Sometimes patience pays off and sometimes it causes you to miss a trade. I was looking at Ford ($F) last week when I saw it come off its lows and move above its 10 and 20-day moving averages. I thought it might see resistance at its 200-day moving average, but it didn’t and I realized…
S&P 500 Chart – January 10, 2014
The chart below shows the daily prices for the past six months on the S&P 500 index ($SPX) after the index closed at 1,842.37 on Friday, January 10, 2014. The sideways movement over the first seven days of the year has given the 20-sma time to draw in closer to the 10-sma. If the index moves…
A Nibble on UCO
I’m so far underinvested right now that I caught myself looking for anything that I could reason to be a good trade. The risk seems greater in the near-term to me than the option premiums are offering on most index ETFs. That’s keeping me away from selling new puts on my recent standard ETFs. DIS…
DJIA Chart – 2013 Review and 2014 Prediction
I charted the daily prices for the past year on the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DJIA, $INDU, $DJI, the Dow) after the index closed for the month at 16,469.99 on Friday, January 3, 2014. The index fell as low as its 10-day simple moving average (sma), but hasn’t fallen below it yet. When it does, which…
Closed Low-Premium Naked Puts
Today gave us another boring day for stocks. At the open, it looked like we might see a bounce off of yesterday’s drop, but it didn’t take the bears long to overtake the bulls again (or at least bring get them in check). Most of the day traded around breakeven for the S&P 500 and…
End of the Year Summary – 2013
2013 was a great year to be an investor. Stocks barely made a move off of their recurring new highs throughout the year, which made it hard not to make money, even for those who sold on dips instead of bought on dips. Every year I question whether or not it’s wise for me to…
Options Expiration – December 2013
The final options expiration for my year is going out with a whimper. I only had one option contract remaining and it’s nearly $15 out-of-the-money. My MDY December $125 naked put was the position I thought about closing over the past couple of weeks for $0.10 and then it went up to $0.50+ before calming…
Rolled My Leveraged Naked Puts
I had two different January leveraged ETF puts going into today that had limited upside potential. The downside risk was still there in case a black swan event hit. So, I thought I should roll these out and up with diagonal spreads to increase my potential profit in the coming months. The underlying ETFs were…
End of Month Summary – November 2013
November surprised me a little. Stocks had a better gain than I expected and only the shallowest of dips with no spikes in volatility. In hindsight, I should’ve been more aggressive. Since I kept a safer stance, I trailed the indexes again. It’s hard to complain about a month where I earned more than 1.65%….