Tempting Tuesday – Getting in the Zone
by Phil - November 16th, 2010 8:29 am
It’s hard to be in cash, isn’t it?
I’ve been calling for cash for weeks and now I’m starting to feel like Braveheart, trying to get anxious Members to hold, Hold, HOLD in chat every day as traders, by nature, like to trade and sitting in cash waiting for market certainty is pretty boring. Of course it’s a lot less boring than riding the market down all tied up in positions, isn’t it? As you can see from David Fry’s TLT chart, we did get it right when I called a top on Treasuries at $105 (Sept 24th) but it did take it a little while before it really began breaking down – better early than late in your market timing!
I was early with "October’s Overbought Eight" on the 3rd although, obviously, we had a few huge winners on our short-term plays as we caught that first dip on NFLX, PCLN, BIDU and FSLR while AMZN is looking good as is TLT (Dec $102 puts now $8.50 from net .35 entry, up 2,328% and done, of course). MOS, on the other hand, went up and up but is finally backing off it’s run. Dec $62.50 puts at $2.10 should do quite well if they fail to hold the $65 line.
CMG, on the other hand, has become our white whale, now up 27% from where we first looked at them. The original play was a ratio backspread of 4 March $190 calls at $10.75 ($4,300), selling 5 Nov $175 calls for $8.75 ($4,375) which was a net credit of $75 on the spread. The good news is the March $190 calls are now $51 ($20,400) but the very bad news is the Nov $175s are now $56 ($28,000). We have, of course adjusted this trade several times but it is still very painful to wait out.
An example of a simple adjustment on a trade like this is to roll the calls to 10 Jan $210 calls at $28 ($28,000) and rolling the March calls to 8 June $230 calls at $29 ($23,200) so an extra $2,800 put into the trade to buy a more manageable 6-month spread. When you do this, you have to keep in mind that your net entry has gone up from a $75 credit to a $2,725 debit and killing the trade now would cost $4,800 more so the…
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Cloud: Barron’s Puts IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard et al on Notice
by ilene - October 25th, 2010 12:32 am
Cloud: Barron’s Puts IBM, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard et al on Notice
Courtesy of Joshua M Brown, The Reformed Broker
This weekend’s must-read is Mark Verveka’s cover story in Barron’s on the next phase of the cloud migration.
Veverka’s story Sky’s the Limit in January was my first exposure to the cloud investing theme and I’ve made an obscene amount of money riding the stocks he introduced me to all year. In his latest missive on the topic, he looks at the downside of cloud adoption and what investors should watch out for.
Cloud computing for large enterprises has been successful – too successful – and now large enterprises want to take it even further. By contracting out more and more of their IT operations, these businesses are eliminating their own internal need to buy a lot of the equipment that is baked into next year’s forecasts.
The ramifications for many large cap tech stocks may be huge.
The message of the article is that no one is really ready for this shift to happen quite this quickly, many companies will be caught flatfooted. Large OEM equipment and IT vendors like Cisco, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM have the most to lose from this premature migration. Amazon, Microsoft and Google on the other hand look to extend their dominant positions in cloud services.
If you trade or invest in tech stocks, make sure to read this article this weekend.
Source:
A Private Party (Barrons) - sub req
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There Goes Those Fancy eBook Aspirations from Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon: 100,000’s of FREE eBooks from the Public Library
by ilene - August 11th, 2010 2:49 pm
There Goes Those Fancy eBook Aspirations from Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon: 100,000’s of FREE eBooks from the Public Library
Courtesy of Reggie Middleton, writing at Zero Hedge
Sometimes the best laid plans can be put out to pasture due to a lack of foresight in regards to the ever changing, liquid landscape known as the Internet. What fascinates me so much about the Web is that it is the great democratizer, it brings down the barriers to entry and allows for unfettered information flow. For instance, who would have thought that your local public library could lay low the massive aspirations media and retail titans such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple? Put simply, why would you buy an eReader from these vendors for several hundred dollars, then go ahead and spend more money buying the eBooks for said reader when you can simply download the books from your local public library’s website into the equipment you already have? Okay, I know why those Apple heads would do it – because they want to spend money on Apple products,,, the eBooks may look cooler with that shiny Apple logo-thingy indicating that you too have donated unnecessarily to the Steve Jobs’ enrichment fund, but how about the rest of the vendors???
As a matter of fact, you can kill several birds with one stone simply by buying one of the recent Android phones. Google is really on to something here, and the growth potential of Android is simply phenomenal. When those Android tablets get moving at Kmart for $100… Whoops, there goes that Amazon Digital eBook business model.
Attention Kmart shoppers: $149 Android tablet on aisle 5 : The Android OS isn’t just powering high end smartphones, it also runs barebones tablets sold at Kmart for the price of an iPod nano.
Think about this! Hundreds of thousands of titles freely and legally downloadable from your local public library to play on your $150 tablet with standard ports, HD video, the whole 9 yards, or maybe just on your cell phone. Android can scale pretty high in the capability department and reach rather low in the price category as well.
