Wild Weekly Wrap-Up, Topping or Popping?
by Phil - November 14th, 2009 12:02 pm
This was an annoying week for bulls and bears alike.
We had a very exciting day on Monday, topping out at 10,248 but I didn’t like the way we got there (low-volume, commodity rally, as noted in David Fry’s chart) and, when pressed for a prediction on TV that evening, I had to say that I felt that we were more likely to be down by Thanksgiving than up with a possible Santa Claus bounce into Christmas. What we did get for the remainder of the week was very choppy action on even lower volume.
I had mentioned in last week’s "Wrong-Way Weekly Wrap-Up" that we were partying like it’s 1999 as we broke through Dow 10,000 and S&P 1,080, despite rapidly deteriorating fundamentals. Stocks are being bought because they are going up in price (much like commodities), not because there is any actual demand for them and that is very clear from the rapidly declining index volume as we run back into resistance at S&P 1,100.
Since early September our upside targets for the indexes have been: Dow 10,087, S&P 1,096, Nasdaq 2,173, NYSE 7,204 and Russell 623 and nothing has happened to change our fundamental outlook for the better so the closer we get to those levels, the LESS comfortable we are taking bullish positions. In fact, yesterday as we got our mid-day spike to 10,300, I told members that it was sorely tempting to just cash out all bullish positions and take 20% of the portfolio 100% bearish with a 10% stop. Rather than mess around with a mix of positions, going fully bearish can allow for some spectacular gains if we crash and stopping out with a 50% loss would suck - but a breakout like that, well above Dow 11,000 and S&P 1,200 would certainly give us reason to be more bullish.
As I concluded last week: "We’re generally not happy until we see Russell 600 and the Dow Transports over 4,000 (now 3,852) and we took a 55% bearish stance into the weekend because we’ll feel a lot less silly being burned by a move up than we would if we weren’t bearish enough for a move down. It would be nice to be able to make more of a commitment but the bulls clearly have the bears cowering in fear so we’ll just patiently wait and see how far they can play things out." Not much has changed since then and we are still waiting to confirm…
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Will “THEY” Hold It Wednesday - Veteran Scammers on the Loose!
by Phil - November 11th, 2009 7:57 am
We are off to the races today!
Too bad I’m going to miss this, I’m away for the day but have fun on what is probably going to be the lowest-volume day since our top in mid-October. Let’s call this a bonus rally as market pushers take advantage of the low, Veteran’s Day volume and lack of substantive news to goose us over our 5% levels, which will now give us some critical bullish lines to hold.
Yesterday I said we would be looking for retraces before breaking higher and clearly we are not getting them as the market is up almost a full point in pre-market trading as the Dollar falls below 90 Yen and now a full $1.50 is needed to buy a Euro, up from $1.25 (20%) in March. Does it bother you that your bank account has lost 20% of it’s buying power compared to the rest of the civilized World in just 8 months? Does it bother you that your wages (if you are one of the 89% that are not already unemployed) have lost 20% of their buying power? If you are the average American citizen - Not at all! No one seems to care and it’s too complicated for the MSM to explain because it requires math.
We are still too bearish (55%) for a move over our range tops as I underestimated the ability of the pumpers to stir enough excitement on low volume to get us over the 5% lines we discussed in yesterday’s post (Dow 10,206, S&P 1,086, Nas 2,152, NYSE 7,087 and Russell 588) let alone the 25% upside levels we targeted in Monday’s post (Dow 10,250, S&P 1,100, Nasdaq 2,187, NYSE 7,000 and Russell 600) - which is where we planned on getting more bullish. Will we hold it? That’s the question of the day and, even if we do hold it today on low volume - it won’t matter until we get a proper test. As you can see from Mojo’s S&P chart, we are now into our bonus round of upward movement that may last until next Wednesday but, more likely than not, 1,100 is a great shorting opportunity on the S&P this morning.
I wrote an article earlier about the Global Oil Scam and the same techniques that are used to manipulate the energy markets are in play today. We are hearing a ton of analyst upgrades this morning, including poppa Goldman telling the sheeple that gold can go up…
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Stock Market Crash - Year One in Review - The Gathering Storm
by Phil - September 7th, 2009 7:13 am
Happy anniversary market crash!
One year ago, in September, the market started falling in earnest. A lot of people were caught by surprise by that drop as many thought we had just had a major correction and the worst was over. We had bounced off 10,800 on July 14th and had made it all the way back to touch 12,000 on August 14th but that day I warned my members in the morning post:
We’re really through the looking glass when you see investors stampede right back into oil and other commodity stocks at the first sign of a bounce off a 20% drop. I guess they’ve never seen a pullback off 20% before so it makes sense that Cramer would hit the BUYBUYBUY button on anything that smells like crude. I wish I had access to the tapes of all these same idiots telling you to BUYBUYBUY housing stocks and mortgage companies when they made their first bounce on the way to 80% losses.
