Dipped in Gold

With all the Arch Linux posts lately, loyal readers may be tempted to think I have given up the aggressive-investing game. Not true. I recently completed my trade of the year with those out-of-the-money GLD calls I wrote about back in August. I bought them for 25c a share, and sold them for various prices, a few as high as $8. All told, those calls netted something on the order of 800% return on premium paid.

As I exited the last of those calls, GLD was in the midst of its toughest correction in the past few years. I bought my first shares of GLD in 2009, but even looking back as far as 2006, I don't see a correction as violent or as deep as the one we just completed. Gold bulls were hit with a triple whammy: a technical double-top formation around the end of August was followed by the Fed failing to signal much more in the way of monetary stimulus. As the investment world started its usual flight to quality in the face of disappointing developments, the CME responded to the increasing volatility in gold futures by raising the margin requirements. Everyone in the trading community still remembers how margin increases sparked the recent Silver panic, and so it is no surprise that GLD gapped-down two days in a row in the last week of September. It shed 8% of its value in two trading days, which is a pretty dizzying fall for a physical commodity unaffected by droughts and floods like gold.

The gold haters came out in droves, claiming this was the "popping of the bubble", and giving target prices of $700/oz (about $70/share in GLD terms). I stepped away from leverage on GLD, which I had planned to do during the fall, anyway, since September-October has historically been a bad season for gold (I have no idea why, it's not like there's a harvest or something). I gritted my teeth and held onto my outright shares of GLD, the straight-up gold ETF, and GDX, the ETF comprised of gold-mining companies. And I bought a few more shares of GLD on the way down, but far too soon (169). I admit I started worrying that the bubble was popping, too, but those fears are past.

Does the chart above look like a bubble to you? I have added a 100-day simple moving average to the price of GLD over the past 3 years. Notice the double-top, with a high of 185, and the two days of down-gapping shortly afterward. But also notice that GLD stopped its free-fall at the 100-day trendline, and resumed the trend. That's not a bubble-pop, that's the start of the mania phase.

Here's another chart you might recognize, this time of the NASDAQ from 1996 through 2002. See how there are corrections back to the trendline throughout the 1990s? Some of them undoubtedly looked like The End at the time, but those corrections ended up looking like little squiggles in comparison to the mania phase starting in late 1999, and of course the multi-year sell-off afterward.

So I'm looking to buy dips in gold again, since I think we'll start another leg up in this market sometime around year-end. I've already bought some shares in GDXJ, an ETF comprised of smaller-cap mining companies, and some calls in GDX, expiring in January. Both are already priced higher than where I bought them, but I can't take credit for that -- it was just an effect of the risk-on-risk-off hokey-pokey the markets have been dancing since 2008. At the moment, we're putting a foot in, so all risky assets are going up. Later, we'll take it out, and they'll all fall again.

Why mining companies instead of gold itself? I mostly prefer to trade the metal on its own, so as to slightly reduce the vast number of variables acting on my investment, but we are entering Q3 earnings-reporting season. There will be a lot of bad news coming out of the tech industry (Google's blow-out notwithstanding), and a lot of good news coming out of the mining industry, as gold miners realize higher and higher prices for the more or less constant rate of supply they are pulling out of the ground. Also, mining companies have lagged behind gold prices during this bull market. If they close the gap, I'd like to be there to profit from it. And finally, dividends. Gold doesn't pay a dividend, but miners do. Consequently, I might look to buy a few outright shares of individual mining companies so as not to dilute my dividends through the GDX ETF.

I have some trades unrelated to gold in progress, too, but that's another post.

Another Flurry of Trades

Remember a couple of days ago I said I thought the stock market was overpriced and due for a correction?  Well I certainly didn't expect it so suddenly.  Since my blog post on 2-August, the S&P has shaved off 6% of its value, dipping as low as 1163.25 (futures) on an intraday basis.  This intraday low represents a -13% peak-to-trough return in the past month. Meanwhile gold rallied hard (at first), making me very glad I hadn't taken my entire call position off.  I had another flurry of trades the last couple of days, most of them defensive.

