Put Player Positions for a Pullback in Lorillard Shares
by Andrew Wilkinson - March 7th, 2011 4:43 pm
Today’s tickers: LO, HMA, AMR & USO
LO - Lorillard Inc. – A three-legged spread involving April contract put options on the cigarette manufacturer appears to be the work of an investor positioning for the price of the underlying stock to slip ahead of expiration. Shares in Lorillard, the maker of Newport cigarettes, the number one menthol brand, are currently up 0.33% to stand at $78.00 as of 12:50pm. The stock rallied as much as 5.7% one week ago to trade as high as $81.18 after the FDA said the risk of lung cancer for smokers of menthol cigarettes does not differ significantly from that of non-menthol cigarettes. But, last week’s sharp run up in LO’s shares was fairly short-lived given other portions of the FDA report that were not quite as positive for big tobacco. One trader expecting Lorillard’s shares to fall in the near-term seems to have established a bearish butterfly spread. The investor picked up 5,000 puts at the April $75 strike for a premium of $4.40 each, sold 10,000 puts at the April $65 strike for a premium of $1.50 apiece, and purchased 5,000 puts at the April $55 strike for a premium of $0.35 a-pop. Net premium paid to initiate the put ‘fly amounts to $1.75 per contract. The trader profits if LO’s shares decline 6.1% from the current price of $78.00 to breach the effective breakeven point at $73.25 by April expiration. Maximum potential profits of $8.25 per contract pad the investor’s wallet in the event that shares plummet 16.7% to settle at $65.00 at expiration. Options implied volatility on the cigarette-stock is up 3.4% at 54.92% just after 1:00pm in New York.
HMA - Health Management Associates, Inc. – Shares in the health care services provider are down 1.4% in early afternoon trade to…
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Warren Buffett’s Secret to Making 100% a Year
by Phil - February 26th, 2011 10:51 am
I love the Berkshire Hathaway annual report!
Especially Warren Buffett’s letter to shareholders. The report gives us a great view of the overall economy from a man who has his finger in every pot and his letter to investors gives us a very good insight as to how things are going in the various sectors his operations cover. Most importantly, what I have learned in my own 40 years or reading Mr. Buffett’s reports (my Grandfather was a shareholder) is what should shape any long-term investing strategy: Patience and performance.
I often preach to members the joys of letting gains compound and our $25,000-$100,000 Portfolio, which is currently at $27,531 (up 10%) after 4 weeks, is an exercise in how to quickly compound small gains over the course of a year. Primarily, we try to follow Warren Buffett’s Number One Rule of Investing, which is: Don’t Lose Money. Buffett’s Rule #2 is: See Rule #1 and like us, it’s not that nothing Warren Buffett ever buys loses money – it’s just that he doesn’t ever buy things he isn’t willing to stick with UNTIL they make money. Sure we take a few losses along the road but, by being selective in our entries, we don’t discard stocks that we carefully selected just because the market temporarily disagrees with our valuations.
In our $25,000 Portfolio, it’s only been a month so we’ve only closed our winners so far and they were SPWRA with a 100% gain (these are option trades), INTC with a 40% gain, NFLX with a 42% gain, EDZ with a 75% gain, XLF with a 15% gain, VIX with a 50% gain, USO with a 53% gain and XLE with a 5% gain. In 19 trading day we have made 28 virtual portfolio moves (counting each leg) and, as I said, netted a 10% return to date. Interestingly, we’ve been playing it very cautious as we still have over $18,000 of virtual cash on the sidelines, hoping for a sign to get a little more aggressive next week.
How, you may wonder, are we going to get to $100,000 by December with just $27,531 in February? THAT is the lesson Warren Buffett has to give us and that lesson is COMPOUNDING RETURNS! Since 1965, Berkshire Hathaway has returned an overall gain of 490,409% to it’s shareholders. $10,000 handed to Mr. Buffett…
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Fuggedaboutit Friday – Dip? I Didn’t See No Dip?
by Phil - February 25th, 2011 7:38 am
Dip Buyers of the World unite! You have nothing to lose but your 401Ks…
Ah, could there be a more thorough perversion of Marxist ideals than not only confiscating a portion of the workers’ wages but using that money to actually pay for the means of production in exchange for infinitesimal, powerless shares of ownership? It’s BRILLIANT but that’s the stock market, we had that back in 1848 when Marx penned his little Manifesto but what we didn’t have – what should really have old Karl rolling over in his grave today – is union busting. And it’s Union Busting by the Government no less!
