Freaky Friday – Alpha 2 Says “Cliff Ahead”
by Phil - January 21st, 2011 8:22 am
This is fun, right?
We had a nice opportunity to buy the F’ing dip yesterday as well as an interesting opportunity to test the prudishness of the hundreds or web sites that syndicate my articles as I saw every possible variation of "F’ing" popping up in titles that were pinged back to me. Social mores aside the move was so well telegraphed that we were able to take a non-greedy exit on our QID position – leaving us, thankfully, with just the DIA shorts in our $10,000 Portfolio. That means, we are going to be able to start our brand new $25,000-$100,000 Virtual Portfolio right on schedule next week.
We began "Turning $10,000 into $50,000 by January 21st" on June 11th and we’re not done yet but we’re well over $30,000 – even looking at our wrong-way (so far) short bet on the Dow. We could have killed that one yesterday as well but, as today’s title says – we just have to give the old Alpha 2 a chance to fully play out as we would just hate ourselves if we get get that 500-point drop in the Dow right after we bail on the shorts as that would be our $50K right there!
So up only 200% or so in 7 months is a failure but, to be fair, we did take a couple of months off as I didn’t like the market enough in October and November and we already had $26,000 so it didn’t seem worth risking 260% to make another 100%. In the final month, we decided to "go for it" but it was a messy way to make another 20% as our overall premise – that a drop was "right around the corner" simply did not pan out.
Frankly, looking back at the original 5 picks makes me want to cry as we could have just left those on the table and gone on vacation! They were:
- 10,000 YRCW at .21 (we doubled down at .11), now $3.76, up $35,500 (a Bazillion percent, I think but there was a reverse split…)
- 20 C Dec $3/4 bull call spreads at .62, closed at $1, up $760 (up 61%)
- 20 short C Dec $4 puts at $1.08, close at $0, up $2,160 (up 100%)
- 20 TASR Jan $5/7.50 bull call spreads for .35, now $0, down $700 (down 100%)
- 10 short
…
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Options Feeding Frenzy Ensues Ahead of Earnings at Intel, JPMorgan
by Andrew Wilkinson - January 13th, 2011 4:46 pm
Today’s tickers: INTC, JPM, MRVL & YRCW
INTC - Intel Corp. – Large-volume bearish positions cropped up in options on the chip giant this morning ahead of the firm’s much anticipated fourth-quarter earnings release after the final bell ends trading for the session. Intel’s shares are down slightly by 0.30% to stand at $21.24 as of 11:55am in New York. Investors placing outright bearish bets on the stock ahead of the earnings report utilized 60,000 January contract put options to construct a ratio put spread. Ratio put-spreaders purchased 20,000 of the January $21 strike puts for an average premium of $0.34 per contract, and sold 40,000 puts at the lower January $20 strike at an average premium of $0.10 each. The net cost of the transaction amounts to $0.14 per contract. The spread positions players to make money if the chip maker’s shares fall 1.8% from the current price of $21.24 to breach the effective breakeven point on the downside at $20.86 by expiration day. Maximum potential profits of $0.86 per contract are available should shares in Intel Corp. decline 5.8% to settle at $20.00 at expiration. The sale of twice as many lower strike puts is a sign that traders do not anticipate an all-out collapse in the price of the underlying. The position will start to work against investors in the event that shares in Intel fall 9.9% from the current value to trade below the effective breakeven price of $19.14 before the contracts expire next week. Bearish sentiment on the stock is also evident at the February $20 strike where around 20,000 puts were purchased for an average premium of $0.31 a-pop. Investors buying the put options make money if INTC shares drop 7.3% to slip beneath the average breakeven price of $19.69 by expiration day in February. Nearly 265,000 option contracts have changed hands on Intel Corp. as of 12:10pm.
JPM - JPMorgan Chase & Co. – Options traders are initiating bullish stances on the financial services firm today in the final…
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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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Pass/Fail Friday – Europe’s Stress Test at High Noon!
by Phil - July 23rd, 2010 8:23 am
What a way to end the week!