S&P 500 (proxied by SPY) since 1-Jan-2011

Yesterday, my GLD calls were close to triple the price I paid a few days prior.  I was working a 400% profit order on 25% of them to secure a profit and let me continue to ride the train as long as I could.  As they hit their high, rumors emerged that big London-based hedge funds were getting margin calls on their gold positions.  Our company's market analyst mumbled the announcement about the rumors (a frequent problem lately), and NeighborTrader and I thought he said that the CME was raising its margin requirements on gold futures.  Either way, gold immediately went into a hard sell-off, and I was reminded of what happened to silver when the CME raised its margin requirement a few months ago.  Now gold today is a very different market than silver then, but that wouldn't stop a mini-panic from pushing gold down and keeping it there until my calls expired worthless.  To control the cost of this possible outcome, I sold enough calls to guarantee a profit, getting a trade price only 4c below the high.  Immediately afterward, the calls sold off and are now trading 33% lower.  Whew!  I still hold a little less than half my initial position at about double my purchase price, and if I let it expire worthless I will still make 6% profit - enough to cover commissions.

Gold (proxied by GLD) since 1-Jan-2011

The day after SPY opened below its 200-day moving average, causing CS|MACO to close its long SPY position, the AAII released its weekly investor sentiment survey.  Over 10% of investors stopped being bullish this week, which was enough to get a Buy signal out of the CS component.  Buy + Flat = Buy, so yesterday I bought SPY back at 124.30, which seemed great at the time (it was 3.50/share lower than where I sold it), but isn't looking so wonderful now that SPY is trading at 120.

I was working target exit orders on both of my SPY put positions, which I mentioned in the previous post; I never dreamed both of them would fill yesterday, but then yesterday was an unusual day.  Despite making a combined 56% on those puts, by the end of the day I was kicking myself for not holding the second batch until the market stabilized.  I left a significant amount of money on the table: the position I sold for $7/share is now worth $10.50/share, and the one I sold for $6/share is now worth $8.25/share.  Sigh.  NeighborTrader pointed out that I can't always sell the high, and I suppose he's right.

Yesterday crude oil dropped by $5.50/barrel, or -6% *on the day*.  If you need any confirmation that the global economy is slowing into a new recession, this is it.  Demand for crude waxes and wanes based on industrial activity, and the capital markets are exceptionally good at predicting and magnifying changes in demand.  When crude sells off hard over several days, it's a very bearish economic signal.  On 26-July, crude oil futures hit a high of 100.62/barrel.  Today's low in crude was 82.87: -18% in less than 2 weeks, a very bearish signal indeed.  I had an order working to buy USO at $35, which was filled yesterday during the craziness.  I'll buy more when I think we're near the nadir of the recession.

Oil (proxied by USO) since 1-Jan-2011

After the massive sell-off yesterday, I came in this morning expecting:

1. a better than expected monthly payrolls number
2. a big number-driven rally in the stock market
3. a post-number sell-off to yesterday's close price or lower by the end of the day.

In fact I was so sure about this that I bought Nasdaq futures at about 7:15, 15 minutes before the number.

What happened was:

1. a better than expected payrolls number (+117k/9.1% vs expected +85k/9.2%)
2. a big number-driven rally (S&P rallied about 19 points, Dow rallied about 280)
3. the craziest roller coaster of a day I've seen since the Flash Crash; S&P has had a 60-point range, Dow has had a range of about 460 points.  It closed 3 points below yesterday's close.

I sold back my futures immediately after the number for a $430/contract profit.  It's nice to be right every once in a while, and it's even nicer to be able to make a little money doing it.

The final trade of the day today was that Xilinx (XLNX) sold off enough to hit my target exit on the put position I've had there for a while.  At last glance, I sold the high price of the day in that option market.  That doesn't really make up for the SPY puts, but it's a start.

A Bunch of Trades

This morning, the SPY opened below its 200-day moving average after flirting with it on an intraday basis for the past three sessions.  This signalled "Exit" in the MACO component of CS|MACO, and so I closed the long SPY position at the open for a price of 127.80.  I changed the entry criteria a few months ago after doing some backtesting, and under the updated rules, CS|MACO would have bought SPY back in September 2010 for around 112.  Unfortunately, in real life I can't go back in time, so the SPY position only yielded about $1/share due to its much more recent entry.

