This week has been busy for me. I had a lot of option expire for clients last Friday and spent some time in the first part of the week repositioning their holdings and by the second half of the week I was glued to the Tour de France. I know, not a money maker for…
Author: Alex Fotopoulos
Dow Jones Chart – The Waiting Game
I charted daily prices for the past year on the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DJIA, $INDU, $DJI) after it closed on Friday, July 15, 2011 at 12,479.73. The DJIA came close to its multi-year high a little over a week ago, but failed to get all of the way up there. This creates the second…
Options Expiration – July 2011
Options expiration was mixed again for me this month. I only had four options expire today on three underlying stocks/ETFs – UWM, UCO and AFL. Starting with the good, two of my naked puts expired worthless. On the other side one of my naked puts expired in the money which also left the covered call…
Added January UCO Naked Put
This morning I was looking at my TD Ameritrade (AMTD) account and started thinking that I had some more room to add exposure there since the LEAPS I sold months ago are far from being assigned. I don’t have a lot of cash available in that account so I turned to UCO knowing that I…
S&P 500 Chart – July 8, 2011
I charted a little more than the past eight months of the S&P 500’s ($SPX) daily prices after it finished the week at 1,343.80 on Friday, July 8, 2011. After ripping higher from the floor set by the rising 200 day moving average (dma) the SPX looked like it was going to be on a…
2011 Stock Picks Contest – Q2 Update
It’s that time of year again. The end of the quarter calls for another update to our 2011 stock picking contest. My all out bullish picks looked like they were going to be in danger for a while and I started slipping in the ranks, but the last four days of the quarter helped me immensely. My…
Dow Jones Chart – July 1, 2011
I charted daily prices for the past three months on the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($DJIA, $INDU, $DJI) after it closed on Friday, July 1, 2011 at 12,582.77. This past week was huge for the Dow. Not only did it pull out a weekly return of more than 5%, it brought out a handful green…
End of the Month Summary – June 2011
June finished its seventh year in a row as a losing month for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This helped me gain back some footing on the major indices for most of the month and even pushed me ahead of them briefly, but the final four days of the month saw such a big rally…
Added More Large Cap Exposure
While the markets were on a steady slide lower since the beginning of May I let my overall equity exposure slip away some. This was nice on the way down, but with what I see as limited downside remaining I’ve started to build my exposure up again with shorter dated options. I spent some time…