NY’ers, check this out from your NYC Public Libraries:
These books use DRM protection administered by Overdrive. Guess what platforms they won’t play on (okay, I’ll spoil it for you – the two front runners in the…
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DARK HORSE HEDGE UPDATE
by ilene - July 23rd, 2010 3:38 am
DARK HORSE HEDGE UPDATE
By Scott at Sabrient and Ilene of PSW
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy, Willie Brown.
You can run, tell my friend-boy, Willie Brown.
Lord, that I’m standin’ at the crossroad, babe,
I believe I’m sinking down.- Crossroads, Robert Johnson
Heading into Friday July 23, 2010 the market is again at a technical crossroad with the SPX closing Thursday at 1093.7, above the 50-day Moving Average of 1085.5. The MACD 12-26-9 remains close but still under the (zero) signal line at -1.13, with the RSI 14-day at 45.26. There is lateral resistance at the 1096 level from the close last Thursday showing how the market has traveled a long way the past week to get nowhere.
Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) fell short of analysts’ forecasts after Thursday’s close and was down 14% in after-hours trading, suggesting that the market may follow the pattern it has been in most of the summer.
Up 200, down 200, up 200, down 200 - wash out your savings, rinse and repeat! What a total sham of a market we have these days with machines running us up and down on virtually no news at all. Yesterday they would have you believe that Ben Bernanke caused a sell-off. How ridiculous is that? He didn’t say one thing that he didn’t already say in the Fed Minutes that were released on the 14th, which were the notes from the meeting of June 23rd so for analysts to get on TV and say “the markets were concerned by the Chairman’s comments” is beyond stupid – it’s criminal negligence. Phil’s Thrill-Ride Thursday.
[chart from freestockchart.com]
Thursday’s economic releases were less than encouraging with a jump in the number of people seeking unemployment benefits. Sales of previously owned homes fell, but the market shrugged it off as seasonal and rallied on the earnings of Caterpillar Inc., UPS Inc., and others that beat estimates. However, the SPX hasn’t been able to break through resistance at 1096 and essentially has gone nowhere since last Thursday.…
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Thrill-Ride Thursday – Wednesday Never Happened, Now What?
by Phil - May 27th, 2010 8:16 am
Poor CNBC! They are never going to get those chocolates…
I joked with Members during yesterday’s rally, after Fast Money’s bullish "Half-Time Report": "Uh oh – All the Fast Money people said buy - make sure you have your disaster hedges in place!" Indeed the market fell off a cliff almost the second they said it but we got out of our TZA calls (a little early) and did a little bottom fishing yesterday with our own buys on LYG ($3.13), Short EUO ($25.30), VZ ($27), FRO ($30.50), RIG ($58.50) and PFE ($15.10). Maybe I’m just a paranoid conspiracy theorist but I said to Members at the close:
That was a sad little show at the end wasn’t it? Nas was beaten with a stick into the close. AAPL $243, BIDU $67.46, AMZN $123… Ugly stuff. Not at all sure what they were trying to accomplish if not a flush…
Gap/RMM – Yes (we will gap) up. I just didn’t see why we would sell off like that. It seems that someone wanted to paint un ugly picture, maybe they didn’t get a good fill on Tuesday morning? Maybe not gap up tomorrow, maybe another drop and THEN we take off but I’m thinking a fund that wants to make numbers on Friday would want to flush us today and buy the SPX overnight and pump us up for a big finish so they can get back to cash on Friday and book it.
Isn’t it funny how that’s pretty much exactly what’s happening this morning? A huge gap up into the open that’s erasing the previous day’s losses when no one is trading – just like yesterday (when I get on my knees and pray - we won’t get fooled again). Fast Money got fooled out of their bullish 1:50 positions by 5pm as suddenly they relized the market is controlled by evil computer programs – not exactly news to us and no reason to shake us out of our well-hedged positions. We ignored rumors on China (and we always ignore Steve Ballmer) in chat and those seemed to be the major rumors moving the market lower yesterday.
Cramer kept the rumor mill grinding, saying: "The Chinese reportedly are debating whether or not to sell their European bonds, and that’s what killed our upward momentum." CNBC seems to have pulled the video so it’s hard to tell the tone but Cramer put up a list of a dozen stocks to buy but said to wait for…
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Weak Weekly Wrap-Up – Charting Uncertain Waters
by Phil - May 8th, 2010 5:43 am
I’m just doing a quick wrap-up this week because, surprisingly, it MIGHT be time for a new Buy List!
I had said to Members on Cinco de Mayo, in our 5% Rule Review, that if we broke below 1,155 we would retrace all the way to 1,100 with our 5% Rule resistance points around 1,100 at 1,155, 1,114, 1,100, 1,073 and 1,045. We actually spiked as low as 1,066 on Thursday but finished the week at a very sad 1,110 as we watched for that "weak bounce" zone to be broken all day. This does not bode technically well for the markets next week but I told Members we would have to give the markets a pass for the day. Based on the uncertainty of the weekend, we can’t expect a lot of capital commitments ahead of the EU decision. After all, we’re in cash – why shouldn’t other smart funds be too?