The CiG trade has seen me in and out of S&P Futures several times this last month as the stock market went through its daily gyrations.  The trades have mostly been profitable, but it has been a challenge to risk-manage the positions when the stock market has opened up and closed lower, or vice-versa.  This debt deal nonsense going on, coupled with the worrisome economic numbers coming out lately, has the market on edge.  CiG is long S&P and underwater right now, and not far from its stop-loss on the current position.  As a counter-trend-fade trade, CiG is always destined to get hurt when the long term trend reverses instead of simply correcting.  Times like this one are built into the profit expectation, which makes them easier to take.  I am actually using a small number of SPY calls as a proxy for S&P Futures this time around, because CiG called for a long position on Friday amidst swirling rumors about debt ceiling activities over the weekend.  Since stop-loss orders don't work on Saturday, I felt something with a defined maximum loss was a good idea.  I spent the same in premium as I would have lost with a stopped-out position, which lets me keep the trade on no matter what the market action... in exchange for lower profits, if I ever see any.

Speaking of on-edge markets, I bought some deep out-of-the-money calls on GLD during the height (so far) of the debt ceiling circus.  My reasoning was that if the talks really broke down and no deal was formed, then the country's debt rating would be immediately downgraded, the stock market would crash, the economy would head straight into recession again, and the Fed would pledge QE3 to try to policy our way out of this gigantic mess we created for ourselves.  Panic + money printing = inflation expectations + falling dollar, and Gold would climb a wall of worry.  Having some leverage on the only thing likely to rally in that environment would help control the bleeding in my portfolio.  This was (almost) a Black Swan trade, and now that the clowns in Washington are getting back into their tiny car, I'm working to exit the position, starting with getting out of about 25% of the contracts at a 20% profit today. Considering what else would have happened if this position made a lot of money, I'm pretty glad it didn't come to pass.  But with lowered profit expectations, I still should be able to deleverage for a nice profit on the trade.

Despite my taking my finger off the big red button, I still don't have high hopes for the economy. I think the stock market is terribly overvalued (when don't I?), and we are so close to slipping into another deep and painful recession right now that I feel like I need to protect myself against a big market sell-off.  Back in May I bought some puts on SPY, and then took a lot of heat on them.  I was OK with this, as I was more interested in catching a big long-term sell-off throughout the summer than in a small short-term correction in the late spring.  We have now closed below the 2011 lows (125.28 on March 16), so the puts are starting to fulfill their roles as portfolio hedges.

In the midst of all the other excitement going on the last month or two, I sort of forgot about the Iron Condor.  Luckily for me, I placed some target-profit exiting orders before I forgot about the position.  While I ignored the trade the Russell oscillated up and down, taking out my exit orders and then returning to nearly unchanged before I went and looked at it today.  So I discovered a half-sized, well-centered, and very profitable Iron Condor position when I finally bothered to look at it.  Since it had already depreciated past my target for the trade and most of the way toward maximum return, I went ahead and closed it out the rest of the way, opening an Oct 860/870/690/680 IC while I was at it.  This "forget it and get lucky" approach is not a good one, but it happened to work this time.

One trade that didn't work out as I'd hoped was Office Max (OMX), which reported earnings this morning before the stock market open.  Historically, the stock has done very poorly on earnings announcements, and they were only expected to break even in the latest quarter.  Between that and the general skittishness in the market, I felt puts on Office Max were a low-risk play with a high probability of an overnight profit.  This is similar to how I like to play Research in Motion (RIMM) around earnings.  Office Max beat expectations with a 7c/share profit, however, and OMX quickly rallied 18% on the open.  I took the loss on the puts and moved on.

Quick Position Run-Down

• I have a Wal-Mart bond as well as a couple of Illinois muni bonds to control my portfolio volatility.
• I have a long position in a commodity ETF (DJP), which is primarily energy, metals, and agriculture - this is a "China needs stuff" long-term investment.
• I still have a sizable position in GLD call options, as well as long-term holdings of GLD and GDX - to take advantage of this record-setting gold bull market and to partially protect against a market apocalypse.
• I have an investment-grade corporate bond ETF (LQD), which is designed to capture the strength of companies relative to people, without being directly correlated to the stock market.
• I have puts on SPY at both the 129 and 126 strike level; not a huge number, but enough to turn my trading screen green on ugly days like today.
• I have recently started accumulating exposure to oil via USO.  I've been watching crude-oil futures every day at work for months, and I feel like buying USO on big crude dips is a good idea.  I bought my first batch when oil dropped below $95/barrel, and I'll buy some more during the next recession.  Maybe a lot more, since this is also a long-term "China needs stuff" investment.
• I have puts on Xilinx (XLNX), and I'm working an order to close the position for a 125% profit.  This position has hung around longer than I would have liked, but it is finally starting to work itself out.  It started out as an earnings season pessimism trade and turned into a general bearish trending position.
• I am long the Canadian Dollar ETF (FXC), which I bought at par.  This is another US Dollar hedge, and I don't have a specific plan for when to close this position.
• I'm still long Microsoft (MSFT) from a long time ago.  I keep looking for opportunities to write covered calls or something against this position, but the collectable premium is so bad that I can't justify the risk of losing the stock at ex-div, even though the yield is only 2%.  I really need to unload the stock soon, though, as its membership in the DJIA guarantees a rough couple of years when the recession hits.  Mental note: get on this one.
• I have a small position in inflation-protected treasury bonds (TIP), as another hedge against inflation getting away from Uncle Ben.
• I also have a small position in Verizon (VZ).  I took half of it off a few months ago, and have been working a target exit ever since.  Meanwhile, the dividend yield on the stock is 5.5%, which is easy to procrastinate getting rid of.