It’s not just oil that is expensive, now it has to compete for consumer dollars with food and airline fares and tobacco prices and consumer goods etc. Oil was able to bubble up because people were enjoying a robust economy and it was the ONLY thing that was rising out of control. Metals began to follow it as that didn’t affect the average person but then companies had to start passing on the increased costs and the banks stopped lending money and the consumers were forced to stop using their home’s equity (if there was any left) like a piggy bank and *poof,* suddenly there isn’t enough money for oil. This isn’t going to change because there’ s a hurricane or a shut down pipeline or anything else.
Oil was trading at a still ridiculous $115 a barrel that day, down from $147 on July 1st but still choking the life out of the economy. We were very bearish on oil and natural gas ($14 at the time) as the fundamentals simply didn’t support the price of oil at $115 as much as they didn’t support $147 a month earlier. I had gone negative on oil too early though, as we thought $120 was surely the top back in May. Sometimes fundamentals can get you too ahead of the market. Our man Ben was between a rock and a hard place as he HAD to do something to bring down oil prices before the entire economy came to a screaming…
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Weakening Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - August 15th, 2009 8:27 am
What was that?
Did we just finish lower on Friday than Monday? We almost forgot such a thing can happen in Obama’s magic market-land but here we are with a week in which the stock market had not one, not two but three (3) red days out of 5. You have to go all the way back to the week of June 22, when the market was finishing a 600-pont down leg from June 15th, to see so much blood on Wall Street. I have, for a month, been drawing parrallels betwen this market top and the market top that ended on June 12th and it’s all about next week as options expire and things begin to get very interesting.
As you can see from David Fry’s chart on the right, we hit the very tippy top of our expected range on the Qs and then could not close the deal above our $40 line. It didn’t seem too much too ask - just a teeny, tiny little breakout and we would have been happy to buy some GOOG and get back into SPWRA and find some other 4-letter stocks to play with, even some semiconductors if the SOX had finally taken out our 308 mark but nooooooooooooo - the Nasdaq couldn’t hold 2,000, let alone our 2,017 target, which they teased us with two weeks ago but never came back to.
And don’t even get me started on yesterday’s close. For those of you who have ever doubted the power of the stick, David and I say HA!, as there has never been a more bogus end to a trading session than the despicable display of market manipulation that went on yesterday, just before the close. The only good thing I have to say about this very sad state of unregulated market affairs is that at least we called it practically to the penny and played it perfectly because, as I often say to members: "We don’t care IF the markets are rigged as long as we know HOW they are rigged so we can place our bets accordingly."
As shamefully despicable as these "stick saves" are at least they fall into a pattern that we have learned to recognize and profit from in Member Chat. I was, of course, very bearish in the morning post as we expected a minimum 1.25% correction (1.27 on the SPY chart) by Monday, on the way to a 3% dip, minimum, so we can properly let some…
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Dave’s Daily
by Chart School - August 13th, 2009 8:28 pm
MARKET COMMENT
Dave Fry’s ETF Digest, August 13, 2009
Today’s action is more impressive than yesterday’s given the stream of “worse than expected” news from retail sales and jobless claims. Those predicting the recession’s end evidently shrugged all this off as old news. The bulls have the momentum. They believe the Fed and powers that be will do anything and everything to reflate asset prices. That should end the discussion right there.
Volume backed off again to the lower levels being recorded previously. Breadth was positive and the rally still lives thanks to financial and material sectors.
Entire Market Comment here >>>
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Thank Jobs It’s Friday
by Phil - August 7th, 2009 8:23 am
Well, yesterday was fun!
As we expected, the massive pre-market pump job failed once again to push our breakout levels and that led to 6 of our 7 day trades coming out winners in Member Chat. We’re still waiting on the 7th, our MOS puts that were meant to be a weekend hold anyway so not really a day-trade but it was lots of fun after sitting mainly on the sidelines this week waiting for a good opportunity to jump in. Our plan from the morning post to buy out our DIA putters worked perfectly as well and we even went bullish on the DIA’s into yesterday’s stick save so we’re not even going to complain about that nonsense today!