While the hunt continues for runaway Democrats, state Senator, Robert Jauch, a longtime Wisconsin lawmaker, said Thursday that – despite rumors that some of his colleagues had returned to the state, "everybody is outside of Wisconsin . . . all of us." Jauch criticized what he called the "police state mentality" of Republicans in the Capitol and took issue with Walker’s assertions that Democrats who had fled the state were abandoning their duties. "I’m doing more from the Land of Lincoln to communicate with citizens in my district than he is," Jauch said, adding that the Senate Democrats talk regularly and are "trying to reach out through back channels to see what the solution could be. This governor has dug himself in – that’s very clear."
While the Capitalist tools at Forbes are already cracking the Cristal and celebrating the demise of unions, it is more likely that (like many hair-brained Republican schemes) – defeat will be snatched from the jaws of victory because, even if Walker’s Republicans don’t back down (and they will), they have already reignited the National Labor Movement in much the same way that 8 years of George Bush polarized the usually disorganized Democratic opposition and led to a rout in 2008. This is not about politics though, this is about investing and who will control the country in 2012 is indeed something to consider.
Another thing to consider is, if they do take away collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin – the next Global city you see erupting into riots may be the one by your house. That’s how pissed off the Democrats are now and you’d know this if you ever spoke to one or read one of their "liberal" publications, like the…
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Technical Thursday – The Needle and the Damage Done
by Phil - February 24th, 2011 6:33 am
I’ve seen the needle
and the damage done
A little part of it in everyone
But every junkie’s
like a settin’ sun. - Neil Young
Come on Bennie, give us another hit!
We’re hurting man, we need the good stuff. The markets love to get high and, just when we thought the trip was never going to end – we crash hard! Big Ben and his Central Banking buddies fed our commodity addiction with a flow of easy money and the speculators got so hooked that they have now overdosed and the price of commodities is now killing the host (the Global Economy).
Gee, who could have ever seen that coming?
Oh yeah, right, it was me. Well, very good then… I guess. There’s nothing like a good correction to make some fast money. In yesterday’s post (and Tuesday’s) I mentioned our TZA and EDZ hedges and thank goodness we dumped XLE as they flew back to $78 on the oil madness (more on that later). In yesterday morning’s Alert to Members we added IWM $83 puts at $3 and they finished the day at $3.93 (up 31%) but we were done with them earlier as we flipped bullish when they pulled back to $3.75 and grabbed the IWM weekly $80 calls at 1:03 at .66 and we flipped out of those at .93 (up 40%) for a nice, quick gain.
We also lost .20 on an SSO trade, trying to catch one more bear wave that didn’t come but, on the whole – Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee! This is the best ride EVER!!! We love a volatile market, especially when it gooses the VIX (something we were also long on) as that gives us better and better prices for the options we sell to suckers who think they are smarter than the market. Yes, we buy them too – but look how fast we dump them. Options are great for momentum trading and for controlled leverage but the REAL MONEY is made BEING THE HOUSE – not the gambler and what we really love to do is SELL options, not buy them.
When the VIX is low, selling options is much less fun but, when the VIX goes up, so does the amount of money people will pay us…
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TGIF – Holding that 100% Line Would Be Nice
by Phil - February 18th, 2011 8:16 am
Fastest Double EVER!
That’s the verdict as the S&P 500 adds 666.79 points in 23 months, the fastest gain since the index was founded in 1957. "The scale of this rally is just enormous," said New York money manager Barry Ritholtz. He calls it the most intense rally since the Depression. Even during the go-go 1990s, the S&P typically took around three years to double. For instance, it first cleared 1,000 on Feb. 28, 1998 — 35 months after its first move above 500 on March 24, 1995.
Ritholtz says the average stock market bounce following a crash is 70% or so, and is stretched over a longer period. But of course, in previous cases the Fed wasn’t buying up half a year’s worth of Treasury issuance and holding short-term interest rates near zero.
"This one is unique," said Ritholtz. "Obviously the Fed is the key difference. We have never seen them throw this much liquidity into the mix." Accordingly, most market observers are now tapping their feet waiting for the inevitable pullback. The average correction following a postcrash bounce is 25%, Ritholtz said. According to Fortune: "There are all sorts of reasons to expect the momentum to turn against stocks after their unprecedented gains. They range from rising bond yields and stretched stock valuations to political unrest in the Middle East and another iteration of the ongoing debt crisis in Europe."