CS|MACO... Finally!

Mea Culpa

First, I need to relate a painful but valuable lesson I learned last week.  In my previous post, I said that the CiG trade had fired a Buy signal on S&P Futures.  As a fade strategy, the CiG trade frequently signals trades that I view as bat-shit crazy.  It takes some teeth-gritting and reminding myself that this is fake money in order for me to be able to enter the trade sometimes.  Last Wednesday was one of those times.

I dutifully entered the trade, but I put a $500/contract stop-loss order in, instead of the $1000 that the script calls for.  I congratulated myself a couple of hours later when my stop-loss was hit, closing me out for a $500 loss, on saving the other $500 dollars.  Well... go look at a chart for S&P Futures.  My max unrealized loss that evening would have been about $700, and over the next two days we had a sizable rally.  By the time the exit signal arrived, the trade as designed would have been up over $2000/contract, a big return.  Instead, I was sitting on the sidelines with a $500 loss.  My "judgement", in this case, cost me a total of $2500/contract.  Ouch.

So why did I go against the trade as back-tested by NeighborTrader?  My rationale at the time was that this was a fundamental market move, and we were in uncharted territory that couldn't possibly be handled by back-testing.  OK, fair enough, and that's what judgement is for.  But I took the wrong action based on that judgement: instead of tightening my stop, which cut my max loss by 50% but increased my probability of experiencing that loss by far more than 100%, I should have opted not to place the trade at all.  If my comfort level with the risk is insufficient to execute the trade as designed, I should avoid the trade entirely - not cripple it and damn it to fail.

My conclusion was invalid, even if my assertion (these unprecedented times are likely to cause the trade not to work) was valid.  But what about my assertion?  If we want to look at unprecedented times, let's look at May 7, 2010, the day after the "Flash Crash" (I hate this term, by the way).  CiG would have similarly fired a Buy signal at the end of the day that day, and the exit signal would have come two trading days later, for a profit of over $2200/contract.  And here's the thing: NT back-tested this trade before May 7, 2010.  That's out-of-sample data, and thus can't be discarded as sample bias in his back-testing.

So my assertion -- unprecedented times invalidates the trade signal -- was invalid, and my conclusion on how to act on it -- tighten the stop -- was invalid as well.  Look, I'm not perfect, but if I had gotten either thing right, I'd feel a lot better about it.  Anyway, $2500 lesson learned: either follow the trade, or don't do the trade - don't adjust the trade on the fly based on my gut.

Oh, and you may recall me mentioning that "by rights, I should be short Ten Year Futures, too". That trade, if entered, would have made another $1250/contract over the course of three trading days.  Sigh.

CS|MACO

Last Wednesday night, not long after my stop-out, AAII's sentiment survey for March 17 was posted, and those inversely prophetic investors had some pretty negative things to say about the market.  Bullishness dropped all the way to 28.5%, just below the CS Buy signal level of 31.5.  With SPY trading between its 25SMA and its 200SMA, the MACO component was giving a hearty "meh" signal.  Buy + don't-care = Buy.  So I bought a unit of SPY the next morning... at 128.  SPY is still in MACO's "meh" territory, but up 1.66/share from my buy price; AAII publishes another weekly survey overnight tonight.  If my individual investor peers recognize the cessation of the downtrend last week and get more bullish ("bullisher"?), I might find myself selling SPY on the open tomorrow morning.  But they'll have to get a lot "bullisher" - 41.5% or more - for me to take my profits and go home.  We'll see.

