Phil
Killed it tonight trading copper. Anyone who jumped in right after election is up about 75k on one contract!
Thanks
Kapella
Started my membership in mid-Oct and have since then learned so much about options by reading the site's articles and postings, members' chats and suggested trades – as a bonus, the articles are entertaining as well! Phil's long-term investing strategy makes really good sense as I've seen its effect on my GLW positions.
Phil – thanks for sharing your knowledge of the market! I've worked as risk analyst for the investment dept of a $19B insurance company, and the scope and depth of your daily commentaries blows away what I have seen and heard from the PMs and even the chief investment officer! Most of all, I will continue to be a member because you have your priorities right (from my POV) – it's not all about money and power.
Bai2r
10/15/2014: Phil…..been travelling more than not but reading and watching you guys every night. This is to say a big thank you. Even though I don't have the time to trade every day now I set up hedges and base long term strategy on PSW. I now it may sound like BS to some readers but my 401k is down a mere 3%. It hardly gets my attention when I open my brokerage portfolio accounts. And that is by using your longer term hedges and strategies. I don't need to be a day trader to take advantage of PSW. At this time in my life when I cant trade every day……. not losing what we've gained moves front and center. It's just a great feeling to watch your brokerage account hold steady in a sea of red. Thanks Teacher.
Livingfull
What a quarter! (AAPL, etc.) "People react; PSW'ers anticipate." Thanks everyone for a vibrant board.
Silentstorm
I've been trading/investing since the early 80's (my dad started me out young). I've had seven figure accounts (in the past) and I've done lots of trading, so I can say that I'm a well seasoned investor. Phil is the real deal. His trades make sense and his strategy is sound. He sees things that others miss and he's one of the best at finding price anomalies. When he makes a mistake, he has an exit strategy already planned. He hedges very well and he has an instict which tells him to go to cash or to be all in.
Autolander
WOW, look at DRYS go. Nice call on the entry the other week Phil. I got 200 at $6.66 and sold a 7.5 call for $.50, then on the tear today sold another 7.5 call for $1. This should puts me in at an average of $5.91 and called away at $7.5 for a profit of $300+ after commisions. Once again another Phil trade pays for this months membership.
Craigzooka
Phil has some great insight into the market. He's given me a different perspective on the market and I know I'm a better trader/investor because of it.
I've been trading options since the late 80's and Phil is right. Unless you know what is going to happen (how can you, unless you have insider information), then do what the smart money does - be the house. Remember guys, we're allowed to sell options. If you're afraid to be short, then do a spread to limit your liability. When I think about the money I've made and lost on options, a good approximation is that I win 30% of the time when I do a straight buy; I win about 70% of the time when I do a spread; I win nearly 90% of the time when I sell naked.
Autolander
Thanks for the oil tip Phil: Bot & sold the USO May 29 calls for net $125. Not bad for few minutes work.
JWick1981
Phil: Thank You!
Scaling, Scaling, and Scaling… then patience, patience, patience I'm 2 to 1 short and even on a day the broad market is up I had my largest one day gain in years. The last 6 weeks in fact have been great. I really feel I've learned to use some tools that will enable me to deal with the turbulence ahead. Selling short calls is definitely my preferred approach. Even allowed me to play golf this afternoon while the premium melted away and shoot a career low round. I owe you man!
Lincoln
Why were the analysts wrong?
If I were a Japanese investor who purchased US stocks prior to November at Y80 yen to the dollar, with the US market up an average of 15% or more and upon selling the asset I covert dollars to Yen, also realizing an additional 25% gain (one dollar now converts to 100+ Yen rather than the 80 I used at time of purchase), I think I would be unloading US assets also.
But analysts never do the math in their articles nor very rarely bring up or discuss the ramifications of currency fluctuations. I don't include Phil in this group as this is a valuable lesson I am learning from him.
