If only all months could be like July! I thought I was going to report that July was one of the best months I’ve ever had, but when I looked back at the past 12 months, July 2013 ranked third. Still, it was a very good month as both oil and stocks rose while I…
Author: Alex Fotopoulos
Sold FEZ Naked Puts
A few days ago, I mentioned I was interested in adding some international exposure again. I didn’t want to go back with EEM, my previous go-to international play that focused on emerging markets. I expect Europe to outperform emerging markets as the EU recovery begins. I weighed a few EU ETFs and settled on FEZ….
Return to Mid-Caps
I let my last mid-cap exposure expire with my February put option spread. Until I started writing this, I didn’t realize that I had not gotten back in since then. In fact, I didn’t believe it had been so long and searched my notes and then Quicken because I was so surprised. I’ve certainly had…
Dow Jones Chart – Calm Before the Storm
I charted the daily prices for the year-to-date on the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DJIA, $INDU, $DJI, the Dow) after the index closed for the week at 15,558.83 on Friday, July 26, 2013. The 20-dma moved above the 50-dma a few days ago and that’s a bullish signal, but it may be late in the cycle as…
Sold UCO Ratio Put Spread
After finishing my long series of UCO trades with a profit last week, I’ve been trying to re-enter my exposure to oil. The price got a little ahead of itself and there was no way I was going to make this mistake of chasing it with high strike naked puts while WTI Crude is trading…
Options Expiration – July 2013
For as much money as I had in options expiring today, it was very quiet all week. The bulk of my options today were on UCO. The only one that wasn’t on UCO was on IWM. Here’s how they played out. I had three IWM July $95 naked puts that finished far out of the…
Moving Forward – IWM, DIS & T
My account is at a high for the year and has some more room to move higher before next week’s options expiration. I have less than 1.5% to gain in my account over the next 5 2/3 months to hit my full year target. As I’ve been writing about for months, I’ve had a lot…
S&P Chart – Can It Last?
I charted the daily prices for the past three months on the S&P 500 index ($SPX) after the index closed at 1,631.89 on Friday, July 5, 2013. The move lower was foreshadowed by the break in the Williams %R indicator. The 14-day indicator showed a break below overbought, which shows short-term sentiment has changed. This was…
Account Clean-Up: UWM & UCO
I entered limit orders early in the week to clean-up my account some by closing out some positions that had very little time value left in them. Both of those orders hit today near the open and I freed up some more cash for new trades. After the jobs data came out and the futures…