The EU has decided to leave us hanging until the last moment as they hold off on releasing their bank stress test results until after the markets close (11:30 EST) which leads me to believe the results may not be good or they wouldn’t be waiting until the markets are closed and then giving investors the weekend to digest the results. If the tests are good, then the US will rally and Asia will rally and the EU would have to gap open on Monday and that would annoy investors over there (kind of like we were annoyed yesterday) but, if the results are bad, then we can drop back to 10,200 or lower and Asia can sell off and they will gap down on Monday but perhaps less of a panic sell-off than if they got hit with the news on a Friday morning.
So, because the results were already delayed and because the ECB has chosen to wait until Friday afternoon – I’m going to have to at least make a small bet that we have a failure. We already hedged the Dow in yesterday’s Member Chat as we weren’t sure of the timing and we wanted to lock in our gains for the week but now let’s look at a nice, profitable way to play a sell-off in the financials.
- FAZ is the 3x Ultra Short ETF on the financials and you can just buy that ETF for $14.62 a share and a 3.3% move down in XLF should translate to a 9% gain to $15.94, not a bad day’s work right there! Thanks to the uncertainty we now have, this trade can be augmented with the sale of the August $14 puts and calls for $2.65 and that drops the net purchase price to $11.97. If XLF finishes below $14, another round of stock would be put to you at $14 for an average entry of $12.99, which is 12% lower than the current price so this trade assumes the financials don’t go UP 4% by August 20th. If FAZ finishes over $14 (.62 lower than it is now) the net return on the $11.97 is 17%, not bad for 3 week’s work….
- Since XLF is also $14.45, we can also have some math fun. In theory, XLF should move 1/3 of what FAZ moves so for XLF
…
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Thank Jobs It’s Friday!
by Phil - July 2nd, 2010 8:23 am
Do I know what the jobs data will be at 8:30? Nope.
Then why would I title a post "Thank Jobs It’s Friday!" – what if the report sucks and we go down? Well, at this point, even if that does happen, I think that will be the end of it. We’ve been building up to this "terrible" jobs number all week and we got a rotten ADP Report and a rotten Unemployment Report so everyone is expecting a rotten Non-Farm Payroll report. When everyone expects the same thing, we like to bet against it. Sometimes we’re wrong and sometimes we’re right but you make some amazing money when you are right. The magnitude of the short squeeze that would follow a significantly BTE NFP Report could send up up 300 points or more on the day, likely with a big finish this afternoon and some follow-through on Tuesday as the rest of the world plays catch-up.
A bad report, on the other hand, is already baked into the cake and we have yet to test S&P 1,000 so we can expect support there. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but we should be able to scramble and protect ourselves if we head lower so the smart move is to play for the mega-move higher, and that’s where we are. Of course, it’s also a balance issue. In our last Weekly Wrap-Up, we had the following open trade ideas going into June 21st (we had gotten bearish at the end of the previous week):
- APOL July $40 puts spread at .46, now .60 – up 30%
- BBY Jan $37 puts sold for $4, now $3 – up 25%
- BP July $30/32 bull call spread at $1, now .70 – down 30%
- YRCW at .21, now .15 – down 28%
- BP Oct $33/July $33 ratio backspread (3:5) at net $225, now $524 – up 132%
- TZA July $7 calls .08 (net of spread), now $1.50 – up 1,775%
- SIRI 2012 $1 puts sold at .33, still .33 – even
- USO July $33 puts at .51, now $1.08 – up 131%
- GLL July $37 puts, sold for $1.30, now .35 – up 70%
- TBT July $38 puts sold for $1, now $2.05 – down 105%
- OIH June $104.10 puts at $2.02, now $8.70 – up 330%
- TZA July $6/8 bull call spread for .55, now $1.48 – up 169%
- TZA July $6 puts sold for
…
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Turning $10,000 into $50,000 by January 21st! (Members Only)
by Phil - June 11th, 2010 7:12 am
Wheee - this is getting to be fun!