General Thoughts

As regular readers of this blog know, I run multiple trades in my paperMoney account at ThinkOrSwim.  Besides the ones mentioned above, I also have a bullish NDX option vertical spread on to simulate a collar, a bearish SPX option vertical spread, an Iron Condor in RUT (Russell 2000) and naked-long SPY puts.  I'm also looking for a dip in gold to buy back some GLD calls, after having exited my March calls before expiration.  The problem that I am starting to run into is that I have too many trades on the stock market - and many of them are nearly perfectly inversely correlated.  The worst offenders are the bearish SPX and bullish NDX spreads.  CiG and CS|MACO only hold positions once in a while - but the option spreads are there all month long, every month.

This false diversification doesn't benefit me at all - if they were real trades I would be spinning my wheels spending commission on an expectation of about 0 profit.  In a paperMoney account, this isn't so bad, because I can use the excuse that I am looking for profitable trades: the unprofitable ones will never "go pro" into a real money account.  But this is kind of a hollow argument, because any of these trades can be profitable or unprofitable, depending on the market conditions.

This issue bears more consideration.

And a Micro Rant

"They", whoever they are, changed the Nasdaq-100 ETF's symbol from QQQQ to QQQ last night.  WTF???  Didn't they just change it from QQQ to QQQQ a few years ago?  Make up your minds!

Keep Your Head Back

Let's lead this one with a chart, courtesy of BigCharts.com.  I'm using SPY here as a proxy for the S&P 500... mostly because I couldn't figure out how to hide the volume, and the index's volume is empty and boring.  The shape is the same, so it doesn't matter.  It looks a lot like the first 60 seconds on an awesome roller coaster.

Let's put this in perspective.  This is a 6-month chart, so it goes back through mid-September.  SPY was somewhere around 112 back then, and it closed at 126.xx today.  That's a 12.5% return over 6 months, or 25% annualized.  Wow, what a great stock market!  OK, yes, from the high of 134.xx one month ago on February 18, SPY is down 6%, or 72% annualized -- but of course if you really think it's going to continue at this pace for 11 more months, I have some swampland to sell you.  But let's look at the last month, shall we?

• Major unrest in the Middle East, including full-scale revolt in many of our oil suppliers, has caused Crude Oil futures to shoot up above $100/bbl (only $98/bbl today - what a bargain): well into production-drag territory;
• Japan suffered the worst earthquake in... what? forever? a long freaking time, anyway, and its nuclear plants are about to unleash a glowing hell on the Pacific Rim;
• The festering pimples in the European economy are starting to look like they're about to pop one after another: Ireland, Portugal, Greece, etc;
• The Federal Reserve's credibility is finally starting to be questioned, and major indications have started surfacing that inflation will be a bigger problem than people have been assuming;
• And Charlie Sheen, OMG.

Watching the activity in the market on Feb 23, I started worrying that we were about to see another Flash-Crash-type event.  The spreads were widening and the markets were looking really jittery.  I bought some puts on SPY, expiring in April.  I still have them, and I see no reason to sell them just yet.  I also have a bullish option spread that simulates a collar in NDX.  It's pretty deep underwater (duh), but this is a continuation of the collar trade I've been running for a long time, and I won't be changing it now.

Besides the stock market, what have been the other financial effects over the last month or so?  And just for fun, I'll talk about my activities where appropriate.

• The Canadian Dollar roared up and then slunk back, since the Fed-bashing started early on, but the flight-to-quality has taken over the last few days.
• I bought FXC (the Canadian Dollar ETF) today.
• The Ten Year Note, in a strong downtrend at the end of the year and trading sideways-to-down through mid-February, suddenly pointed its nose at the sky as of the end of last week and turned on the after-burners.
• By rights, the CiG trade should be short the ten-year note futures, but I opted for buying S&P futures instead, reasoning that the return on S&P should be more extreme than on Ten Years.  I was right.  I bought S&P on the close, and was just stopped out for my max loss a moment ago.
• Crude Oil futures traded as high as $107/bbl on March 7, and are back down to $97/bbl now in a pretty (but meaningless) isosceles triangle pattern on the chart.  Daily ranges expanded big-time, as the market tried to constantly adjust to unfolding events in the Middle East.  It's back down now mostly on Dollar strength, I think, but 97 is still far above the 85 it started from in February.
• Agriculture futures (corn, wheat, soybeans) all have the same triangle pattern as Crude Oil, without the big gap-up at the beginning.  Again, USD strength as everyone runs like hell into something "safe".
• I hold DJP, which is a commodity ETF which holds 33% energy, 30% agriculture, and 31% metals.  This is a long-term play against the USD that I put on back in January.  I have no interest in selling it at this point -- I only wish I'd bought a long time ago.
• Gold has traded pretty sideways recently, victim of the risk-on/risk-off tug-of-war that's been going on since Charlie Sheen started distracting us from trivial Middle Eastern matters.
• I've had big gold positions on for a long time, and just today I sold some calls that are due to expire on Friday, taking a small loss.  When the nuclear crisis in Japan finally settles down, I'll buy some more, because the dollar will suddenly seem like a bad idea again.

