Wednesday, December 1, 2010

12/1/10 Locked In A Prison Of Your Own Devise



How many times have I wished I'd locked positions into a cell and thrown away the key? It's been about two weeks since going cold turkey on day trading, the only trades being additions to the long side. Trading around the positions would have been profitable, but would also have locked me out of any overnight gaps. For now, I'm finding it easier to keep my eyes on a more distant horizon, and close the ticker screens during the day.

58 comments:

  1. Re: Locked In A Prison Of Your Own Devise
    Submitted by Ron Sen (598 comments) on Wed, 12/01/2010 - 08:58 #75167 (in reply to #75165)
    The "handcuff trade"

    http://chartsgonewild.com/2010/08/19/the-four-stag...

    http://weeklyta.blogspot.com/2009_03_22_archive.html

    I'd be worried about Takotsubo Syndrome...stress cardiomyopathy
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takotsubo_cardiomyopathy

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  2. Re: Locked In A Prison Of Your Own Devise
    Submitted by 2nd_ave (5011 comments) on Wed, 12/01/2010 - 09:16 #75170 (in reply to #75167)
    Ron- Too funny.

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  3. today is gonna be an ugly open for me. i'm thankful (1) I'm only 40% short with BGU as a hedge to boot and (2) that I'm willing to take this as a learning experience.

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  4. Holy shit, I'm actually UP in my main trading account, thanks to NFLX easing off, IBKC jumping up and BGU spiking.

    Why didn't I hold BYD!?!?!

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  5. TOF

    go redf!

    and be glad you aren't holding apwr. I used to have that one . glad i don't anymore!

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  6. vb - yeah i saw REDF spiking this morning. i'm disgusted with what they did with their founder's side biz...ain't touching that until / if i see some honesty/signs of improvment.

    So I sold BGU just as SPY hit 1,200. took that hedge off. I kept my terrible trades in BGZ and TYP. I added a few more NFLX puts at $208ish so my avg is now down to $3.9 (vs $3.25 current bid). Still holding on to my 1 x CRM Jan Put and long IBKC.

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  7. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
    In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

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  8. i know i'm jynxing myself but the one leverage position i took a short in via puts is the only one down on my list....and the winner is: NFLX!

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  9. Sold my BGZ and TYP...dumb, dumb, dumb trade. Oh well. On to the next one.

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  10. my sales of my ultra shorts was poorly timed...i figured we had 1,200 behind us. lets see. i'm mostly watching from the sides and letting prices fall where they may. NFLX looks quite weak.

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  11. **were** poorly timed :)

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  12. Looks like there was some early concerns about the collars PXP entered. I thought really had about getting back in on the weakness, but couldn't really make heads or tails of them. My bad.

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  13. BAC - Needs to recapture and hold $11.17

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  14. Debt panel - Sounds like something from Nazi Germany.

    US should double gasoline taxes? Are these guys serious, how about cutting back on wasteful government spending, why isn't this a larger proportion of the consideration?

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  15. david - i hope you're not as ignorant as me in holding on to your short CRM. i only have 1 put in it, but i am down $170 on that put alone. i'm going to hold since it expires in January. i find it hard to understand how people buying stock now in this, NFLX, CMG can honestly do it with the idea in mind that it's undervalued. i guess that explains why 20% of the shares outstanding in NFLX were flipped yesterday. hardly anyone is holding it for more than a few days. certainly not the insiders...look at the CEO sales of CRM. dude is selling $1 Million worth of stock each and every day. must be nice...

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  16. Hey Mark - did you ever check out Infinity Futures? I've added the 6B (pound/usd) futures contract now. Actually really only trading 6E and 6B, the action in the ES has been unreadable (at least by me).

    On a more hopeful note; any cruise ships missing at sea????

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  17. Hi Guys - I'm not short CRM, never have been. They could be on the verge on announcing a massive deal at HPQ, tossing at ORCL. By all "normal" measures the stock is out of control but my guess is that someone like IBM comes in a grabs them

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  18. U$D chart - Man, that sure was an obvious place for a reversal, too obvious!

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  19. jb - that's possible but who is going to pay 80 times free cash flow? a buyer would have to pay like $25 Billion for the company and based on cash flow, they wouldn't get their money back in 100 years. FCF would have to skyrocket higher to make it a worthwhile investment.

