2010 – Time to Arrest the Oil Extortionists?
by Phil - December 30th, 2009 4:58 am
Is "extortion" too strong a word for what’s being done to us?
Extortion is a criminal offense which occurs when a person unlawfully obtains either money, property or services from a person, entity, or institution, through coercion. Coercion is the practice of forcing another party to behave in an involuntary manner (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation, trickery, or some other form of pressure or force. Such actions are used as leverage, to force the victim to act in the desired way. Coercion may involve the actual infliction of physical pain/injury or psychological harm in order to enhance the credibility of a threat. The threat of further harm may lead to the cooperation or obedience of the person being coerced.
Perhaps there is not much we can do to stop the criminal cartel known as OPEC from withholding the supply of oil (they have cut production by 5M barrels a day globally in the past 18 months) or the US Energy cartel that has taken 32.4% of the US rigs off-line in the past 12 months – EVEN though oil prices are UP 100% over the same time period. I’m sure, if called to testify before Congress, T Boone and company will do some song and dance to pretend the economics of $80 oil justify 32.4% less drilling than $40 oil did last December rather than the very obvious fact that, by cutting off 32% of our supply, they were able to EXTORT us, to force us to pay through trickery and the pressure of witholding a vital commodity - an extra $40 per barrel.
$40 a barrel is costing the US consumer $760M a day – and that’s without the refining mark-up. $760M a day is $277Bn a year stolen from US citizens alone and over $1Tn globally – that’s 20 Madoff scams a year! If the oil companies were witholding water or air from us and demanding more money for something they were able to readily produce more of, then we would KNOW it was torture, right? Why should oil be different? It’s not a choice – for good or ill, we need energy to survive in this modern world every bit as much as we need air and water yet we allow both the blatant cartel of OPEC as well as the private cartel of US petroleum producers to manipulate the supply of energy and FORCE…
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Frothy Friday – Churn Baby Churn!
by Phil - October 23rd, 2009 8:26 am
What a wild week we are having!
We dumped our shorts as planned yesterday morning, getting a very nice dip at the open and my 9:36 Alert to Members was even titled "Take Those Short Profits!" and our upside targets were set (as they were in the morning post) at: Dow 10,087, S&P 1,096, Nasdaq 2,173, NYSE 7,204 and Russell 623. Where did we finish? Dow 1,081, S&P 1,092, Nasdaq 2,165, NYSE 7,182 and Russell 613 – so a bit short of all of our targets but not bad considering we were opening 167 points below that on the Dow so perhaps I can be forgiven for a 6-point miss…
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Even our free PSW Report readers would have done great just following the trades we had in last week’s Wrap-Up (Report subscribers get to read our articles without the 48-hour delay). We had GS Nov $210s shorted at .87, now .35 (up 60%), CERN short $85 calls at $4.15, now $3.10 (up 25%), ISRG Apr puts and calls sold for $39.20, now $36 (up 8%), PARD at $6.87, now $7.35 (up 7%), NTRI at $18.60, now $19.15 (up 3%)…
We had other trades that are still in progress. ICE notably burned us so far, but we rolled them up and shorted them some more yesterday (now $106.56). We’ve had a wild mix of short and long trades this week as we TRY to get more bullish on the markets but yesterday’s run-up had us reloading Thursday’s successful short plays as that set made…
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Jobless Thursday – Max Keiser Bashes Banks
by Phil - October 22nd, 2009 8:19 am
I’ve never embedded a video before but you just have to see this so I’m learning a new trick. Keiser puts out some gems like:
Goldmans Sachs, JPM, CitigGroup are all engaged in accounting fraud- The American peasants have got to be the stupidest people in the World today. They don’t mind becoming peasants, they don’t mind living like peasants and, if that’s the case, then we should do nothing to stop them from sliding into a peasant class.
- Banks are just stealing money outright from the World economy.
- There is no liquidity being provided by the banks, they are hoarding their cash and non-disclosing their losses.
- In part 2 of the video: "The reality is people are dying due to the actions of JPM, GS and the Wall Street Jihadists"
Max compares Wall Street bankers to suicide bombers and predicts it is only a matter of time before they are back before Congress with a gun to their heads threatening the destruction of America if they don’t get another bailout. I’m glad he said it an not me because I get enough hate mail from GS fans… Keiser makes the point that, while the American people may put up with this nonsense, the leaders of Europe and Russia and China look at what’s going on here and have no faith in our currency.
I think this is great as it saves me from ranting and raving this morning. I had my fill in yesterday’s post when I said the only way to play this market to the bull side is to suspend all logical disbelief. Fortunately, we had a huge, ridiculous run-up in the morning that gave us tremendous shorting opportunties. Even as the market was rising, in my 9:56 Alert to Members, we targeted the DIA $99 puts at $1.30 and those finished the day at $2 (up 54%) and in my 10:32 Alert to Members we sold the FAZ $19 puts for $1.80 and those finished the day at $1.20 (up 33%). We also took short plays as the market topped on MS, IYT, CS, ICE, V, GMCR, DD, EBAY and even our beloved AAPL as the market was just too ridiculous looking to be bullish.