Oh, I also had a bullish option spread on SPX that I liquidated today for just about max-loss.  Option spreads are great because they let you define your max profit-loss range and sleep well knowing that you will neither make nor lose more than that range.  I had been fighting the uptrend in the stock market for 6 months, and finally capitulated with this option spread.  I told myself when I suffered a loss I would reverse direction and start doing bearish spreads instead.  That's tomorrow's trade.

Trade Catchup

Iron Condor
This month I did something I swore I wouldn't do: I rode an iron condor position all the way to expiry.  Almost daily I took a good hard look at the position, and just didn't see a reason to close it.  It was somewhat underwater and getting worse as the gamma spiked up, but it wasn't through any of the strikes yet.  I reasoned that the increased loss incurred after the short strike went into the money didn't outweigh, on probability-weighted terms, the near-instant profit up to max I stood to make if it settled where it traded nearly all week last week.  If I had seen an inkling of a bullish follow-through in the Russell (my IC index), things would have been different.

I would have much preferred to get out of the IC early like I usually do, but it was a headache the whole way this month, trending up like crazy and refusing to give me any pullbacks to use for exiting opportunities.  Until the last week before expiry, that is.

With the market sell-off last week, we had a minor RVX spike, which I took advantage of by initiating the March condor position on Thursday.  I never did open a February position - January was keeping me busy, and the implied volatility was crappy.  March is already proving to be better than January, in that yesterday the call spreads inexplicably were priced at only a little higher than half what I sold them for.  I covered a couple of them, leaving most of the rest on.  March's strikes are 690/700/860/870, and they generated 2.35/contract in income when opened.

CiG
The big news is that the Collaboration is Good trade fired a buy signal on gold futures yesterday at the close.  Gold has had an ugly 3-week sell-off, and honestly I was starting to be concerned about my other gold positions in GLD, GDX, AEM, and GLD calls.  Gold futures have a $6750 margin requirement per contract, so I was glad this trade was in the paperMoney account, saving myself some sleep. Also, buying a gold futures contract after a 100-point sell-off would be a lot tougher in a real-money account, especially since with a contract size of 100oz, I'm looking at $100 per point per contract.  That's a lot of leverage: 100 oz of gold, with a street value of more than $130,000, for $6750.

Today the position started about 5pts in the red and continued to slide, bottoming out at about -7pts before gold suddenly started to go parabolic on an intraday basis before the FOMC announcement at 1:15 CST.  By the close, a profit-exit signal had fired, and I closed the position with a nice $1100 profit.  It rallied so hard during and after FOMC that it started to encourage me about my other gold positions.  A good hard rally after a CiG buy signal, historically, seems to result in some follow-through.

NeighborTrader, who was running this with real actual money, claimed he was going home to vomit into a trash can after closing his position this afternoon.   Sounds like it's time to increase the size...

Earnings Plays
Microsoft and Starbucks announce earnings this week: Microsoft tomorrow and Starbucks as I write this.  I have a sizable Microsoft position already, so I bought some puts on it as a hedge in case the stock slides after the announcement.  On the other hand, I have no position in Starbucks stock - but I have a natural short position in their products (nerdy trading humor, meaning I drink a lot of their coffee).  The market has been room-temperature on Starbucks for some time (insert more nerdy humor about room-temperature coffee here, if you like), and I recently saw some compelling arguments why a good report should send the stock higher overnight, so I bought some calls.  The conference call is still going on, but the numbers are out: Starbucks beat estimates and jumped its income by 44% this quarter, so of course the stock immediately slumped by 2.5% after losing 1% throughout the trading day.  Apparently they didn't raise their guidance enough to make everyone happy.

Oh well.