I spend most of my time with members preaching LOW-risk strategies so it’s fun to look at a riskier one once in a while. If the market is trending higher then we may have an opportunity to make a nice, fat return and we’ve already locked in a conservative set with a lot of cash on the side so we’re able to consider taking a little gamble now.
While we still have a nice, fat VIX at 30, let’s look UP for a change and think of some small, fun plays we can take that give us great expectations for the end of the year. As I mentioned the other day, putting just 10% of your portfolio into a risky play that makes 500% to the upside can be a real portfolio booster. The trick here is to select trades that either limit our downside or have downsides we don’t mind (like having a stock put to us that we don’t mind owning).
I thought it would be fun to set up a small, virtual portfolio with a few selections we think can provide big returns by January expirations. Keep in mind that these are, of course, high-risk positions and should not be more than 1/10th of a portfolio so if you have $10,000, just $1,000 should go into risky posiitons like this. If all goes well, you still make 50% on the whole $10,000 so DON’T BE GREEDY! We’ll track this set of picks going forward and make adjustments, if needed along the way.
Let’s start with a stock. As you know, I am NO fan of penny stocks. I pretty much avoid them like the plague but there’s a stock that costs just 21 pennies I’ve decided I like and that’s YRCW. YRCW is an unintentional penny stock and they do have many, many issues that may cause them to go BK BUT – they also have $5.2Bn in revenues against a $214M market cap and, if they don’t go bankrupt, then someone may decide to buy them, probably for more than $1.
Freight volume for truckers was up 0.9% in April after being up 0.4% in March and the Freight Index is now at 110.2, the highest level since Sept of 2008, when YRCW as stilll a $10 stock (but on the way down). YRCW says they broke even in April and should MAKE MONEY in…
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Weekend Wipe-Out, the Second Wave!
by Phil - January 29th, 2010 5:57 pm
Another week another 100 points lower.
Yep, that’s all it was, we lost all of 100 points more than last week, when we fell from 10,725 to 10,172 (553 points) and this week we dropped from Friday’s Dow close of 10,172 all the way down to 10,067 yet you would think the world had come to an end to hear the media and the traders freaking out. I’m not going to try to explain it, I can’t. Maybe it’s because going into last week we were very bearish but, starting on the 22nd, we let ourselves finally get a little more bullish AND THE MARKET BETRAYED US!
How could the market not zoom right back up? It always zooms right back up, doesn’t it? As I said a week ago Friday: "Boy, when sentiment shifts – it REALLY shifts!" My closing comment on Friday the 22nd was "Back to cash but leaving disaster hedges, which are looking great now as this is shaping up to be some disaster" and our weekend "Global Chart Review" showed us to be at some very key inflection points, letting us go well prepared into this week:
Manic Monday Market Movement
My Jets lost on Sunday so I was not in the best of moods on Monday. My outlook that morning was: "We still have our disaster hedges in case things get worse but, on the whole, we’re expecting a 1% bounce in the very least off our 5% lines (anything less will be a bad sign)." We were pretty much at the 5% rule on Friday’s close so we focused on the bounce we wanted to achieve in order to get more bullish.
I noted that the levels we were looking for were not exactly 1% retraces (see post for reasons) and our target retraces were: Dow 10,300, S&P 1,105, Nasdaq 2,225, NYSE 7,100 and Russell 625. What were the highs for the week on those indexes? Dow 10,310 (+10), S&P 1,103 (-2), Nasdaq 2,227 (+2), NYSE 7,098 (-2) and Russell 621 (-4). So that’s a net of +4 points out of 21,355 points worth of predictions on the retrace, accuracy to within .019% - not a bad showing for our patented 5% rule.
