Bulls Scoop Up Valero Energy Corp. Calls
by Andrew Wilkinson - February 16th, 2011 6:05 pm
Today’s tickers: VLO, MRVL, CHS & MU
VLO - Valero Energy Corp. – Traders flocked to the options playing field on Valero Energy Corp. this morning after the operator of refineries was raised to ‘Top Pick’ from ‘Sector Perform’ with a 12-month target share price of $35.00 at RBC Capital Markets. Shares in Valero are up 3.35% to stand at $29.40 just after 11:40am in New York. Earlier in the session the price of the underlying increased as much as 4.1% to $29.61, the highest Valero’s shares have traded since October of 2008. Near- as well as long-term bulls made their mark in VLO call options in the first half of the session. Investors expecting Valero to extend gains through expiration next month scooped up more than 2,300 calls at the March $31 strike for an average premium of $0.71 apiece. Call buyers at this strike stand prepared to make money should shares in the oil refiner rally another 7.1% over today’s high of $29.61 to surpass the average breakeven price of $31.71 by expiration day in March. Investors eyeing longer-term and more substantial gains in Valero’s shares purchased approximately 10,200 calls out at the January 2012 $35 strike for an average premium of $1.73 a-pop, on previously existing open interest of 3,126 contracts at that strike. Traders long the calls profit in the event that VLO’s shares jump 24.05% to exceed the breakeven at $36.73 within the next eleven months to expiration in 2012. Valero Energy Corp.’s shares last traded above $36.73 back in early July of 2008.
MRVL - Marvell Technology Group, Ltd. – Options strategists itching for a substantial near-term rally in chipmaker Marvell Technology Group are buying call spreads in the March contract this morning. Shares in the name are up slightly by 0.10% to stand at…
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Weekend Reading – Reviewing the Reviews
by Phil - January 1st, 2011 8:28 am
I am still trying to get more bullish.
I was thinking about writing something cute like I resolve to get more bullish but that would be wrong. I try, in my own humble way, to "get" the market right. That means I am not bullish or bearish but Truthish (to further botch Stephen Colbert’s use of the word) and, as Buddah says: "There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting." Confucious reminds us that there are three methods by which we may learn wisdom: "First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."
In that spirit, we will spend the day in reflection so that we are better able to start on that long road to the truth so that we will be better able to imitate the things that will work in the year to come while trying to avoid making mistakes that will give us bitter experiences.
This post is not about me – We had a fantastic year and I’ve already given some outlook for 2011 back on the 19th in that weekend’s "It’s Never too Early to Predict the Future" and our current position is short-term bearish in the Jan-April time-frame, looking for a pullback to at least 1,200 on the S&P and possibly back to 1,150.
After that, we are expecting a return to steady gains but without the irrational exuberance we’re currently experiencing. So no, I am not bearish – I simply think we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. Since we don’t know where the rally train will stop, we have our "Breakout Defense – 5,000% in 5 Trades or Less" from Dec 11th, which were a set of very bullish, highly levered plays where a little bet can pay off a lot if we simply hold our long-established breakout levels.
How much is "a lot"? Well my GE trade idea, for example, was to sell the 2013 $12.50 puts for $1.10 (net $1.15 in ordinary margin according to TOS) and to use that money to buy the 2012 $17.50/20 bull call spread for .95, which was a net .15 credit on a $2.50 spread that was on the money at the time. GE has gained about .75 since the 11th and…
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Monday Market Movement – Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy!!
by Phil - November 15th, 2010 7:40 am
The Fed is in all-out attack mode this week with $35Bn scheduled for release in the next 5 days. If that doesn’t goose the markets, then I think we are screwed because people, $35Bn is A LOT of money for a week. It’s $1.82Tn a year at that pace or 12% of our entire GDP being created by the Fed to give you the illusion that all is well with the markets. So say, thank you Chairman Bernanke, for treating us like children who would rather be lied to than facing reality and making necessary choices.
Speaking of necessary choices, I HIGHLY recommend looking at Barry Ritholtz’s "Fix It Yourself" deficit kit. Barry takes the more complex (but also good) NY Times article and presents the very excellent chart that shows us exactly what budget cap needs to be filled and what the available choices are to fill it. It’s a great way to think about the budget and also it makes you realize that 5 or 6 reasonable people sitting down with this chart at a table should be able to knock this thing out in a weekend if we were living in a rational world or perhaps one where an out-of-control Central Bank cooperated with a deceitful Treasury Department to maintain a status quo that clearly is not working for the American people.
QE2 is not about "fixing" the economy, it’s about FIXING the profits of the Primary Dealers (Gang of 12) who are estimated to reap a $50Bn benefit by simply acting as the conduits through which the Fed distributes our money as if they were the town Santa tossing candy off the back of a fire truck.