Of course, as Fortune should know, IT JUST DOESN’T MATTER what’s going on in the World as long as B-B-B-Bennie and the Fed continue to prime the pumps at the IBanks and last week, the Fed set a new record as well by expanding their balance sheet to $2,492,000,000,000 after adding $23Bn of US Government Securities.
Now I wouldn’t want to force you to draw any conclusions that may link those two items. After all, Doctor Bernanke himself says that the Fed’s actions have nothing to do with either inflation in the commodity pits or in the equity markets. They are merely providing ample liquidity to their Member banks who, in turn, lever that liquidity 10:1 and spend it in the same wise fashion they always have – like the 10s of Billions of Dollars of "toxic" securities they have been splurging on again, once again hoping to make a quick buck (and get a big bonus) before the bottom drops out – again.…
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Which Way Wednesday – 1,333 or Bust!
by Phil - February 16th, 2011 8:38 am
1,333.
That’s the number Art Cashin is looking for on the S&P as our breakout line. I’ve been using 1,332 but Art is right as the bottom on the S&P in March, 2009 was 666.79 so, tecnically, 1,333.58 is a 100% gain on the S&P off that low, not 1,332, which was my lazy rounding off 666. “Everyone’s got this psychological area of 1,333 [on the S&P 500]—they want to prove that we can double where we were from the panic lows,” Cashin told CNBC. “So later in the week, the bulls are going to circle the wagons and take another shot at it and that will tell us whether it’s a rest and recoup or not.”
Well, that pretty much sums things up. Have a good day everybody…
We had a good day yesterday with our bullish positions really starting to fly and our $25,000 Portfolio is up to a virtual cash position of $26,240 in day 12 with a fairly even mix of winners and losers in our still too-bearish mixture. The mixture on the Nasdaq yesterday was also bearish and you wouldn’t know it from their down 5-points finish (0.17%), but declining volume yesterday was 1.35Bn vs. just 637M of advance.
Fortunately (by some amazing coincidence that could not possibly have anything to do with IBanks masking their selling by pumping the top of the Nas while selling the rest), this 2:1 bearishness in volume did not scare off the after-hours crowd, who immediately popped the Nasdaq futures from 2,382 to 2,391, right back to Monday’s highs as if 2 days of selling never happened.
The Dow is just as excited with 80 points worth of gains since 3:30 yesterday and the S&P is, of course, right up on their 100% line, as are the Transports (see Dave Fry’s chart), which we’ll be watching as they test the 95 mark on IYT. I had mentioned to Members in Chat yesterday that the Transports were the key to breaking the S&P over the line and we discussed FDX’s amazing action in yesterday’s post that seemed like a Gang of 12 effort to manipulate the Transports ahead of Cashin’s predicted run at 1,333 – NO MATTER WHAT!
We agreed and we were so bullish on yesterday’s dip that we even bought NFLX! Now that is bullish! Just a short-term in and out but you know…
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PSW Wrap-Up Show for the Week
by Phil - February 12th, 2011 12:57 pm
We have a new episode of The Wrap-Up Show.
This time, it’s a quick review of the week’s activity:
Also, as we have a ton of Government Data that will be driving the markets next week, let’s review "How the US Government Manipulates Inflation Data" – just so we remember not to take it all too seriously.
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Bulls Bulk Up on US Oil Fund Call Options
by Andrew Wilkinson - January 28th, 2011 4:28 pm
Today’s tickers: USO, MWW, AMCC & CLDX
USO - United States Oil Fund, LP – Crude oil rose Friday with traders finding more than a few excuses to support chasing the United States Oil Fund higher by as much as 4.75% to an intraday high of $37.64. The exchange traded security is meant to broadly track the price of oil and had fallen sharply at the outset of the week after OPEC’s leading producer, Saudi Arabia hinted strongly that it would accommodate rising demand with an increase in supply. Since then investors drove crude oil prices down almost $7 per barrel towards $85 leading some to possibly think that the decline might leave its price bank in the middle of a price range that Saudi and other cartel members would be content with. Friday’s third-quarter GDP report was restrained by inventories, without which the economy might have grown at a breakneck 7.1% pace for the fastest since 1984. Rising oil prices were also inspired by further unrest in the Middle East with headlines over the house arrest of an Egyptian government opponent and a clampdown on domestic Internet usage encouraging call option buying on the USO. Bullish players are binging on call options across several expiries today to support their view that USO shares will continue to rally. In options expiring next week, a whopping 20,500 calls changed hands at the February $38 strike on open interest of just 2,424 contracts. More than 15,150 of the calls were purchased for an average premium of $0.22 apiece. Similar buying patterns were seen in March contract calls. Oil-optimists even looked up to the April $44 strike to take ownership of some 2,100 calls for an average premium of $0.18 a-pop. More than 170,000 options have traded on the USO thus far today and the massive upswing in demand for the contracts helped lift the fund’s overall reading of options implied volatility 12.7% to 29.88% by 12:20pm in New York. Trading in USO calls is currently outpacing that of puts by roughly 5.3 contracts to 1.…
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Fickle Friday’s Jobs Report
by Phil - January 7th, 2011 8:29 am
I don’t know what the Jobs will be but I’m betting on disappointment.