Denlundy
As a fellow "low-end" investor I like Phil's Buy/Write strategy on solid stocks. Before I came here I loved to try to "figure things out" with very little success "TRYING TO FIGURE THINGS OUT"! I traded too much and fell in love with stocks that "should have done" what they didn't do. Now a majority of my accounts are in Buy/Writes suggested here or cash (waiting for a better time for more Buy/Writes). I use 15-20% of my total holding to short term trade and hedge. This is manageable with my full time job as a business owner. I have found Phil's system a more discipline way to achieve the returns I want without relying on my ability (more like inability to "figure things out").
DCalrk41
I started with $250,000 in cash as of Oct 1 and have realized gains of $81,000 thru close of business. And that's in an IRA with no margin or naked trades. Whenever you are in Argentina or Chile I owe you a drink. I'm looking forward to it.
Denlundy
Boring trading – Phil/ Thanks to PSW, my yearly covered-writes are on pace for 15%. Add the long puts and well over 20%… and I look at it once a day and never lose sleep over it. Actually doing better than my trading account at this point (Thanks, summer 2013)
Anyway, the point is that anyone with enough money would be wise to do the 20% – 40% stuff and do trading as a hobby…
Arivera
Phil I must say that it was really nice to have a portfolio that was looking very stable in the face of a rough day for the markets. I ended the day up 0.3% which includes another successful day of futures trading. So with a portfolio of mostly cash, a few of our faves like Apple and LL, JO, TOL, DIS, etc., along with a couple of hedges that paid off nicely today, and my futures trades, I never had to break a sweat during that madhouse today. Yes, by George (or Phil), I may be learning this system!
Craig
Man, what a week: Bought C at 1.40, sold half at 1.59 (relatively big position), another quarter at 3.04 just now. Ran SKF down from 270 with one April put, still holding some 115's expiring in a couple days. I'm going to gamble this position like a champion Friday. Bought FAS at all sorts of levels and started cashing out. Long HOV, stock and some nickel calls for fun - Mocha up your buy-out from 5 to 8 and that's 10,900% return for the May-2.50's . Ha!
Biodieselchris
Thanks super helpful re: UGN example…..other inflation/market-correction-defensive-related play you threw out that has jammed UP in less than a month is TITN 6/14 $15 puts, up 40%. Excuse my enthusiasm but haven't had those types of gains in multiple plays in years let alone days doing it on my own…….maybe I should host the PSW infomercial!!!!
stevegeb200
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
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
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 - I am 3 month follower and shout a big thanks for all the good advice and training. I read all the materials and posts as suggested. I am retired CFO and took over my investments 2 years ago from broker after frustration with returns. I followed some conservative advice for retirees and have 60% bonds currently in a 5m portfolio. I had been doing covered calls on my stocks to boost returns and slowly am getting more aggressive after following your site and my son who has been with you for 6 months. I allocated 1.5m to stocks and am scaling up from 30%. I did some of the trades suggested in early June using Aug & Oct buy/writes on CSCO, WMT, MON, WFR, DO in addition to calls on XOM, CVX, PEP, PG, WM, T that I owned. Most are doing very well (4-24%) in 60 days. My good problem is that instead of getting longer, I will be making 6% quickly (50% plus annualized) and getting called away on many positions. What would you advise for getting long again. Thanks again for such a great job advising all of us!
TXChili
Thanks Phil another great week of guiding us!
Steven Parker
Phil/CLK4 – Perfect! Saw the answer 1 min after my post…out with $740 on two contracts. Thanks again for the education.
Jeffdoc2004
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
WOW, glad I went bearish… Phil, thanks for the help on the QID calls yesterday, I turned it into a partial cover rolling down to the Feb 52s selling the 55s 1/2 covered. Sold 1/2 and now lowered my cost basis to $4.38 on the $52s (fully covered).
Texasmotion
Phil thanks. You never cease to amaze me with your thoughtful perspective on a myriad of different issues and challenges. It's kind of an embarrassment of riches since I joined this board a few years back. The ride from Dow 9,000 or was it 8,000? up to Dow 15,000 seems hard to believe. I wish I could have it all over again, except with the capital I have now.