POMO spending might keep equities up and that is good for those of us who own them but what is it doing for the great unwashed and unemployed masses? Speaking of unemployed, did you know that 100,000 of Octobers 156,000 jobs created were not actual jobs but a bookkeeping entry as the government changed the "seasonal adjustment" it made to payroll numbers? Our friend, John Maudlin, explained the shenanigans over the weekend:
"According to John Williams at Shadow Government Statistics, the BLS’ fiddling with the figures via what he calls ‘seasonal-factor games’ actually created 200,000 phantom jobs last month. John cites such finagling as the
…
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Defending Your Portfolio With Dividends – Q4 (Members Only)
by Phil - October 23rd, 2010 7:55 am
In uncertain markets, dividends can give you a critical investing edge.
As you can see from the chart on the left, just mindlessly investing in dividend-paying stocks can give you more than a 2:1 annual advantage in your investments.
Of course, here at PSW, we teach the art of selling options premiums – something that turns virtually any stock into a "dividend" payer. For example, MSFT is only a small, 2% dividend-payer but a fairly solid cash-machine of a stock that we don’t feel is likely to go bankrupt overnight so it makes for a nice safe staple in a long-term portfolio. But MSFT is also a very poorly-run company that hasn’t grown in 20 years but we can make it a much more interesting stock by simply selling covered calls.
For example, in our August edition of Dividend Payers, we looked at MSFT for $24.23 and we sell the Sept $24 calls for .77. This lowered our effective basis to $23.46 and selling the call putus in no special danger – we simply agreed to sell MSFT for $24 on expiration day in September (the 17th).
The stock was called away from us, and we made a .54 profit or 2.3% of our net $23.46 cash investment in less than 30 days. That works out to a 26% annualized ROI and we had an opportunity (as we had expected) to buy the stock again and again at $24 on Oct 4th and 5th and sell the November $24 calls for .90 for a net $23.10 re-entry and ANOTHER 3.8% GAIN if we are called away at $24 or greater on Nov 19th. Doesn’t that beat waiting a whole quarter for your 1% dividend checks?
Of course, you can optimize all this with timing and we favor stocks that are on sale – this is just a very simple example of how our most basic options strategy can drastically boost your annual returns on any stock in your portfolio.
Let’s say you don’t want to mess around with MSFT every month. You could have simply sold the 2012 $22.50s for $4.40 (also suggested in the August post), that dropped your net entry from $24.23 to $19.83 and getting called away at $22.50 would be a profit of 13.5% over 17 months PLUS you would be getting your .52 annual dividend…
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Testy Tuesday – Kan Keeps His Job, Yen Makes New Highs
by Phil - September 14th, 2010 8:12 am
Japan has the same Prime Minister!
That is big news after having 5 different ones the past 4 years. With the last PM lasting just 9 months, word was Kan was going to challenge the record for shortest term after being forced into this election just 3 months after being elected the first time. When we talked about this yesterday, the race was considered "too close to call" but the incumbent Mr. Kan ended up winning 60% of the vote – kind of makes you wonder how far off our own pollsters are with their early election calls…
Now the stage is set for the Oct 4th meeting of the BOJ, where action must be taken to get the Yen under control. Ozawa was clearly better for the Dollar, as he favored strong intervention to bring the Yen down including a program of both QE and stimulus and they Yen blasted to 15-year highs on the result of this election, now at just 83 Yen to the Dollar, down from 120 in 2007 (30%) with a 15% move up since May. This is TERRIBLE for Japanese exporters, who get paid relatively less for everything they sell but it’s good news for commodity pushers, who get paid in devalued Dollars.
To what extent is Japan’s deflation simply a function of their currency appreciating an average of 10% a year? If their deflation rate is 2% then doesn’t that mean it’s really an 8% INflation rate masked by a too-strong currency? Perhaps that’s why the people of Japan, who get paid in Yen and shop with Yen, strongly preferred Kan, who was only really opposed, in the end, by Parliament, where he won 206 to 200 – the Japanese version of the US Senate. This means that, like Obama, it will be very difficult for Kan to get anything done despite his popular support and, also like our own Senate: "Having witnessed the shaky ground he stands on, opposition parties are licking their chops to begin their attacks on Mr. Kan," said Koichi Nakano of Sophia University.
Doesn’t it make you feel good to know that, despite our cultural differences, politicians around the World are all the same – just a bunch of power-hungry, vindictive bastards who put their own interests ahead of the people who they are supposed to represent? Like Obama, Kan still faces difficulties navigating what the Japanese call a "twisted parliament," where the DPJ has a minority in…
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Turning $10K into $50K by Jan 21st – Week 12 Update (Members Only)
by Phil - September 4th, 2010 9:24 am
What an exciting 10 weeks these trades have had!
The most important thing to take away from these hedged play reviews is how important it is NOT TO TOUCH THEM. We orginated this group on June 11th and the Dow was at 10,200 and it ran up to 10,600 and down to 9,600, back to 10,700, down to 9,800 again and is now back to 10,400. We could have made some good adjustments and we could have made some bad adjustments but the best move is to do nothing with long-term, hedged positions while the market gyrates UNLESS something fundamentally changes in your range outlook.
