Thursday Wrap-Up

Darn, I always miss the fun days!

Today is a great example of why we love mattress plays – it is so much easier to cover and stop out of one position than to furiously buy and sell dozens of stocks whenever we have a dip.  Today’s action was so nice and smooth, even my auto stops worked out just fine.

I’m not too excited, basically we are right back to where we were Wednesday morning but it sure beats the alternative doesn’t it?  March sales gave us a nice boost as consumer spending marches on no matter what happens in the world.  SOX and Nasdaq had a huge day while the bankers continued to be weak, this will be a nice change of leadership if it sticks but we really need these commodities to calm down a bit.

Oil is back over to almost $64 despite 39M barrels being lopped of the front 3 months delivery.  The score is now: May 183M, June 245M and July 108M.  183M barrels is still a lot but it was an amazing display of pricing power as the May contract, despite a net loss of 58M barrels (20%) in one day, managed to gain $1.84, significantly more than the months were people were adding barreles.  It really is fun to watch but not if you’re short on oil – then it’s just frustrating!

Our RIMM $130 puts were frustrating if you ignored rule #1 and didn’t sell at the open.  The .60 puts we’ve been buying for over a week shot up to $1.85 at the open but quickly fell back to $1.55 (where my stops triggered) and ended the day at .90, despite making no great recovery – a very textbook example of why we ALWAYS sell into the initial excitement!

The transports picked a funny day to get going but they did stop dead at the 50 dma so we’ll have to wait and see what happens there but we got a little greener and tha’t all that counts:

Despite the dollar making a 2-year intraday low (and finishing there), gold was fairly flat a $682 but it will be all up to the PPI tomorrow so stay tuned.