Winston
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 – 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
1,000% on SKF - It was a freakin' monster into the center field bleachers! I saw it play out live and squawked it from the StockTwits ID which 14k people follow: Home run trade of the week @philstockworld just knocked cover off ball w $SKF puts. http://bit.ly/piBL Great trade bud!
Phil Pearlman - StockTwits
I have been a member of Phil's site for three years and counting, and my advice is that all investing takes time. There are o shortcuts, no secret way to riches. Same with Phil's site- you need time and patience to start benefitting fully from his advice. But it is often spot on and also very useful, especially to me as I try to keep a level head in this turbulent stock market environment.
Jordan
Phil/Eric/Cwan/Matt/Cap/etc.. - I've learned so much from all of you and want to thank you. I'm up 23% this month thanks to all of your advice - Thanks, guys!
Welcome to Baruch at Ultimi Barbarorum.* In this post, Baruch revisits the alleged, insider trading of 3Com options, casting doubt as to whether the calls were bought by persons with inside information prior to the takeover. More likely, scared shorts were trying to hedge their positions. – Ilene
The blogosphere made the catch! The Interweb protects the rest of us from evil doers! The world is ablaze with the news that prior to the 3Com buyout announced by HP last week, there was an unusual amount of volume in the $5 november call in 3Com. We’re all pretty sensitised to insider trading at the moment, and so this looks as clear cut and beautiful a case of evil-doers caught with their hands in the till as we are likely to see in our time on earth. As Tyler Durden puts it:
This is so blatant it is sufficiently stupid that even the SEC will presumably catch the perpetrator. Here’s to hoping the trader ends up being Galleon’s Raj Raj buying options from his E-Trade account while on bail. Of course, we fully expect any prosecution case against the perpetrator to fall apart at the seams courtesy of a completely inept legal team at the SEC and the Justice Department.
Oh really? Before the Zero Hedge folks get the pitchforks out, let’s stop and think a bit. Let us be splitters, and not lumpers, and we might see that would be quite reasonable for the SEC and DoJ not to prosecute anyone at all. Using the principle of Occam’s Razor, they may well tend to conclude that no insider trading took place.
Let’s get technical here. Do forgive Baruch if you get lost (because it may be that you’re not actually all that bright and that’s not his fault). In the case of the unusual volume in the 3Com options, you should know that incredibly unusual volumes in options is not terribly unusual, if you follow me. It is in fact the case that the volume of a particular option resides, as Taleb would have it, in Extremistan. It is subject to many many days of low and limited trading, and very few days of extremely high volume, orders of magnitude above the norm, where most of the total…
I don’t believe in market calls, and trying to time turns is a perilous game. But most savvy people I know have been skeptical of this rally, beyond the initial strong bounce off the bottom. It has not had the characteristics of a bull market. Volumes have been underwhelming, no new leadership group has emerged, and as greybeards like to point out, comparatively short, large amplitude rallies are a bear market speciality.
In addition, this one has had some troubling features. Most notable has been the almost insistent media cheerleading, particularly from atypical venues for that sort of thing, like Bloomberg. Investors who are not at all the conspiracy-minded sort wonder if there has been an official hand in the "almost nary a bad word will be said" news posture. Tyler Durden has regularly claimed that major trading desks have been actively squeezing shorts. There have been far too many days with suspicious end of session rallies.
The fall in the markets overnight, particularly the 5.8% drop in Shanghai, seems significant in combination with other factors… continue here.
Your last best hope to sustain any measure of relevance is to ally yourselves with the smartest minds in the financial blogosphere and start opting for quality rather than volume. But we’ve gone over suggestions for improvement before, and you’d clearly rather create feature shows about the business of pornography. Fine. If you want to wane into a sputtering, swooshing, brightly-colored perpetual self-parody, go ahead. But there’s no need to telegraph your fear of obsolescence with displays like this: [skip ahead to 2:30 or so].
This isn’t an isolated incident – Dennis Kneale has generated some heat (and certainly not any light) with similar comments. But in fairness, maybe we bloggers are all “moronic” when it comes to the core competencies of a Kneale, a Gasparino, or a Caruso-Cabrera. I certainly don’t know the first thing about reading from a teleprompter, about parsing Goldman Sachs press releases as journalistic content, or about providing unenlightening extemporaneous verbiage without any embarrassment or shame.