Rather than panic out of positions like these examples, a simple disaster hedge was used in the July 26th update to ride out the dip, while letting time (theta) decay contine to do it’s work on the premiums we sold…
The VIX was at 30 back on June 11th and that, in part, determines the nature of the trade ideas we decide to use. The higher the VIX, the more we want to sell premium as we simply profit from the declining VIX (now 23.5). The idea of these picks was to find $10,000 worth of small plays that we thought could gain 500% by Jan 21st as part of a larger portfolio. If you can do this with just 10% of a $100K portfolio or 5% of a $200K portfolio, that’s plenty of risk for these uncertain times and it’s a nice 25-50% bonus on the entire portfolio if it works out. Risk can be a component of a conservative portfolio if we wall it off safely.
Our first play was a fundamentals play on YRCW, assuming they wouldn’t go bankrupt. 10,000 shares at .21 was the original entry ($2,100) and I called an audible on this one on 7/7 to add 2x at .11 rather than stop out. That brought the net down to 0.143 on 30,000 or $4,290 so a bit more than a DD overall and we took 1/2 off the table this week at .29 ($5,850), turning this one into a free play ($1,560 profits in pocket) with 15,000 shares to ride out but we lost our nerve at .41 because we couldn’t get .10 for the Jan $1s so we gave up (and rightly so it turns out) and cashed out for another $6,150 in profits for a total profit of $7,710. YRCW is once again…
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TGIF – Stop the Week, We Want to Get Off!
by Phil - August 20th, 2010 8:29 am
This week cannot end soon enough for the bulls.
While it’s no shocker that we are finishing the week where we started and, in fact, finishing the options expiration period where we started last month (July 16th), it’s still very disappointing that we are making no progress. This weekend I asked if it was "Time for a New, New Deal?" I went to DC over the weekend and I’ll write about that this weekend but let’s just say I’m not seeing the political will to actually do something major to put Americans back to work and, as I said last Friday, when I said "Hoping the Weekend Brings Perspective":
Weekend stance – off this disappointing two-day run I’d say as neutral as possible over the weekend. I do think we need a good blow-off bottom now because we blew our chance to turn it around on volume yesterday.
Trading Range – I was counting on QE2 AND a stimulus announcement by next week. After the weekend we may have neither so it’s really going to be all about watching our levels in absence of any fundamental market forces. Monday we have the NY Fed and NAHB Housing Index. Tuesday is Housing Starts, Building Permits and a PPI that will also be BTE along with Industrial Prodcution (probable disappointment) and Cap Utilization (dragged down by refiners). Thursday is Leading Economic Indicators and the Philly Fed and that’s it for the week so, once we get past housing, the newspaper is more likely to move the markets than the data points.
We got so-so Leading Indicators yesterday and a TERRIBLE Philly Fed, leading me to send out a 10:03 Alert to Members saying:
Whoa! Philly Fed is disaster! -7.7. Leading indicators are up 0.1%, which is in-line but Philly was expected at +8 so this is TERRIBLE! We should test yesterday’s lows at least on that.
DIA $103 puts give good bang for the buck at .74 to stop the bleeding – just keep in mind thay have a ton of premium and need to be taken off quickly when momentum stops
While that play worked out very nicely, the bleeding I referred to was my 9:43 Alert to Members where I reiterated my "small gambles" on SSO, QLD, DDM and USO – but I did say at the time: "Don’t forget we get Leading Indicators and Philly Fed at 10 and…
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Smart Portfolio Management Update – The $10,000 Portfolio
by Phil - August 7th, 2010 8:25 am
Options Sage submits:
“Never risk what you do have and do need on what you don’t have and don’t need”
Smart portfolio management is a world apart from conventional portfolio management. While conventional portfolio management offers generic guidelines to diversify capital, smart portfolio management is tailored to your personal circumstances. With that in mind this article has been divided into a three-part series. The first discusses a $10K portfolio while the second will offer suggestions for a $100K portfolio and the final article will discuss $1M portfolios.
Although this first article in the series addresses prudent strategies for a $10K portfolio, many conservative investors are likely to find the strategies addressed throughout suitable for their own portfolios – though the % allocations will differ as we will see in the future articles. No matter what your risk tolerance, a portfolio comprising some relatively conservative trades is always prudent!
Phil once commented that, when trading a $10,000 portfolio, “every $100 counts”!
Capital should be allocated judiciously in a $10K portfolio. NEVER allocate a majority of your capital to any single trade. Dedicating 20% of your portfolio to relatively conservative trades (shown below) is appropriate but exceeding 30% is far too risky when dealing with limited capital. With a $10K portfolio, it becomes increasingly imperative to be right first time. Financial constraints limit your ability to scale into trades at different threshold levels and that makes timing critical unless….
Unless you figure out how to trade without requiring perfect timing of the market! Those of you trading along with Phil’s earnings spreads have already seen some of the ways we take advantage of stock movement, whether they go up, stay flat or even drop to some degree…
Strategy A: The Covered Call – With a Twist – Making 30% in 5 Months
The original trade was 5 June $3/4 bull call spread at net .87 ($435), which finished at $500 for a nice $65 gain (15%) in 7 weeks. A lot of small portfolio player spend too much time "going for it" with risky trades when there is very good money to be made on sensible ones. – Phil
Instead of placing the short call out-of-the-money in the conventional format, the short call is actually placed in-the-money.
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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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