An update on oil proxies
by stjeanluc - May 3rd, 2015 5:11 pm
Courtesy of Jean-Luc Saillard
Back in December, I wrote a post on my blog where I compared the performances of various ETFs related to the oil industry. I was looking for the best possible proxy to match the moves of oil prices if you didn't want to play with futures. At the time, I concluded that for medium term trades, USO and the leveraged ETFs UCO and SCO were the most promising. Longer term, broader ETFs like OIH and XLE might make better investment if oil prices do recover to more profitable prices since ETF linked to futures like USO, UCO and SCO do suffer from decay. It also seemed that DIG and DUG could be promising if OIH could recover as it should with the price of oil, but that they don't make a good proxy for the price of oil itself.
Since then, oil has hit a multi-year low at around $42.50 and is now approaching $60, still well below its highs of 2014 but probably closer to a breakeven price for American shale producers. In this post I want to see what ETF would have profited best from that rebound and also which one would have fared worse. Let's look at a couple of performance charts. First, the standard oil proxies based on the futures:
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Oil (red) is up 40% since March 17 but what is interesting is how the pure oil ETFs are tracking that move. USO (blue) which is not leveraged is not tracking very well. In fact, it's up only about 27% or about 2/3 of the oil move. As expected, SCO (pink) is down, but clearly, the leveraging is not the 2x that you would expect as it's only down a bit less than 40%. And UCO (green), while the clear winner here, is only up 57% which is lower than the advertised 2x leverage factor. Once again, these future based ETF are victims of some decay.
Let's look at some ETFs not based on oil futures but who should benefit from an oil price rebound. In the next performance chart, we'll look at OIH and XLE.
It's not surprising that there should be a lag between the time oil prices start…
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TGI False Hope!
by phil - June 29th, 2012 7:47 am
I love it when a plan comes together!
As you know, we took an aggressive, protective short on Wednesday afternoon so it was "wheeeeeee!" on the dip with our prediction of XLF hitting $14 coming in to the penny while our JPM bottom target of $34.75 missing by .10, as we bottomed out at $34.85 before popping back $1 (3%) but, in all fairness, I did say "around $34.75" in the morning – so we knew it wasn't an exact target.
While we bottom-fished all day, I officially called the turn at 2:48, saying to our Members in Chat:
If you want a thrill ride, you can now buy the QQQ next week $61/62 bull call spread for .55 and that should be able to stop out with a .20-25 loss if things go badly tomorrow but make a nice double if the Qs head back up (now $61.58). Note we got wiped out on our this week $63s so not at all a sure thing.
Also, UCO just seems silly at $23.50 with July 4th coming up – I like the July $23/24 bull call spread at .50.
TNA next weekly $47 calls at $2.15 are also fun but those can cost you if things go the wrong way but TNA was $50 2 days ago and $52.50 2 weeks ago so they could make a nice payoff quickly.
Damn, I guess I still think the EU comes through tomorrow….
We didn't have to wait until tomorrow, of course. Someone (who will never be investigated) jumped the gun with a $3.3Bn block purchase of 50,000 S&P E-Mini Futures and that reversed almost all of the day's drop into the close. Then we got word of the expected $120Bn whatever they are calling it from the EU after hours and we got even better news at night as they took various steps to do stuff that I really don't care about because it isn't enough cash and it's going to fail again unless they pump it up by about 3x today.
As we know from PSW's…
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Flip-Flopping Thursday – $267Bn from the Fed Not Enough!
by phil - June 21st, 2012 8:18 am
And we're out!
It might be a little early because we did get another $267Bn from the Fed yesterday but that plus $125Bn given to Spain and $100Bn to the IMF this month is "just" $492Bn and that, according to our calculations, should be good for 1,350 on the S&P, tops. If they want to get to 1,400 – they'll need another $500Bn from Europe and, while it is widely expected to come – the Fed came up short and if the EU comes up short as well, we could be talking flash crash so we took advantage of the pre-Fed run-up (as planned in yesterday's post) to get back to cash.
My morning Alert to Members was short and sweet:
Good morning!
I don't know if you guys usually click on my little links but this one was the most important of the day – Don't be white people – GET OUT!!!!
This one was so important that I tweeted it (you can follow me here) and Facebooked it (you can follow us here) and I even put it out on Seeking Alpha's Stock Talks (you can follow me here) so don't say I didn't warn you. Sure the market may go up as funds dress windows into the end of the Quarter/Half next week but we caught the run off the bottom this month so why push it when the upside looks limited and the downside does not?
Other than 2014 spreads in our new Income Portfolio – all of our virtual portfolios went to cash rather than risking very nice first half gains. As of yesterday morning they were:
Much thanks to StJ for keeping these tracking portfolios – all back to cash now and hopefully we can match that performance in the second half of the year although I think we're going to ditch the very boring $5,000 Portfolio in favor of a $25,000 Portfolio…
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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.