Sincerely etc.,
Jared
P.S. “Tyler Durden – it’s probably not even his name!”
Now that Merrill Lynch has upgraded every single REIT and has a price target of +/- infinity, (conveniently pocketing over $100 million in the process), the company can focus on more pressing issues at hand. And no, not redecorating Thain’s legacy office in the neo-uber-criminal style). Instead, the bank has sent not one, not two, but a whopping six cease and desist order to Zero Hedge. As the recently acquired bank can finally afford to pay lawyers again compliments of Schmidt and Sakwa, it has decided to pursue the source of all evil: all those David Rosenberg posts Zero Hedge has published, that seek to educate and provide some color to otherwise confused and CNBC abused readers and investors.
If it is any consolation, now that David is literally out of the building, ML can sleep soundly that ZH will only focus on the bank’s daily REIT upgrades (no, we have not forgotten about those) as it is alas the only source amusement coming out of doomed mother Merrill.
So, dear readers, please be aware that the following six posts will be removed at some point tonight as Zero Hedge is unable to underwrite and collect on average $10 million per REIT dilution events and thus afford any lawyers (except potentially for White & Case’s Tom Lauria).
As for the 500 or so websites that fervently and automatically repost and redistribute ZH content, well, those we have no control over.
*****
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Several thousand traders on Wall Street may be extra jittery tomorrow when the FOMC announcement hits at 2:00pm. The reason: shipping containers full of illegal drugs - mostly blow - were found and seized at a Philadelphia port in what authorities described as the largest seizure in the region's history. Back in March we reported by what at a time seemed like a giant haul when a ton and a half of cocaine seized at the port of New York and New Kersey, in what was describe...
Could the Staples sector and the yield on the 10-year note be on the verge of sending an important message to the stock and bond markets? It sure looks that way.
Staples ETF (XLP) is currently attempting to break above the January 2018 highs at (1). If it does, it would be a breakout of the trading range that has been in play for the past 18-months, as it looks to have created a double bottom last year.
Moneygram International Inc (NASDAQ: MGI) rose 128.3% to $3.31 in pre-market trading after the company reported a strategic partnership with Ripple. Blockchain payments firm Ripple has made an investment in MoneyGram and will also allow the group to use its XRP cryptocurrency as part of the cross-border payments process. Ripple made an initial investment of $30 million in the money transfer company, made up of common stock and a warrant to purchase common stock. Ripple purchased newly-issued common stock including the shares underlying the warrant from MoneyGram at $4.10 per share.
Back in 2016, Helen (a pseudonym) took three different direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic tests: AncestryDNA, 23andMe and FamilyTreeDNA. She saw genetic testing as a way...
Having survived the day's bloodbath in US tech stocks, cryptos are crashing in the early Asian session, apparently playing catch-down to the day's de-risking.
While no catalyst is immediately evident, there are some reports noting 13 large global banks are preparing to launch digital versions of major global currencies next year, though we suspect this drop was more algorithmic that fundamental-driven.
For March 2019 the fund was up approximately 5.5% net of all fees and expenses. By way of comparison, the S&P 500 was up approximately 1.9% while the Russell 2000 was down approximately 2.1%. Year-to-date 2019 the fund is up approximately 12.8% while the S&P 500 is up approximately 13.6% and the ...
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...
The threat to America is this: we have abandoned our core philosophy. Our first principle of this nation as a meritocracy, a free-market economy, where competition drives economic decision-making. In its place, we have allowed a malignancy to fester, a virulent pus-filled bastardized form of economics so corrosive in nature, so dangerously pestilent, that it presents an extinction-level threat to America – both the actual nation and the “idea” of America.
This all-encompassing mutant corruption saps men’s souls, crushes opportunities, and destroys economic mobility. Its a Smash & Grab system of ill-gotten re...
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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.
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...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site