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  20. ATNI - Direct approach on runway sinful, maintain course...

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  21. CRM - BACML rates it a buy still, I'll download their latest report for a look-see.

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  22. GM - Where'd they get their electrical engineers, China?

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  23. Wow, what a move today! Congrats 2nd. I completely missed this.

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  24. Took my loss on my CRM put. Lost $180. Still holding on to my NFLX puts, which are actually doing ok, and considering adding to my IBKC and re-entering BAC.

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  25. NFLX finally starting to crack. Woohoo!

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  26. I lost track of how many times each one of my three holding have slipped back and forth between red and green.

    Just not getting that warm-fuzzy feeling yet...

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  27. cp - not to worry man...NASA has been using your tax dollars to figure it all out. The aliens are coming to help us trade this market...

    http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html

    Just in the nick of time too IMHO...

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  28. NASA - Right, another stupendous breakthrough no doubt, maybe they should focus just a little more attention on understanding the biology of earth's oceans for a change, as opposed to the all out effort of mapping every biological dessert in space (a complete vacuum). Notice their colorful photographs? There's no color visible to the human eye out there, they have to doctor those photos to justify their own existence.

    No, NASA has always been about maintaining a military presence in space, now we need to double gasoline taxes in order to line the pockets of contractors who sell them $10,000 toilet seats.

    They get no sympathy from me until they puke up something useful like an infinite alternative energy source, otherwise they remain part of the problem.

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  29. TOF, as I posted before, I decided to approach shorting CRM in a purely technical manner: I set a sell short stop order below a 2-day support I saw on the intraday chart, and as soon as that support was broken and my order was triggered, I invoked the "supreme rule of trading" of not letting profit turn into a loss and placed a buy to cover stop order at my entry price ($142). This morning my stop was triggered and I am out of that position flat.

    However, CRM is now on my watch list, with yesterday's close at $139.22 acting as the next support level in my mind. So I might place a sell short stop order at $139 if I see market weakness again.

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  30. REDF came back to life today! I bought 1000 shares at $3 and today it hit my sell limit order at $3.50 for 500 shares. I decided to take a full profit on that trade and just sold the other 500 shares at $3.68, for a total profit of $590. Now I just have my "nominal" core position of 500 shares that I purchased at $3.40.

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  31. APWR - Financing failure for proposed Texas wind farm.

    Strike 12 for alternative energy.

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  32. Hey bro...No, I haven't checked it out yet. Maybe this winter when I have some more time. No word yet from the pirates I contracted. I damn near slammed you yesterday on SOH bashing my beloved BAC. Careful...next time I'll rain a world of pain upon you ;)

    Yep, sure as shit, I should have gotten back in UCO yesterday AH. What a wuss.

    I am pleased to see MMR up 3.6% so far. BAC seems to be catching a bid, finally.

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  33. Screw it...sold all of my NFLX puts. I just saw that pumper Cramer is going to be featuring them on his show tonight so I would rather wait for another spike up before buying puts again. So I sold all of my puts for a 12% gain. Sold them at $4.4 (bought for $3.92 avg). Not bad. I had to take on too much risk, though, just to get the position above water.

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  34. I could see MMR going to 15.44 today. I talked to MOG about this one today. He likes it. IF crude runs like he expects, MMR would be a leveraged winner as it's assets have the most potential for expansion. Can't believe I'm back in the Gulf. Feels like home.

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  35. See that there might not be much of a bounce in NFLX given how weak it has been all day today, I decided to re-enter a put position. However, this time, I put on a smaller position and used strike prices closer to the current price and also further out. I bought the following:

    3 x Dec $200 Puts at $8.70
    1 x Jan $200 Put at $15.40.

    I believe Netflix is the most overvalued stock in the market and if it gets a boost tomorrow at the open because of Cramer, I will be using the strength to add to my put position. The massive amount of bandwidth they're using is going to cause them to have much higher operating costs going forward and that is not priced into the stock. The spat with Comcast just over the past day or two is just the beginning. Their free cash flow has been dwindling the past few quarters and I don't think anyone is pricing this in the stock.