It will take more than a stick to save the markets today if the jobs report is a disappointment. GS, BCS and JPM have all lowered their loss predictions from around 370,000 lost jobs to 250-275,000 job losses and DB has gone completely off the wall with a prediction of just 150,000 losses! As the US is gearing up for the 2010 census and as no one understands the mystical "seasonal adjustment" game and as GS pulls all the strings in government, we are hard-pressed to dismiss this seemingly ridiculous prediction. What do the big 3 market manipuluators have to gain by raising expectations so high just ahead of the actual numbers? Perhaps they have already finished their selling and have now fipped negative, looking to initiate a massive sell-off as jobs disappoint? Or, perhaps, they are brilliant analysts who are well ahead of a number that will, finally, give us our long-awaited break out.
![[Total workers on nonfarm payrolls]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MI-AY121_AOT_NS_20090806184812.gif)
If the figures do surprise, it won’t be in a statistically significant way. A payroll decline of 450,000, which would mortify Wall Street, would mean a 0.3% decline in total payrolls. A market-friendlier decline of 150,000, on the other hand, would represent a 0.1% decline. Percentage-wise, the difference is a crapshoot. At some point, jobs data should improve meaningfully. The four-week moving average of new jobless claims is down 10% from late June. That translates into about 200,000 fewer job cuts a month, estimates High Frequency Economics economist Ian Shepherdson. "The risk of a substantial upward surprise on payrolls over the next few months has risen," Deutsche Bank economist Joseph LaVorgna wrote recently.
China lost a little faith this morning as the Hang Seng fell right to the 2.5% rule (down 523…
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Full Thrust Thursday - GS, China and the EU Pump It Up!
by Phil - August 6th, 2009 8:27 am
Sorry bulls but, as the great Phil Collins said:
Well it feels like something you want so bad
And then you think you’ve got it, but it’s somethin’ you already had
And you can feel it all around you, but it’s somethin’ you just can’t touch, uh huh huh
And I can feel it coming at me
Yes I can feel it coming at meAaw, did I miss again?
I think I missed again, uh huh
Very appropriately for this market, in the video, Mr. Collins is a one man air band - he pretends to be playing with instruments but THERE’S NOTHING THERE. This is just like our markets, which are being held up by the air spouting out of the MSM, GS and their government puppets while, in reality, the recovery is something you (the people) "just can’t touch, uh huh huh."
We thought we had all our breakout levels: Dow 9,297, S&P 1,000, NYSE 6,438, Russell 562 and SOX 308 but the Nasdaq - JUST the Nasdaq, could not close the deal at 2,017. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post (when I was the only analyst in America brave enough to title an article at 8:23 am, with the futures on fire: "Will We Break Out Wednesday? No."), 40 on the QQQQs was the key level to watch and we did open at 40.13 on the Qs but all that ended up being was a fantastic short play as they dropped like a rock to 39.50. In fact, the entire rally was in serious trouble yesterday but was gallantly saved by our friends at Goldman Sachs, who initiated the stick save with a slap shot at the bears as they RAISED their outlook for the GDP in the second half of 2009 by 200%, from 1% to 3% GDP. As David Fry said in his column last night:
Today’s disappointing employment report from ADP was the dose of cold water an overbought market needed to sell-off. But then the cavalry came to the rescue at just the right moment with Goldman’s call upgrading economic growth estimates. The effect was a ragged rally reducing more selling. There’s a concerted effort in officialdom and with their Wall Street brethren to lift markets they’ll use whatever new rules and tools are needed to get things going. Making you feel good makes them money and reelects incumbents. With regard to the former is this eyebrow raising Bloomberg story about how GS is making $100M per day trading. Yep,…
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Will We Break Out Wednesday? No.
by Phil - August 5th, 2009 8:23 am
So close but yet so far!
As you can see from David Fry’s chart of the QQQQ’s, the Nasdaq is looking to boldly go where no index has gone since last October, back through the September highs! If you look at the chart pattern, we have a nice "W" bottom already in and a breakout here at 40 on the Qs could mean we’re heading back to where the drop began - way up at 47.5. That’s a neat 20% gain from here and that would give us Dow 11,160, S&P 1,200, Nas 2,400, NYSE 7,800 and Russell 700.
What? Do you think that sounds like a bit much? Well, if you question the resulting trend of a breakout then perhaps you should get ahead of the curve and question the breakout in the first place…
Does it strike you as strange that a breakout here and a move up to the top of that "W" would put stocks back to where they were valued last June, when the average company earned twice as much on 35% more revenues? Do you really consider MRO a value because they beat expectations of .53 by earning .58, "just" 39% below last Q2. MGM is down 21%, TAP down 54%, RRI down 61%, APC down 37%, CTX down 49%, FST - 64%, LF -27%, PHM - 57%, VMC -29%, ADM - 24%…. Well you can look them up yourself here and I’m not saying there aren’t winners in this market, but they are few and far between yet the rally is indiscriminate - as if the whole market is spectacularly undervalued.