As usual, we jumped on top of the Beige Book and right at 2:02 I commented that the headlines didn’t seem so hot and by 2:50 we…
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Weekly Wrap-Up – 10,000 or Bust!
by Phil - October 17th, 2009 8:27 am
I think I was right on the money last week when I said:
The bar for corporate earnings is still set at very easy to beat levels yet, like this limbo-playing child, when they announce their beats of very low expectations we’re going to get all excited and tell them how great they are doing. The problem is, these are not kids who we hope may grow up one day to be President or CEOs of major companies. these ARE CEOs of major companies and they are being paid top salaries for top performance and we, the stock purchasing public, are paying top dollar for what should be SPECTACULAR performance, not beating 75% off last year’s earnings by a penny!
In that post, I rattled off a list of stocks that seemed overpriced to me: AMZN, BIDU, AM, PALM, NFLX, PCLN, URBN, UHS, CERN, CREE, GMCR, CY, SWM, TRLG, BKE and you would have had a fabulous week just shorting those stocks as only NFLX, URBN and CREE stayed positive. Now most newsletter writers would quit right there and make a giant ad saying they were 12 for 15 on the week but, as our members know, THAT’S NO BIG DEAL AT PSW! I’m just going to remind members that they can refer friends to FREE advice like that in our trial newsletter and earn 20% or more off their subscriptions for doing it.
Picking stocks is easy but a few percent here and a few percent there isn’t much fun is it? On that list, the two we attacked were AMZN and BIDU, both of which ran (in our opinion) way too high AND had very liquid and very overpriced call options that we could sell to collect premiums. AMZN is a staple short in our $100K Portfolio and we had set up BIDU the week before, selling Oct $420 calls for $8.30 and the Oct $430 calls for $7,20. While both went higher on Monday, the fact that we had a plan for managing the trade kept us from panicking and, thankfully, Monday was the only day those positions gave us trouble and both finished the week worthless (100% profit for us).
Adjusting our positions kept us busy this week as we STILL have a slightly bearish bias and I apologize for that but, as I said in Friday’s post: Every time I try to get a little more bullish, they pull me back…
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Weekly Wrap-Up, How to Make Money in a Down Market
by Phil - October 3rd, 2009 8:27 am
Wow. what a fantastic week!
Well, not for the markets but for us as we totally nailed it. It’s hard to believe that it was just two weeks ago, on Monday, the 21st, after I posted the "Wrong Way Weekly Wrap-Up" as the Dow rose from 9,600 to 9,800, that I had to apologize to members, saying: "I’m sorry because I don’t like being bearish – I’m an optimistic guy usually but I can’t just sit here and tell people what they want to hear. It’s just too irresponsible not to be cautious here. We make plenty of bullish picks but I maintain a very wary outlook until we get some real fundamental improvements."
That’s the funny thing about fundamentals, they don’t matter until they do – and then they matter a lot. It’s funny how I get labeled a perma bear when I’m shorting the market at the top and a perma bull when I’m buying the maket at the bottom. Gee, I always thought that’s what you’re supposed to do but it turns out that few people have the patience to work a market trading range and I don’t blame them, I blame the mainstream media, who encourage this destructive herd mentality to investing that culminates in Jim Cramer and his sound-board, where all the complexities of the market are supposed to boil down to either BUYBUYBUY or SELLSELLSELL.
It makes me seem downright wishy-washy when I said to members on the 21st: "I don’t have all the answers, but I do have a lot of questions – too many to get comfortable buying at these levels." On the whole, as I explained in detail way back in late July, I am neither bullish nor bearish, I am Rangeish. Yes, it’s a made-up word and I have to make it up because no other analysts these days seem to believe the market can go up AND down, everyone seems compelled to stick to one or the other AND THEY DO IT TO THE DETRIMENT OF THEIR READERS – I WILL NOT DO IT!
There are strong stocks and there are weak stocks and I can’t believe I even have to write this out but the best strategy is to short weak stocks and ETFs that have gone too high and buy strong stocks and ETFs that have gone too low. As I explained in my LiveStock appearance back on March 6th (when I was called a "perma-bull" for calling a bottom), the market is like a huge tanker being pulled by individual stocks…
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Which Way Wednesday – Beige Book Edition
by Phil - July 29th, 2009 8:30 am
Today we get the "anecdotal" information on the current economic conditions from each of the twelve Federal Districts, we find these reports very useful as they tend not to be sugar-coated and the last BBook release (June 10th) marked a clear top to the the last round of irrational market exuberance when there was no significant improvement in the Fed’s outlook despite the market having rallied 10% in the month leading up to it.
