Thursday, July 31, 2008

Revised Numbers

As we sift through the numbers out today, we find that the economy did indeed contact last year. Once again the revisions...

What we have is indecision between inflation and deflation. The housing (which is estimated to be around 1/3 consumer) is imploding and the feds are throwing any and all money to try and prop it. This is very deflationary. In fact so much so that it is causing debts to explode. NY is in trouble, Cal is in trouble etc.

This is why given the choice the fed will always push inflation over deflation. They can always pay back with less dollars whereas in deflation everything collapses under debt burdens.

So while we are imploding with debt making our economy very deflationary, we have the emerging markets exploding driving up every commodity under the sun. If we were as great an economy as we were in past years, our slowdown would effect commodities. However, (sorry folks this does not mean I am UN American just realist) we are no longer the big cheese. Many are starting to figure this out. What we cut back on in consumption is picked up by other countries coming along.

My bet is more inflation of commodities and a contraction of our own economy. Much to the dismay of most economists. It will be awhile before they figure this out.

So long natural resources and short bonds. Remember most of our debt is to foreigners. They will demand more interest from the U.S. in the futures pushing down bond prices.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Stocks Soar as Oil Drops Again

Just as we mentioned. The headlines are all a jitter with oil dropping. The bottom is in some say. I disagree. If you have followed at all, we were salivating waiting for a big drop to get long. Now the drop is here, we are waiting for a good signal to get long XLE. My best guess (and we know how good I am at this) is 70 or so to get long a calendar. We should see some very low premiums as the masses will know that the oil bubble has popped.

We all should know better. But then this is what makes markets.

Also Gold is getting soft and grains...So if you missed the commodity train last stop, you will have one more chance to get on board. It will be a difficult decision if you have not been riding this already. Since the media will be all against this sort of trade, it will take courage.

I have seen the same arguments since oil was at 20 a barrel and gold at 250. Now I am by no means a gold bug but when the forces of inflation line up such as they are, it is silly to listen to the talking heads. We are in one of the greatest bull markets in commodities. The corrections are part of the game. Take the corrections for what they are and don't get sidetracked believing otherwise.

Accounting

When using spreads, it can be daunting figuring out the accounting.
For example, I start out with 10,000. I buy this amount in options long. Now I sell options. This is premium I collected. For sake of ease here lets just say I received 30%. Now I have 3,000 back in my account. A tidy 30% return if everything goes as planned.

But lets say we took the 3,000 because we want to gain more and buy some more options and once again sell to collect premiums. Now we have just taken on more options than we have in cash to start with. What will this show on our accounting? It should show that we are now at about the same level of 10,000 that we started with. So you ask yourself where did the 30% go? It went to owning another position. We now have 13,000 in options long and the equivalent outstanding short.

So as we roll out to the next month we collect more premiums and if we buy more spreads, we once again are back to 10,000. Our net gain is showing nothing while we are slowly gaining more and more positions. So eventually we would own more than twice as many options as the original 10,000 but only show a slight gain.

If you want the income, then you simple do not buy more positions and let the cash pile up with each roll out. However if you are in the stage in life where you are wanting to increase your assets, then you will want to keep buying more positions ignoring the fact that the overall gain on your account is minimal but you are gaining more and more positions in your portfolio.

It sounds more complicated than it really is. The point here is that you will be hard pressed to figure out just exactly how much you are gaining if you continue to buy more positions, since each new position will once again drain the cash you have and show a slight loss until the spreads starts to work its way through. Then once again any cash would be put to work thereby showing again no increase in cash value, but you are gaining more and more positions.

I hope this helps.

Monday, July 28, 2008

600+ pages

That is what the "Housing rescue bill" contains. Now I am by no means a speed reader, but 600 pages to digest and get a real understanding before I vote? Come on leaders give me a break. Not one of you even read those pages. It was so full of pork. How do I know? I did read enough of the bill that I vomited!! I was force fed so much pork I could not handle any more. Chrysler gets in on the act, city and counties can now be rehabbers, first time buyers can now get 7,500 credit, oh and yes the poor screwed over mortgage lenders will get tax credit till the cows come home.

Who is going to pay for all this? Well if you believe what you read, not one penny of tax payer money is on the line here....Wait a minute...what exactly is a tax credit...Oh yeah it means if I do exactly as they say, I don't have to pay taxes on certain things. So if we are now allowed to borrow 10 trillion (yes that is what this bill also allows, the raising of the debt level to 10 trillion) and the large corporations that just fleeced mom and pop for everything they had in the way of any sort of assets i.e. homes, are paying less taxes but we are now indebted 10 trillion, my taxes wont go up?

At least give me a twinkle and a grin Paulson when you speak like this. That way I will understand it is a joke.

Inflation inflation inflation

Thursday, July 24, 2008

..."all the kings horsemen and all the kings men"...

300 billion that is billion folks. I am sure that estimate is way low more like 1 trillion.