How should I root for Microsoft tomorrow?  Should I root for bad news, making a lot of money on the puts while watching my Microsoft position suffer?  Yeah, that's probably the best play, because I can use the profit from the puts to buy more stock at bargain prices.  Microsoft is a money-generating machine, and its stock price just makes no sense.

Collar
The most boring trade in my portfolio, the Nasdaq Collar, saw its covered call for January expire worthless last weekend, and I opened a new covered call position for February with a strike of 58.  Ho-hum.

So Much For That Plan

Gold for Cash
In my last post, just two days ago, I briefly outlined my plan for disposing of my GLD Dec calls.  I said that I wanted to hit a price or time target, and when either thing happened I was out.  Of course the very next day gold prices dropped 3%, and then another 2% today, wiping out 20% of the value of my calls.  I'm not quite sure what's going on, but that was outside my comfort zone, and I dumped the calls today for quite a lot less than I planned.  Now that I'm out, I'll detail my price/time limits a little more.

I bought the then-ATM calls over the summer for $5/share of GLD, believing that gold would appreciate in the fall.  Boy did it, and it wasn't long before I was able to sell less than half of them for about $11/share.  That took my initial investment off the table, and I kept the rest riding.  I saw them reach somewhere around $17/share at their high, and I had a price target of $25/share to get out of the rest.  That was pretty aggressive, but I also had a time limit.

Uncomfortable, as I said on Tuesday, with the many small indications of a coming correction in gold, I wanted out soon.  I think most people are idiots (see the CS part of the CS+MACO trade), and when everyone's bullish, it's time to sell.  Worse, literally the whole world is hanging on QE2-related verbiage expected in the minutes from the FOMC's meeting on November 2 & 3.  That economic release is doomed: QE2 is already fully priced in, and all the Fed can do now is disappoint.  At the very least, all the IV comes out of the options after the announcement because the inflection point will have passed.  I definitely wanted out by Nov 2.

I have assumed for quite some time that I am riding a bubble forming in gold, and I swore that unlike the turn-of-the-century tech bubble, I would neither miss the run-up nor hang on for dear life during the pop.  That's why I have been in and out of leveraged gold positions via calls for the last year or so, and that's why I'll get back in after the mid-bubble correction makes everyone hate gold again.  I'm pretty bummed that I gave up so much of my profits by dumping today, but I still made about 150% on the trade since August, so I have no major complaints.

Speaking of CS+MACO...
Adding to the bearish signals this week, AAII published its survey results yesterday after the close: more people are bullish again.  With the CS portion screaming "sell!" and the MACO portion insisting "buy!", CS+MACO is still flat and will stay there for at least another week.

Assorted Trades

Iron Condor
On Friday, I decided to add a little up-side protection to my December Iron Condor.  I'm trying to act when delta starts getting out of whack, and after a few days of stock market rallies the Dec IC was looking at a delta of about -20.  Sadly I can't be more precise on this because I forgot to jot it down (mental hand-slap).  Anyway, I decided the adjustment that made the most sense was to buy a Dec 760 call.  With my IC strikes at 610/620/770/780, this puts the naked-long call just one strike below my short call.  This adjustment brought my delta up to about +4 as of now, and didn't hurt the theta too much - still nearly 21.  It cost me 9.50, which is a big chunk of change, but I expect it to be the only upside adjustment I'll need to make to this position.

Until I come up with a better solution than Excel, unfortunately I can only display value-at-expiry.  Trust me when I say that current portfolio value is a lot curvier and much more attractive than this.

QQQQ Collar
Also on Friday, my October covered call on QQQQ as part of the collar trade expired in the money and I was assigned on the call.  Pursuant to the rules I set forth in September, I bought QQQQ back this morning at 51.50 and sold calls against it with a strike price of 53 for 56c.  Here are those rules again, since I keep having to search Facebook Notes for the numbers:

1. Monthly calls to be about 3%, and no less than 2.5%, out of the money.
2. 6-month put to be 8% out of the money.
3. No rolling prior to expiry.

Gold Leverage
I am still long-term bullish on gold, and I express that by being long GLD, GDX, and AEM.  I also currently have some Dec calls on GLD that are so profitable that I have sold off enough to cover my original investment and the remainder are worth almost twice what I paid for the whole stack.  Nevertheless, I'm becoming concerned with the borderline irrational expectations for QE2 lately, so I'm ready to take some profits.  I started working a fairly distant sell order on the rest of my GLD calls this morning.  Hopefully it will reach my target price and I'll exit there, but I also have a time limit on this trade; I'll exit when that time limit expires regardless of the price action.

