That was a bad way to start the week!
We didn't hit one level! And after having such a nice open – not a good sign…
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Dow needs 12,632 is a big slip!
- Transports plunged to 2,923.
- S&P did not hold 1,450.
- NYSE held 9,421 but did not retake 9,450.
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Nasdaq barely held 2,500!.
- SOX 485 held. How ironic that the SOX were the only ones that behaved!
- Russell 830 was not broken.
Combine all that with a gain in commodity prices and that was one crummy day!
Oil was up .25, not impressive enough to chase us out of our puts (in fact I added in the morning) and the new contract was saved at the last second from a very nasty plunge to $60.50 to finish at $61.14 so we'll try again tomorrow.
Gold tested $690 again but could not break it, finishing the day at $689. The dollar broke below 84 but I said at 10 am: "Oil – I’m just not seeing real strength on a weak dollar. Things are just not what they seem here. I’m getting the feeling that big boys are taking this opportunity to dump like crazy." We'll see how this pans out…
On the whole, nothing to celebrate. Al Gore won an Oscar and in his film he said Antarctica was "a canary in the coal mine" – I wonder what he would think of today's market?
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We didn't make too many moves as I said early in the morning, despite the good open: "Markets are not looking that good – still on my IWM puts – way too dangerous looking. That was a terrible pullback off the morning open on the Dow and Nas! I was looking for oil to buy and I ended up adding to my puts… "
It was a good day to initiate our weekend set-up of CY as we sold the Apr $20s for our $1 target and bought the Jan '09 $22.50s for just $2.70 – a better spread than we thought! The stock was kind enough to go down for us yesterday too!
GOOG Apr $530s were bought back for $2.90 (up 42%) but I applied .70 of it to DD on the $530s and $520s just for fun!
GOOG Mar $480 puts were exited at $19 (up 30%) as it was simply too much money in the short-term virtual portfolio and I didn't feel we had adequate upside protection and I didn't want to buy any more.
GOOG Mar $470s were too close to the money to leave at risk so moved them into 2X $480s for an extra .70, just so I won't regret it if Google pops (but it didn't look like it wanted to at the end of the day).
We took out our KMI Mar $105 putter for .35 (up 81%), hopefully we can get another sell in this month!
We took out our SBUX $32.50 caller for .45 (up 53%) in preparation to sell the $30s if we have to!
Re SBUX I said: "I bought out the caller because I think $31.75 will hold – we’ll find out soon! Because of the spread, we can always sell the $30s against the $35s because we have the $37.50s protecting us from a big upside run but I’m willing to watch it here and hope to get another .85 for the $32.50s on a bounce.
If $32ish doesn’t hold, we will likely see $30 where I will probably downshift my positions (assuming I successfully sell the calls and I’m not too sad about the position)."