That is the bailout estimates bantering around for the housing bust. Now the media is giving you a good story about the particulars of the plan so I wont need to explain that, but the media is only telling you what 400,000 hopeful over extended homeowners want to hear.

Econ 101...Inflation: too much money chasing too few goods.

If you cannot see where this bailout is headed, then we really need to get you up to speed.

If there are any questions in any one's minds right now where inflation is headed, read the news...

So we know the gov. is bent on throwing enough of my money after the problem to solve it, leaving me no alternative but to be UN American and short the banks after this nice bounce and stay long natural resources. After all, what maintains or even goes up in value in inflationary times?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

You take what the market gives you

I rolled out to Sept today on many of the plays. I know it is 1-2 weeks early, but with this much of a correction, I could not pass up the returns. I am waiting for more to be filled.

With this new cash infusion, I am looking at KOL and XLE very seriously. Not sure when the time will come to pull the trigger. But soon. Now things I contemplate about pulling the trigger is not so much getting the low, that is a mute issue since we are doing spreads. I don't however want to get in to have them drop significantly before the continued trend.

What I look for is more of the strike and the months premium. Right now XLE is at a cross roads. 75 is good, but then in order to play this for longer than 5 months, I need to go out farther say 2010 Jan's. I don't like the premiums on that so I am looking at the futures strike price of June Q2. that gives me until the end of June not the 3rd week of June as most regular options trade. That has a more appealing time frame for me.

Just another glimpse of what is looked at to trade from.

Buy back and sell again

I get asked this all the time. All of you that have asked this know my answer.

Could I just buy and sell the option as the stock goes up and down?

Yes you can and some do. I myself being the ultra conservative trader that I am, do not. This requires timing and you know about my timing. I have tried to buy back before only to have the market keep going and thereby losing out on more value.

So to answer this question since many of the stocks we have been following are in the inevitable correction phase, you may want to virtual trade buying back the short positions then selling again on the next rally. See if you have the gift to do this.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Short covering rally

Dead cat bounce or not, the short covering forced by the SEC certainly is an opportunity for the very agressive trader. Now FNM is 96% above what it was before the SEC ruling. If the fundamentals are still intact, then FNM should still be a good short.

To play this as a conservative trader that I am, selling a call spread works for me.
FMN and many of the other financials that bounced last week should make for great sell call spreads.

Until the next play the feds give us....

Monday, July 21, 2008

Just to Reiterate

Why I trade the way I do....

First off, you will be severely hard pressed to make any sort of money if you do not get the trend straight. Yes I am aware of supposed neutral trades. Those sound good on paper, but don't really work. Here is the reason. You are up against other traders that have the same news you do. They have to take the other side of your trade in order for the trade to be executed. Now if you are asking for the supposed by the book trade, no one will take the other side. Regardless of the theo or delta etc. and to top it off, your spreads are criminal to say the least but then we know this already. We know to get filled we have spreads that would make a loan shark blush. We digress.

So now we know in order to make any sort of money other than chump change, we need to be with the trend. Now options are just plain terrible to ride out a trend. I have yet to see a trend that did not have wild swings. If you are a market timer and good at it, (I have yet to know one. Athough many claim to be) then you will want to buy calls and puts accordingly. If you are one of these unknown to me individuals, let me know. I would love to learn.

Okay so we know time decay is eating us alive each and every day like clock work. so we can either take advantage of it or let it destroy our returns. Now if we happen (which means 50% of the time for me) to get into the trade as the market goes against us, we have to wait until the trend is once again established. If that takes any time at all, we have lost much time decay and now we not only have to have the stock move to gain back the time decay, now we are asking the stock to keep moving to start making money. Any more pull backs are we once again fall prey to time decay.

So to avoid this, we sell options that decay in time faster than the ones we buy decay in time. Thereby offsetting the time decay. This is done by spreads. Buying an option and selling an option.

Now since we have done away with the evils of time decay, now we have to decide if we want to have many short small gains each and every month that would in all likelihood be offset by one major wrong trade, So now we are at the point of my trading.

Using the same premise of spreads, we now take a longer term approach that smooths out the hick ups along the way that all trends come across. So now we can wait patiently for the trend to kick back in with out the worry of time decay since we are gaining time decay from the short sell.

Questions to ask your Advisor

We are at a point now where the markets are dropping severely.

You need to ask your advisers what they are doing for your portfolio. Ask them if their strategies have steered them away form losses, ask them if they have prospered in these times. If not why?

If you have an option advisor, are the strategies paying off for you or them? Are the complex strategies costing more for commissions then they are paying out?

Can a double calendar or a iron condor be as profitable as a simple buy of an option?

If you continue as you are now, it will be costly. How do I know? The letters and call I get tell me that the same old buy and hold is still prevalent.

Truly this approach is no longer working.

I have written an introduction to a paper I am writing about financial planning. If interested, drop me a line and I will let you review it.

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Correction

We are getting the correction we were looking for in XLE and KOL.

