I charted the NASDAQ NMS Composite Index ($COMP) for the past year’s daily price action ending August 29th, 2008. At a glance this chart could look like it’s leaning bullish, but when you zero in on some details that bull might not be a good buy. At a glance you could see that the Naz broke…
Book Review: Profit From The Peak
Wiley Publishing sent me a copy of Profit from the Peak a couple of months ago and I finally finished reading it while on vacation a couple of weeks ago. The short review of Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder’s work is that it’s a good book and worth the read for anyone investing actively now and anyone who…
Natural Gas and Oil Are Up on Gustav
It took a month since I first said it, but natural gas and oil are up nicely recently on hurricanes Fay and Gustav. I can’t remember a summer/fall season where there wasn’t a scare that pushed prices up, at least temporarily. The big question will be how long this spike in prices last. I’m sitting…
Investing Motivation
I haven’t had a real motivation to invest much lately. This hits me occasionally. Sometimes I try to force myself through it. That typically ends in some bad trades and stupid losses. This time I’ve had enough on the table already that I didn’t feel that nagging need to trade to keep the cash flow…
S&P 500 Chart – August 22, 2008
My Sunday series of index charts continues today with the S&P 500 ($SPX). This time I took a shorter view and only went back three months to see a daily view of the price changes. The SPX is getting to an interesting place in its trend line movement. The longer term downward trend of lower…
Sold Second Leg of Alcoa (AA) Option Strangle
I’m on a roll with selling strangles lately. I’ve sold one on CHK, TDW and today I did the same on AA. None of these is a pure strangle since I’m long the stock too, but that’s probably the best short description. The biggest difference is that I have more “positive delta” (measurement of the…
Sold New MON Naked Put
After buying back my Monsanto (MON) naked put on Friday, I spent some time trying to pick my strike for a new naked put. I decided to keep my risk lower although it reduced my potential profit decently. While MON was trading at $110.20 within the first minute of trading today my limit order hit and…
Sold an Options Strangle on TDW
After my 100 shares of Tidewater (TDW) closed below my covered call stike on Friday I decided to sell new covered calls while at the same time selling new naked puts at a lower strike. While TDW was trading at $55.68 I sold one TDW October 55 covered call in the money and received $379.25 after commissions. I followed…
Option Expiration – August 2008
This is how my August options closed on Friday along with my plans for these same equities moving forward. AAPL closed at $175.74 leaving my August 155 naked puts out of the money (OTM) and giving me a full profit. I plan to write a new naked put on AAPL when it takes another dip. I haven’t picked…