While I have long been in the camp of those saying "The economy is not that bad," I do have to, at this juncture, point out that the economy is not THAT good either. Keep this in mind when you are buying stocks. How far away are we from your company earning what it earned last year? What is your expected growth rate. Keep in mind that last June, your company had positive guidance and was projecting revenues and earnings 10-20% higher than that by 2010 and all we are saying here is how long will it take your company to get back to what it was earning in 2008? If you say 2 years - then look at the price of your stock in 2006 - THAT is probably a fair value for your stock!
XOM, for example, made $8.47 per share last year but made just $1…
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Thrilling Thursday Morning
by Phil - July 30th, 2009 8:21 am
This is starting to get funny.
The Beige Book was certainly no great shakes yesterday but we got our usual afternoon "stick save," with the indexes gaining 1% between 1:30 and the close to bring us to barely negative finish. By the time Asia opened, another half point had been added to the US futures and that allowed China to bounce back and we made yet another half point on Europe’s open around 3am. So here we are at 7:30, with our futures up almost a full point on no particular good news.
Of course, this is the same pattern we got in the days following the last Beige Book - a blow-off top into the cliff we fell off on the following Monday and we’ll have to see what we get this time. This is why I said in yesterday’s morning post: "We’re in "take the money and run" mode on our puts as we’ll be happy with a quick dip and a quick profit as we test our lower levels." You can’t press your luck in this market - especially if you are a bear! I screwed up because I thought the GDP was today but it’s not until tomorrow and that makes a very big difference and explains why the pumpers were able to come out in such force yesterday, as they already think they have the jobs nuber "in the bag."
I’m starting to think the GDP may be in the bag too as we have to pin this new round of market exuberance on our President, who managed to get himself quoted all over the planet saying "the Recession is Over." Now, what he actually said, in the proper context was:
Now, I don’t know if any of you noticed it. Maybe they’re selling Newsweeks by the check-out stand, but the latest cover of Newsweek says, quote, "The Recession is Over." Now, I bet you found this news a little startling. I know I did, because obviously people are going through a tough time all across the country.
This is a really good tactic for Obama to take. He gets to be quoted (like Nouriel Roubini last week) completely out of context but, if anyone comes back to question his wisdom later he can easily point to his statement and say "that’s not what I said at all." Unlike Roubini, don’t expect Obama to immediately demand for the MSM to clear up…
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Wild Weekly Wrap-Up
by Phil - May 31st, 2009 8:29 am
What a wild week that was!
We got such a good sell-off last Friday that we went 1/2 covered into the weekend on our DIA puts (a little bearish) but we had already cleaned up on quick short plays on the Dow and USO and we were very much in cash but still making bullish plays at the time. I did a 3-part series on dividend-paying stocks over the weekend, elaborating on the 21 dividend payers we picked that Tuesday along with our $104,340 Portfolio (used to be $100,000) so we had no shortage of bullish ideas but it didn’t take us long this week to turn pretty bearish.
Last Friday morning (22nd), ahead of the holiday weekend, with the Dow at 8,323, I sent out an early alert to members saying: "I’d go long on the Dow here but frankly I’m just not in the mood today. Still full covered on long DIA puts and still in the DDMs but just hanging out and watching today since you can’t take the action seriously anyway." Our plays that day ran the gamut: We sold BAC July $10 puts for $1 (now .66), took a TBT spread that has been a wild ride but right back where we started and an ICE bull call spread ($90/$100, selling $90 puts $2.33, now .57) that is right on track. All that came before 11:33 on Friday, where I rightly called a top at 8,342. We made nice profits on DIA puts and took an EXM and T hedges that are doing well. One of our best plays on Friday was the USO $32 puts at .80 we took into the weekend, those cashed out Monday morning at $1.05 (up 44%) - those USO trades were followed through in detail in our Members Only post: "Stupid Options Tricks - The Salvage Play."
As I mentioned, we have been mainly in cash for over 2 weeks now so mainly we’re just taking small opportunities and having fun while we wait for the market to break one way or the other. One article I wrote over the holiday weekend was a timely update to "How To Vacation-Proof Your Portfolio," something anyone not in cash needs to take under strong advisement and DO NOT miss the very generous free video lesson from Sage’s Market Tamers that is on that post. Our of 21 dividend plays we had discussed on Tuesday, the 19th, I went with LYG, who flatlined for the week, TNK, who…
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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
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