery until we see those 50 dmas retaken on the indexes. Those are way up at 16,877 on the Dow, 1,954 on the S&P, 4,368 on the Nasdaq, 10,912 on the NYSE and 1,160 on the Russell. Anything less than that and there's nothing to be particularly bullish about.
That doesn't stop us, of course, from picking individual short-term longs. On Wednesday, for example, I was on TV on Money Talk and we featured this play on GTAT as my "Options Play of the Month." Last night, GTAT knocked it out of the park on earnings and the stock shot up over 10% to $15+ already in pre-market trading. That will put us well on track to the full $14,000 return on this spread and a 1,650% gain on cash ($13,200 profit on the $800 we invested)! Not bad for a few day's work, right?
By the way, if you never want to miss trade ideas like GTAT again – sign up right here for Membership and you will be among the first to hear about our new trade ideas every day!
We're still running our SQQQ hedge as we didn't think yesterday's…
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Flip Flopin’ Thursday – Argentina Makes Us All Cry
by phil - July 31st, 2014 8:05 am
I warned you about Argentina!
We discussed them way back in December as they faked their own GDP data, that it was nothing more than window-dressing to keep them from LOOKING like they were in default – even though they were clearly heading that way.
So it should come as no surprise that, as the deadline finally comes, there is no surprising rescue for the World's 26th largest economy ($477Bn vs $499Bn for Norway, $394Bn for Austria, $385Bn for Thailand and $248Bn for Greece). Since it's not a surprise, we took the opportunity this morning to go long in the Futures, as the 1% dip around 4am seemed overdone. I sent out a special Alert to all of our Members, saying:
Still, I like /TF for a bullish over the 1,130 line (testing now) and /YM at 16,700 and /ES 1,950 for bounces but VERY TIGHT STOPS if any of them fail.
Fortunately, they did not fail and already (8am) we have /TF 1,135 (up $500 per contract), /YM 16,732 (up $160 per contract) and /ES 1,955 (up $250 per contract) and our Egg McMuffins are paid for and those trades are now off the table (tight stops at least), as we expect more selling at the open!
It's nice to play the Futures to offset bearish bets, like the SQQQ (ultra-short Nasdaq) trade we discussed in yesterday's morning post and the QQQ weekly $96 puts we added for .22 in yesterday's live Member Chat ahead of the Fed – as we expected the statement would disappoint. Those should come out well this morning and going long on the Futures locks in those potential gains for us.
Now, getting back to Argentina, ARGT is UP 32% this year and that is just silly so ARGT makes a nice short at $23.20 and you can, in fact, buy the Oct $23 puts for $1.45 and, if they give back that 32%, they'll be back to $19 and you'll have $4+ for a $2.55 gain (175%) – that's a fun way to play it.
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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.