Traders Look To Tumi Puts As Shares Edge Higher
by Option Review - January 7th, 2013 1:30 pm
Today’s tickers: TUMI, TWC & NRF
TUMI - Tumi Holdings, Inc. – Shares in luggage and travel accessories maker, Tumi Holdings Inc., are moving higher for a third consecutive session, up 1.6% today at $20.77 as of 12:10 p.m. ET. The stock continues to rebound following a sharp pullback last week during the first trading session of 2013. Options activity on Tumi this morning suggests some traders are wary the stock could reverse gains in the near term. The most active options on the stock today are the Jan. $20 strike puts, with upwards of 1,200 lots changing hands versus open interest of just nine contracts. It looks like most of the puts were purchased for an average premium of $0.70 apiece, thus positioning buyers to profit in the event that Tumi’s shares slide 7% from the current level to breach the average breakeven price of $19.30 by January expiration. Shares in the luxury luggage company last traded below $19.30 back in August 2012. Tumi Holdings, Inc. is scheduled to present at the 15th Annual ICR XChange Conference in Miami next Wednesday.
TWC - Time Warner Cable, Inc. – The provider of video, high-speed data and phone services popped up on our market scanners this morning due to heavy volume in the February expiry put options. Shares in Time Warner Cable kicked off the week in positive territory, but have since reversed gains to trade down 0.60% on the day at $97.17 as of 12:25 p.m. in New York. One options trader appears to be placing a floor on the cable operator’s shares, selling 6,250 puts at the Feb. $90 strike for a premium of $0.60 apiece. The strategy makes maximum profits of $0.60 per contract as long as shares in TWC settle above $90.00 and the puts land out-of-the-money at February expiration. The put seller could wind up having 625,000 shares of the underlying put to him at expiration if shares in the name decline 7.4% to $90.00 during the next five weeks. Time Warner reports fourth-quarter earnings ahead of the opening bell on the…
Bye Bye Buy List!
by phil - March 18th, 2010 6:15 pm
Oh, I have tried!
I have tried to be bullish, I have tried to get enthusiastic about this rally but I have been reviewing these picks for a few days and looking at the market, the charts, the sentiment, reading the news and studying the fundamentals and I'm OUT! Oh, I'll be back, we'll set up a new, aggressive $100K Virtual Portfolio next week for some fun shorter-terrm plays (still keeping the conservative one for the full year) to take full advantage of this insanity but it's going to be mainly cash through the end of the month as I do not trust this rally one bit and it will be so nice to head into the easter holiday with lots of cash on the sidelines.
We hit a perfect entry on Feb 8th, in our last round, and the market is up almost 9% since that day and I'm not expecting another 9% in the next 6 weeks so it's a very good time to take a break. We were able to roll and enjoy these trades since Christmas and we will be revisiting some, maybe even keeping a few but, on the whole, I want to do what I often counsel members to do, which is follow our simple two-step process to maximizing your profits in a market rally:
- Step 1) Take Money
- Step 2) Run
There – isn't that simple? Keep in mind that we LOVE all of these stocks so we'll be back in them if they go on sale and, perhaps, even if they don't and the market looks stronger through April earnings. Meanwhile, keep in mind that these are 6-week profits so 20% is A LOT for generally conservative plays. Not much else to talk about – let's just see how many of these suckers are worth keeping (noted in green):
AET (12/21 – $34.04, 1/9 – $32.70, 1/31 – $29.97, 3/18 – $33.24) They could not have done better for us, staying right in range and giving us 4 excellent sales but health care is passing this weekend and that's too wild for us to stick with. Our last batch is right on target:
- Apr $33 calls sold for $2.40, now .40 – up 83%
- Apr $30 puts sold for $1.50, now .02 - up 99%
- 2012 $25/35 bull call
The Buy List – Q1 2010 (Members Only)
by phil - January 9th, 2010 7:26 am
Well we finally hit our levels!
Fundamentally, I still don't buy this rally but, technically, we could go up and up from here. We discussed in chat yesterday how we may be in a pattern similar to 2003-7 where we came out of the dot com crash and 9/11, which took the market lower than it should have and then government stimulus took us higher than we should have been. Sure it all ended badly but there was a really good ride up in between. HOWERVER, 2004, which is about where we would be now, was a choppy and downtrending year. That is not a problem for our buy/write strategy as long as we keep our heads and scale into our positions.
Obviously we can't rely on patterns to simply keep repeating themselves. We could have another terrorist attack, we could have more stimulus or maybe both in our future but, until we see the patten broken, we can play for a similar move. Our buy/write strategy is ideal for this as it's a conservative play that gives us 15-20% downside protection. Combine this with our usual strategy to scale into positons along with some sensible disaster hedges and we can build a nice, bullish virtual portfolio for 2010. Keep in mind we don't fear the upside with buy/writes as our "worst case" there is we get called away with a nice profit.
I put up our latest Watch List on Dec 22nd, following through from our bullish lists of September 6th, October 8th and Nov 24th. These are the bullish plays that form the bulk of our virtual portfolios and that sometimes gets lost in our weekly short-term trading. It was a lot like shooting fish in a barrel, picking winners since September (we had our last Buy List on July 11th our first since the bottom in March, which was followed by the more conservatively mixed $100K Virtual Portfolio that we used from April through July, when we were worried the market would be choppy (it was). As always, our active lists are found under the Virtual Portfolio Tab near the top of our pages - always check there for recent updates.