I had said to Members yesterday that I liked the Jan QQQQ $56 puts at .77 and the Weekly (next week, not today) QQQQ $56 puts at .53 as good ways to play a jobs miss. My comment in Member Chat was that I felt the ADP figures pushed expectations up significantly higher and now we would be much more likely to disappoint with almost any number short of 250,000 jobs added.
The key is the seasonal adjustments but there was already some very disturbing jobs numbers in the Gallup Poll, which came out last night and showed unemployment RISING from 9.3 to 9.6% in December and, even worse, the number of Underemployed workers shot up from 18.5 to 19%, just 0.5% lower than we were in January of last year.
Gallups Job Creation index showed no improvement in December but it is holding +10, which is the best net level we’ve had since October of 2008. So we have ADP going one way, yesterday’s unemployment numbers were flat and Gallup says things are getting worse. 8:30 will be very interesting indeed.
While we wait for the number, let’s take a look at last week’s post to see how things are tracking. Monday morning I mentioned we liked FCX short at $120 (a trade that was reiterated Tuesday morning) as we felt the run in copper was overdone. It was a rough week but FCX is down at $116 now so we’re on track at the moment of course we took a spread in chat, which was the Feb $119/110 bear put spread at $3.60, selling the Jan $120 calls for $3.60. That spread is now $4.60 and the calls have dropped to $2.30 for a nice net $2.30 gain already.
I said that $90 was already ridiculous for oil and we shouldn’t go any higher. We picked up the USO Feb $40 puts on Tuesday morning in Member Chat at $2.10 and those are now $3.70 so a nice $1.60 gain there, which is about the same as if we had just shorted the stock as it dropped from $39 that morning to $37.68 now. That’s where puts are very useful, you don’t have to commit as much as a short on the stock, you limit…
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Thrilling Thursday – US Companies Create 1.4M Jobs! (Overseas)
by Phil - December 30th, 2010 8:28 am
US Corporations are hiring – they are just not hiring you!
The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, says American companies have created 1.4 million jobs overseas this year, compared with less than 1 million in the U.S. The additional 1.4 million jobs would have lowered the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.9 percent, says Robert Scott, the institute’s senior international economist. "There’s a huge difference between what is good for American companies versus what is good for the American economy," says Scott.
American jobs have been moving overseas for more than two decades. In recent years, though, those jobs have become more sophisticated — think semiconductors and software, not toys and clothes. And now many of the products being made overseas aren’t coming back to the United States. Demand has grown dramatically this year in emerging markets like India, China and Brazil. Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent often points out that a billion consumers will enter the middle class during the coming decade, mostly in Africa, China and India. He is aggressively targeting those markets. Of Coke’s 93,000 global employees, less than 13 percent were in the U.S. in 2009, down from 19 percent five years ago. (see my interview with Kent here).
We’re anticipating the usual 400,000 jobs lost for the week at 8:30 this morning and I sure didn’t see too many "Help Wanted" signs at the malls this year, or anywhere else now that I think about it. We also have the Chicago PMI at 9:45, Pending Home Sales at 10:00, Natural Gas Inventories at 10:30 followed by both Oil Inventories at 11 along with the Kansas City Fed’s Manufacturing Index. Later today (3pm) we get the very inflationary USDA Agriculture Prices where we can short FCOJ like this as the panic that drove prices up this week seems a bit overdone.
Of course, I’ve been saying the entire commodity rally is overdone as I don’t see how firing 1.4M Americans who made $35,000 and replacing them with 1.4M Chinese workers who make $2,500 means the price of oil should go up. Only the fact that the US Government is going deeper and deeper into debt to help those 1.4M laid off Americans buy their next tank of gas is keeping demand level – without that support, buses would be MUCH more popular in the US, as they already are in China…
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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
(