Please, under NO circumstances subscribe to our daily newsletter, where you would have this kind of information every morning and DO NOT get an Alert Membership where we send out our amazingly accurate watch levels to you every day. Having this sort of advanced information…
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Trucking Put Options Drop Despite Slip in Shares at YRC Worldwide
by Andrew Wilkinson - December 31st, 2009 4:44 pm
Today’s tickers: YRCW, NOK & MDVN
YRCW – YRC Worldwide – I was a little skeptical yesterday of the extreme pessimism that depicted the predictions from the options market surrounding the fate of trucking giant, YRC Worldwide. Investors stepped up to buy huge amounts of put options at the 50 cent strike price that expire next month. With shares at that time trading at $1.00 the huge premium represents a rather expensive 50% layout on an event far from certain. The event is not necessarily the bankruptcy of the company itself, rather it’s the potential for the investor to make money from the trade. Investors would do well to look back at the actual trading price of stocks that go into bankruptcy. Shares don’t always go to zero and they can stay above 50 cents even upon entering a Chapter 11 filing. While today’s news of a debt-for-equity swap provides a reprieve from a filing now, investors continue to ditch the stock, which is today trading at 82 cents. However, those same put options at the 50 cent strike have fallen heavily to 35 cents offered today because the uncertainty surrounding the outcome is perceived to be lower. In the options world, we call that reading implied volatility. Today it’s fallen massively from 291% to 188% at the 50 cent strike.
NOK – Nokia Corp. ADR – Looks like an investor is either unwinding a implanting a call option spread on Finnish cell phone maker, Nokia, whose shares have traded between $12.85 and $12.97 this morning. It appears that open interest at both of the February $14 and $15 strikes took off yesterday with both reading around 35,000 lots today. Further bullish volume saw investors buy the lower strike calls at 28 cents and sell the higher $15 strike for about 9 cents. The net cost of the spread at 19 cents means that a surge of 15.6% in Nokia’s shares to $15.00 would maximize investors’ gains at 81 cents per contract. Volume today is 18,000 lots at each strike price. Shares have not traded above the $14.19 breakeven point since they slumped on October 14, 2009.
MDVN – Medivation Inc. – Shares of the biopharmaceutical company have risen at a 45 degree angle since October rising from $25 to almost $40 each this week. The company develops drugs for diseases with limited treatments including Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease. One…
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How to Have a Happy and Safe New Year with Hedges
by Phil - December 31st, 2009 8:28 am
"Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving Hell with them as usual." ~ Mark Twain
"We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” ~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce
I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all of my readers a very happy New Year. 2009 was challenging to say the least – clearly it was the best of times and it was the worst of times but if 2009 has taught us anything it’s that there is always an opportunity for the perseverent. We went from the depths of despair in March straight into a 9-month rally of epic proportions. While we may question the wisdom of the underlying fundamentals, we cannot question the evidence of just how resilient our economy and our people really are and that, if nothing else, gives me great hope for our future.
I myself have gone from being the lone market optimist back in March (see our Crisis, Year One Review) to being one of the 11% of the remaining pessimists as the market takes back over 50% of it’s losses (I am arguing that it’s less than 50% in my Last Charts of the Decade). Whether we are, as I think, at the apex of a very normal Fibonacci retracement or whether we are at the mid stage of a full recovery back to our 2007 glory remains to be seen but for now, I can re-use the same statement I made to Members when I argued the media was too bearish in March (click on image for great video):
"Television is a powerful and emotional medium, it is very difficult to go against the will of ALL these "experts" when they get on TV and all tell you to sell (or buy) and then their TV station backs them up with bearish news and bearish guests – it’s a natural bias that develops, they aren’t going to make their own paid personalities look foolish by contradicting them with facts and dissenting opinions."
Substitute bullish for bearish and we have my quote of the day for December 31st, 2009. If you do nothing else today in the markets, at least consider the idea of establishing some hedges – just…
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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
(