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  36. Actually I decided to add 2 more Jan $200 Puts at $15.6. I now have a pretty large put position in the company (about $6k) so I will probably buy a few calls that expire on Friday in the event anything crazy happens between now and then.

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  37. Usually what happens with Cramer is he pumps it, it jumps 10% AH, then the pros off it the next day for a loss.

    FF

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  38. The 1 month intraday price chart for ESLR gives me a feeling that the price decline has lost its momentum and ESLR might be ready for another bounce. I just placed a buy limit order for 10000 shares at $0.77, with the intention of stopping myself out if it breaks below $0.75, which to me seems like a support on the 5-day intraday chart.

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  39. That buy limit order for ESLR was just executed. Let's see how this trade works out. If ESLR hits $0.75, then I might sell just 8000 shares and leave the other 2000 for the long term, as a replacement for the 2000 shares I sold at $1.09 in October when ESLR spiked to that level.

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  40. So far, for the past 6 months, the ESLR chart looks exactly like REDF chart: a flat section, then a major spike up, then decline for some time and then another spike up from the level that is slightly below the previous flat section. ESLR now has reached that level of being slightly above the previous flat section, and if it behaves like REDF, then it should spike up in a short order.

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  41. I decided to place a sell limit order at $4.40 for my last 500 shares of REDF I bought at $3.40, so as to book another $500 in profit and forget about that crazy stock.

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  42. BAC - I'd say that was a step in the right direction, keeping an ear on the track here for potential Beijing tightening...

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  43. "26-Nov-10 06:23AM Rediff.com Announces Results of Extra-ordinary General Meeting"

    So today was an extra-ordinary delayed reaction?

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  44. Speaking of India, does anyone know how their economy's doing lately? Inflation?

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  45. "In the complicated cocktail of policies China has pursued in recent weeks to tackle an unwanted burst of inflation, one ingredient has been missing: a stronger yuan. But economists think that is likely to change."

    Let's hope so...

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  46. CP - I think I saw that India's GDP grew 8.9% last quarter. I'm following MMYT and hoping I can get in at the IPO price. We'll see.

    To continue with the NFLX theme, I decided to buy 7 x Dec $210 Calls right before close at $0.66 (they expire Friday) just in case something crazy happens. I also bought 40 shares of the stock at $199.82. These positions will offset my put position, which is pretty large at about $6,500. They expire in January for the most part so I'm not as pressed on timing on this one. I'm hoping that Cramer pumps up the stock in his show so I can exit my long and calls tomorrow morning at the open for a small profit. If for some unGodly reason he comes to his senses and admits that the company is extremely overvalued, then I will profit nicely from my puts position. We'll see.

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  47. can't seem to figure out a good entry point on eBay. I ultimately think this will be a $40 to $45 stock. I think the value of Paypal is too great to ignore.

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  48. I can't believe I actually ended up only losing $1,700 today, given I had a 40% long position in triple shorts. On the flip side I hedged those with BGU and IBKC and my put position in NFLX worked out well. I'm thankful I had this move wrong and was still able to walk away relatively unscathed.

    Going forward, it sure looks like the market will be moving higher.

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  49. Well, it looks like King Pumper himself Cramer isued a sell on NFLX, which is great for me. I decided to cut my losses on my 40 shares long that I added at $199.82 as a hedge so now I only have 7 call options valued at $450 versus 5 puts valued at $6,500. I firmly believe this stock should be valued at 1/2 it's current valuation given the concerns about declining free cash flows sequentially and issues about the Comcasts of the world and Disney's etc charging for bandwidth and content, respectively.

    It looks like I'm not alone:
    http://www.businessinsider.com/whitney-tilson-explains-why-hes-short-netflix-and-opentable-2010-10

    Tilson sold short about $25 ago so I really like my entry points.

    I also like CRM, CMG, and OPEN as shorts. I think there are a lot of overvalued high fliers that can be shorted right here. The key I think is waiting for a big volume day at the top of a range.

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  50. I am placing, once again, a sell short stop limit order for 100 shares of CRM at $142/$141.95.

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  51. great job David on REDF. You had a disciplined plan, followed it and it paid off. Nice

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  52. Good to hear India's cranking right along, I've been concerned inflation may slow progress but perhaps inflation is an issue specific to countries attempting to peg their currencies.

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