A Little Free Advertising

I think some background might be useful before I jump into trade journal activities.  Most of the trades I will describe on this blog are being done in Think or Swim's paperMoney platform.  A few might be done with real money, and I hope that someday the realMoney/paperMoney ratio will increase.  But I have no intention to specify which ones are real and which ones are fake: my actual personal trading activities in the real market risking real capital are not something I want to put on the internet.  Likewise I don't plan to be very specific about position sizes or prices except where they are necessary to understand what I'm doing.  There also won't be profit/loss numbers.

There are two big reasons for not being very specific about these things.  The primary one is privacy: if I talk about my trading sizes, profit/loss, or which trades are real or fake, I give away personal financial information.  Additionally, though, I don't want anyone mimicking my trades.  If I wanted to be an investment advisor I would go off and get certified, and make a lot of money doing that.  Trades described in this blog are intended to be general ideas open for discussion, and they are certainly not recommendations or advice.  See that little disclaimer right under the title bar?  Yeah.  So if you're looking for stock tips, picks, predictions, or strategies, move along now and don't come back.  If you want to read about my own personal thrills and spills in the marketplace and interact with me about what I learn along the way, welcome.

In any case, assume that all positions are held in my paperMoney account (not real money).

So here's a little commentary about this thing called paperMoney, of which I am a huge fan.  Think or Swim has an interactive trading front-end written in Java.  This is great for me because I made the Windows-to-Linux switch about 18 months ago and I get kind of pissed off when I have to run a VM just to run a piece of software.  ToS's front-end is fully featured, providing charts, stock screening, real-time news feeds, trading grids, account/position management information, etc.  You hook it up to your trading account at thinkorswim.com and you're good to go: any trade you do goes against your buying power in the account and shows up both on your statements and in the front-end.

When you first connect, you choose between realMoney and paperMoney.  I have personally never used ToS's front-end for real-money trading - only paperMoney.  But from what I understand, paperMoney is exactly the same software except for two very important features: 1) trades in paperMoney don't actually make or lose you real money; and 2) market prices seen in the front-end under paperMoney are 20 minutes behind.  I'm sure that ToS does this because of republishing and licensing agreements with the exchanges providing the market data in the first place.  Another minor difference is that you start with $100k in your paperMoney account - I have no idea what you do if you go broke and hopefully I won't find out - so there is no depositing to do.  And execution is occasionally a little strange: ToS fills your limit order based on mid-prices instead of actual price action.  This is the best of a bunch of compromise approaches, in my opinion.  But you do sometimes get kind of a weird fill.  On May 6 (Flash Crash day), I had some limit orders working to exit some positions at ridiculous prices just so that I wouldn't forget about them, and they got filled at even better prices than I had specified.  What should have had a max-$2000 profit based on the option strategy ended up netting me $25k.  If only it was real...

The front-end is really well-tailored to options trading, which is why I selected it in the first place.  One of the screens shows position valuation graphs that can be played around with to examine the effects of underlying changes, delta changes, time, vega, etc etc.  Simulated trades can also be applied to positions from there so that an informed decision can be made before submitting the order.  I spend a lot of time on that screen before making adjustments.

I'm not sure how protective TD Ameritrade (owners of Think or Swim) are about screenshots and whatnot, so I won't post any here.  But check out thinkorswim.com and read all about it, if you haven't ever looked at their platform.  I'm really impressed with the software for having most of what I want in it, and I'm also really impressed at their willingness to let me paper-trade indefinitely without ever depositing any money.  That sort of accommodation shows confidence that their software is so good that I will still want to use it when/if I transition to a real-money option trader.  And that, my friends, is rare.

I sold some December 2010 calls on GLD today, taking my initial investment off the table.  My remaining position is all profit.  I did this today because of the fantastic run-up GLD has had over the past two months; some consolidation is due, and maybe a correction, so it seems like a good idea to reduce my risk and lock in a floor on my return.  Another reason is that the trader that sits next to me at work (we'll call him NeighborTrader, or NT) reported this morning that when he loaded up yahoo.com he noticed that the phrase "gold prices" was at the top of the Trending Now list.  That's a sign of a short-term top if I ever heard one.  It's a good time to hold a call option on my call position.

When NT's Iowa-residing grandfather asks about investing in gold, I'll sell the rest.