That’s all it takes to pop a bubble – the simple lack of additional air. Members would do well to review the comments of that day as we got a quick read on the Book, which backed up our generally toppy view of the market and we jumped right on POT $105 puts for $1.15 at 2:03 as I had been targeting them as the most ridiculously overpriced stock and my quick read from the Fed confirmed it. POT fell from $117.88 that day to $92.72 on expiration day and bottomed out at $82 on July 13th. This is the way to play the Beige Book, you need to have a premise that is either confirmed or denied by the facts and you can make a play accordingly but you can’t simply REACT to the information, it can quickly be too late by the time you figure out what to do. Having a plan and alternatives based on various outcomes allows you to take advantage of market data as it comes out. That’s why we get so excited when we get our Beige Book!
BBook days are often market movers. This year’s Books came out Jan 14th (down 250), March 4th (up 100 ahead of huge drop) and April 15th (up 100) and June 10th where we went down 130, up 100 and finished the day back down just 24 points. Going back to my June 10th post, I see a lot of similarities, including the China bubble – which I also said was overdone at that time ahead of a 2,000-point pullback that began on the 12th. Oil was $71.50 that morning and it’s "just" $65.50 now and that’s a ray of sunshine if it heads lower. That was also the day I called for a class action suit against GS for their blatant manipulation of the energy markets – something I still have not found a law firm brave enough to take on!
I sent…
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Thrill-Ride Thursday, Finally Some Earnings!
by Phil - July 9th, 2009 7:24 am
Wheee, what a day yesterday!
Of course we hit it out of the ballpark with our ICE puts as that stock melted so fast it turned to vapors (or at least the calls did!). Fortunately, we had the puts and the Aug $95 puts I mentioned in the morning post, that we had taken at $6.20 on Tuesday, opened at $8.50 and ran up to $14.35 (up 131%) at the day’s end – all without a significant pullback to stop us out. Since we LOVE to go back to a well that’s paying off, we jumped on the Aug $90 puts for $3 as our first trade of the day at 9:39 and those finished the day at $7.35 (up 145%), not bad for our 3rd play on the same stock in 48 hours!
The best thing about having 100%+ put side winners in a downturn is it gives us free reign to speculate on the upside. Since we had a bottomish view of the downturn yesterday, we were able to use the cushion provided by the gains on ICE (as well as our longer-term DIA and USO short positions) to establish a bunch of speculative upside positions on stocks we thought were bottoming. The key to this strategy is position sizing and portfolio management. If you invest, for example, $2,000 per position and are willing to take 20% losses as a stop-out, then having a 100% winner on ICE (and we had 3!) allows you to take 5 bullish position as the total risk on $10,000 is the $2,000 you gained on the bear side. We don’t just mindlessly flip-flop of course. In fact, it’s been more than a month since we picked up bullish positions for more than a quick trade and we’re not SURE these are going to work but, since we had the winning put plays, it’s a good place to make a stand – dipping our toes in the bullish waters once again.
I mentioned our brand-new $5,000 Portfolio yesterday and our first play was a net .71 spread on AA where we bought the $7.50 calls for $1.75 and sold the $9 calls for $1.04. On yesterday’s dip, we had the opportunity to take out the $9 calls for .70, which was a .35 profit and left us with the naked $7.50 calls at net $1.40, with a break-even at $8.90. We tried to sell them for $2.10 at…
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Friday – The Good, the Bad and the GDP
by Phil - May 29th, 2009 7:03 am
Clearly there are people who will do anything for money.
In the classic movie, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," the characters all lie, cheat, steal and kill as they chase after a chache of government gold. They all kill, they all try to kill each other and the only character trait they all share is they will all do anything for money. We are lucky enough to have a modern version of that, with our own government supplying GOLDman Sachs and other bad market manipulators with TARP money, which they are using to, not to lend money to the good citizens of the US but rather to prop up the commodities market, stealing Billions of dollars from the very people they claimed they were going to help.
Since the November bail-out, consumer lending had gone down, home foreclosures have gone up, unemployment has gone up, housing has gone down yet the CRB has gone up 25%, led by oil, which is up 88% at $66 this morning. $66 oil is a noose around the neck of this economy as the it was cheaper oil that helped us begin to recover as it stayed around $40 from November through the beginning of March. On a per barrel basis alone, that was $500M a day LESS than we are paying now but, despite the fact that oil is still 54% in price from this time last year, gasoline has gone up so fast that it’s only down 23% from the prices that knocked the wheels out from our economy. Including refined products, that extra $26 a barrel is costing US consumers $1Bn a day, $365Bn a year or 1/2 of the TARP money going straight out of our economy and back to the countries that fund terrorism through the very ugly hands of GS (who are partners in ICE) and other TARP recipients who have funded and coordinated this commodity "rally," screwing the American people over with our own tax dollars.
Aside from the very obvious upgrades by the TARP-sponsored Financial houses of anything and everything that even smells like oil and the GE-sponsored 24/7 pump-fest on CNBC, we now have Goldman Sachs this morning telling the sheeple specifically to: "sell Petrobras October $34 put options for $1.95 because a U.S. economic recovery and lower petrochemical supplies will limit declines in the price of oil." What Goldman does not mention is…
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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
(