Just a reminder here, the trend is still very much bullish. Don't let a pullback like this sway you to think otherwise. Nothing has changed fundamentally. While these went up too fast in too short a time, this is typical. This gives us a better buying opportunity.

I have not set up a trade yet, looking for a bit more weakness.

Stay tuned.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Buy and Hold

As sure as birds fly south for the winter, out come the cheerleaders every time a market has a downturn. You have heard it before, the market always comes back, don't sell now you should be buying more etc.

Listening to this garbage has led you to an S&P 500 that will touch a 12 year low before this is over. Banks are already there....

Well I do not know about you, but if I had bought a mutual fund for my retirement only to see it where it was 12 years ago, that would upset me to no end. Then to add insult to injury these cheerleaders touting the same old routine that was fine 12 years ago.

Although I am not a great chartist, looking at the double top over the last 20 years shows me a long term down for the S&P for quite awhile. That is no way to make money.

Who knows, after 10 more years or so, then we can once again buy and let the S&P make us rich but for now that is not the case.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Our pullback

If you agree with the assessment that we are in for a long term inflation including economic stagnation, then the pullback in the natural resources today is good to see. Long time readers know I have been patiently waiting for the energy pullback to get back in. Not ready yet, but it is getting close.

Remember nothing goes straight down or straight up. We take these as opportunities to get in.

So looking to get long diagonals on XLE and calendars on KOL.

Patience here.

On a political note here, we are seeing winds from Washington that I do not like. But then most of what comes out of there is not good for investing. Only pandering to the masses. What has me concerned is the blame game. Us "speculators" driving up prices and manipulating them. I wish this were true, then I could know with certainty a direction and capitalize on it.

What is really going on is the masses are hurting and need a scapegoat. That scapegoat is anyone that is prospering during this meltdown.

The question is not what the gov will do, that is a given. The question is how will that effect trading. We will stay tuned.

Reality is that traders make it liquid to get in and out of positions. If the gov limits this, then you can make a trade and if wrong take a long time to get out. Take Real Estate for example. If that market were liquid, the first sign of trouble you could get out with a small loss. However trying to sell in a buyers market is a killer. What I hear coming out of Washington will only make the housing problem linger much longer.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Fannie Mae

Vacation was too short as it always is.

If you received my newsletter, we discussed the Fannie Mae problem. As I am writing this, the feds have indeed stepped in and made some bogus rescue plan. This is clearly an obvious move that has taken no one by surprise.

This should turn out nicely for the selling puts idea.

Ahh the gov. so predictable Always wrong but predictable

Monday, July 7, 2008

What you will not get

Typical options traders will overwhelm you with technical ideas. While technical analysis has its place, it is far too often used wrongly. Many traders think because they are in a bull market and just about any analysis for buying on the dips works, they are geniuses. Many technical anaylsis comes about during great bull runs. As you will soon notice this great bull run in commodities will bring about many new and improved technical ideas.

Reality is that just about any analysis works in a strong market.

Now back to the idea that you can trade by technical analysis. The overall trend is what you need to be watching. Then when you have the corrections that always come along, you buy more. With options this is not the appropriate way to trade. Options lose value each and every day due to time decay. So to buy and hold for even 6 months is a losing proposition. That is why the technical is supported so much, trying to get in just as the underlying is about to move. If you are great at timing, (which I am terrible at) you can buy calls and puts and make a very nice return. If you are like most mortals, then you cannot time with any exactness to avoid time decay.

For that reason I trade the way I do. Taking advantage of time decay. Find the fundamental forces driving a particular market and then jump on board with calendars or diagonals. Then if my timing as it usually is, fails, I still am in a position to prosper.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Natural resources

We take the market as it gives us.

EWZ Long Jan'09 85 short July 85 net debit 6.70 with only 11 trading days left it looked good to me.

KOL looks like a good correction. Watching this one

Still hoping for XLE to drop significantly to get in on that one again.

Will keep you posted

Glass half full or half empty

Auto industry tanks so they said yesterday, housing continues to erode, oil still shooting for the moon.

While many are losing faith in the capitalistic markets, we continue to appreciate what capitalism gives us. As we ponder the independence day this weekend, try to remember that it is not the greedy capitalists that caused this mess. If you have been around my ranting for at least the last two years, you would not find this surprising at all. so to us the glass is half full.

I read everywhere the assault on capitalism. It just is not true. It is power hungry fed officials that have caused the mess. I do not want to get into a political debate here, but it is the Gov. causing everything we are witnessing now.

Understanding this is vital to your sanity and investing safety. What bubbles greenspan did with loose monetary policies for the last two decades is coming home to roost in higher prices. Get used to it and either stand in line and complain like the masses or do something about it. That is buy tangibles and if you are aggressive use leverage as in options to make a decent return. Other wise suffer the losses them masses are and will be losing.

Someday when everyone is touting how much they are making on commodities, this gig too will be up and we will need to move to the next bubble created. Until then ride this wave for all it is worth.