When I predicted we’d hit 1,000 on Wednesday, I did not think it would be on Thursday! The markets are now negative for the year and the S&P has spiked almost to the Feb low of 1,044 (and our lowest close was 1,056). That’s right, these 5% Rule numbers are the SAME ones we used back then and it’s the same series we used to measure our winter run at the end of last year. We expect a bounce here, hopefully at least a test of 1,155 on a relief rally if Greece is "fixed" yet again on Monday but we’re not going to be too impressed until we’re over that line.
Still that means it’s time to at least lay out a new Watch List, which is the prelude to a Buy List – giving us a list of stocks we’d like to get into at lower prices. Our last Member Watch List was back in December and by Feb 6th we had our famous Buy List, which we triggered at Dow 10,058 for a very successful run through March 18th ("Bye Bye Buy List!"), when we closed 2/3 of the positions and we have since cashed out the rest as I got more and more worried about the rally, finally calling for all cash last week.
Speaking of last week, for those of you who say I don’t pick enough straight stocks – I listed 33 short trade ideas from my unofficial "Sell List" last Friday (4/30) when the Dow was way up at 11,167…
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Weekly Wrap-Up – Why Does This Rally Give Me the Creeps?
by Phil - April 25th, 2010 8:29 am
I’m sorry, I am trying so hard to get bullish but it’s not working…
My only solution is to, as we often joke, switch off my brain and stop reading the news (listening to it is great as everything is coming up roses in TV-land) and ignore the now-exposed shenanigans on Wall Street (why should I worry about my investments just because the people running the game are up on fraud charges?) and for goodness sakes don’t even look at something as depressing as "The Economic Elite vs. the People of the United States of America," neither Parts 1-3 or Parts 4-6 because that can lead to thinking and thinking makes it REALLY hard to go to sleep at night with your money riding on the top of an 80% market while gold is trading at $1,150 an ounce because of overwhelming global instability and a total lack of faith in the global financial markets.
Yep, if we don’t think about all that stuff and focus on the good stuff, like the fact that Unemployment is only 3% for those of us who earn $150,000 a year (for the poor it’s 31%), and 93% of our virtually fully-employed analysts predict the S&P will finish the year even higher (although not too much higher) with only Andrew Garhwaite of Credit Suisse in need of an "attitude adjustment" with his puny target of 1,175, which is 32 points lower than Friday’s close. Fortunately, enlightened analysts like Deutsche Bank’s Binky Chad think we can still squeeze another 100 points out of this rally (about 10%) although Goldman Sachs is wimping out at 1,250, their partner in "whatever you want to call it", JP Morgan is up at 1,300. So it’s BUYBUYBUY from the gang of 12 and we’ll be whipping Andrew into shape by the next report or he may find himself the fall guy for the next scandal…
Oops, sorry, I wasn’t supposed to mention the scandals as that’s not really a buying premise unless of course you look at the sheer volume of things the IBanks were getting away with and then look at the virtual nothing that is being done about it and then we can conclude there is no reason they can’t pump this market back up to Dow 14,000 because we already know it was such total BS last time, when we dropped 50% like…
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Forget About It Friday – Again
by Phil - April 23rd, 2010 8:28 am
Goldman who? Fuhgeddaboudit!
Greece what? Oh we fixed that thing last week! Yeah, the Germans (who are $4.5Tn in debt), the French (who are $4.4Tn in debt), the English ($9.2Tn) and, of course, the Italians ($4Tn in debt) are gonna give the Greeks a little something to keep the lights on until Christmas. Hey the world’s supposed to end in 2012 anyway so it’s not like we gotta keep worrying about this stuff, capiche? See Merkel tells me she knows a guy who knows a guy who’s got the green to keep this whole scam going until then and, after that – who cares? It’s gonna be somebody else’s problem…
I’m not going to complain, I complained about all this stuff on our last Fuhgeddaboudit Friday, just two weeks ago – so you can read that post, where there was a chart of the XLF at $16.40 pre-Goldman and two weeks later, after our mini-crisis on Wall Street, XLF is at $16.65 – just like nothing happened.
Inflation is rising, home prices are even lower than last year, housing starts are anemic, unemployment is still a rounding error off of 10%, wages are falling, defaults on credit cards and mortgages are rising, commercial rents are going uncollected and CRE values are declining rapidly but those declines are being covered up by banks using accounting tricks to hide their losses. All forgotten about as this Friday opens almost exactly where we were last Friday.
Something DID happen happen this week. The SEC made some noise and Obama made a speech and GS fell from $185 a share to $160 a share (down 13%) and isn’t that punisment enough for putting together deals that led to the loss of $15Tn of household wealth in America? Of course Goldman wasn’t out to get us – they were simply structuring deals that would greatly reward their high net-worth clients based on the irresponsible buying patterns of our neighbors while their analysts were upgrading the housing sector to keep the suckers pouring into the other side of the bet.
Sure it’s evil and sure it led to a crisis that crippled our country and cost millions of people their jobs and homes but — oh Goldman — we can’t stay mad at you! Just give us a little stock market rally and all is forgiven but do we have to bend all the way…
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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 Favorites backup site
(