ONE-TWENTY TWO: Trading Financial Markets
Exploring the poetry in financial markets for students of money and economy since the year 2000.
Thursday’s stock market sell-off could finally be the start of the sharp Fall correction I have speculated about in various forms for months now. The extent of the technical damage and the heavy distribution of stock certainly seem to have put a ceiling on stock prices for now. Solar stocks were heavily hit as speculative … Read more
We have all heard the claims that traders take the summer off, choosing to exchange their flashing computers for the calm, cool breezes of the beaches of the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, etc… Yet, year after year, it has appeared to me that summers deliver plenty of noteworthy trading action. I finally decided to take a … Read more
Schaeffer’s Investment Research is reporting today that the Macau IPO for Wynn Resorts, Limited (WYNN) has been meet with heavy put buying the past two days. October 65 puts were popular yesterday and the bearish trading has extended to the 60 strike today. The option strangle trade I outlined last week on WYNN uses the … Read more
It seems traders in ReneSola (SOL) are moving one step too slowly. Options traders loaded up on Oct 7.5 calls earlier this month, only to be greeted with last week’s news that SOL’s revenues would come in a little light based on weaker than expected pricing. SOL also announced a fresh offering of 14.4M in … Read more
On Friday, Federal Reserve Governor wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “The Fed’s Job Is Only Half Over.” In this piece, he suggested that while “…longer-term inflation expectations are stable, and economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal-funds rate for an extended period…prudent risk management indicates … Read more
I suggested on Friday that old mercantile forces would start to gripe if the Japanese yen continued to rise too far. Sure enough, Reuters reports this morning that the Japanese Finance Minister, Hirohisa Fujii, is backing away from earlier remarks he has made essentially welcoming a stronger currency. Fuji even went so far as to … Read more
Today has been a wild day in the financial markets, and I almost hesitate to jot down my thoughts before the close of trading. However, I will be shutting things down to get the weekend started as soon as possible, so I am writing now while thoughts remain fresh. There is no one theme I … Read more
When everyone is a contrarian, no one is a contrarian. I consider this a corollary to the famous quote from Humphrey Neill: “When everyone thinks alike, everyone is likely to be wrong” (from a book I really enjoy but inconsistently apply “
“That rebalancing of the UK economy that I have been talking about for about 10 years, is very necessary. I think the fall in the exchange rate that we have seen will be helpful to that process but there’s no doubt that what we need to see now is a shift of resources into net … Read more
The VXX is an ETF that “offers exposure to a daily rolling long position in the first and second month VIX futures contracts and reflects the implied volatility of the S&P 500 index at various points along the volatility forward curve” (from Yahoo!Finance). This means it offers a method for placing bets on the direction … Read more