What a lousy day, you just can’t please this market.
Consumer confidence was up this morning, existing home sales rose .3% vs. an expected decline, oil is coming off its highs (only $72.90 now!) and even metals are taking a small rest. 65% of earnings reported have beat expectations with less than 20% below, the dollar is down (which should be good for exports) and the Fed is actually saying they are almost done tightening… Still the market goes down!!!
Not my beloved Intel! It was up .24 today as market share reports indicated that AMD is not really getting that far with pretty serious price cuts.
Bush made a big energy speech which is discussed in the comments that did effectively talk down the price of oil but only by a hair and the energy complex overreacted with a big drop that dragged down the market. I have never lost money shorting the market the minute Bush starts talking!
Also in comments I discussed why I bought XOM and ABX today prior to earnings – so far I’m not so happy with either one but we will give it more than 4 hours I suppose…
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All oil picks were disasters today but, if you followed the Valero Rule, there was an amazing shorting opportunity from the minute Bush said he was going to stop the SPR from buying oil (who knew it wasn’t full?) for a few months:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=VLO&t=1d
Almost every stock you could look at had a great opening and an awful finish as the whole market just spiraled down with the oil patch.
T bounced up and down in the roller coaster from hell today but that’s why we took the Octobers:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=1d&l=on&z=m&q=l&p=&a=&c=&s=t
VZ was a little better behaved but sank at the end, finishing slightly positive with the $32.50s up slightly at .70 (up .12%).
If anyone can explaining to me how JBLU rose 13% today please do! I suppose people thought earnings were going to be much worse but they scaled back guidance too…
HPQ had a fire sale earlier in the day but, in the end, the $35s went up a dime to .70:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=HPQ&t=1d
TRAD did just what we wanted it to do as the $15s dropped to .95 but then recovered to $1.20 (up 25%) by the day’s end.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=TRAD&t=1d
I like the HAL $85s more at $1.05 (down 33%) than I did this morning, especially as SLB seems to be holding up. The last time the oil companies got called in front of Congress was 11/13 when HAL was at about $57.50. Since the theme of the hearings was “Go find more oil” HAL shot up to $65 in just over a week and it looks like the same game plan to me. It might be safer to move out a month to the Jun $85s for $2.15.
NAK continues to see no problem with the price of gold as the stock moves up another 7% to $7.65 (up 15%).
SHLD has become amazingly resilient, up .5% today.
TXN had a contrarian day, going up 1.4%.
AAPL was up .6% today!
AMZN looks like it beat but still profits are down 35% on higher sales with an “accounting change”, nothing I will get excited about but should keep it from going lower.
Another day like today for Google and we should jump all over the BIDU $55 puts for $2.30.
YHOO has all the fun of tracking to the penny Google without the messy gap up:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?t=5d&s=GOOG&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=yhoo
