Weekly Wrap-Up

361.89%

That's a pretty good week!  That was our gain on capital on 47 closed positions that were open an average of 22 days.  The average gain was "just" 304%. 

The reason for this astounding performance is that we stopped out of a couple of old favorites; AMZN October $45s and $65s that we were lucky enough to pick up in April and smart enough NOT to sell against heading into earnings contributed 13% of our gains and the FXI Jan $115s, that we've been selling against since Jan 10th, finally got called in with a 482% return.  Whenever we close successful Long-Term Virtual Portfolio plays it makes us look great on cash returns but this was an unusually good week where we got a great market spike and we cynically sold into it, our timing won't always be this good!

There were only 6 losing positions closed and the only one over 20% was a short-lived AMZN $65 put that we took to lock in our gains on the October calls, hardly worth crying over.  We had daily doubles on ICE, GSK, COP, QQQQ and BIIB – always a virtual portfolio booster, but otherwise it was just a run of good picks.  Of course closing out all these winners leaves the Short-Term Virtual Portfolio with 80 open positions at an average cash loss of 8.72% as we took all our big gainers off the table but we leave ourselves very well balanced and ready for anything next week.  All of the STP's losses (and then some) can be traced to our large protective puts on the DIA but, without those, we never would have hung on to our closed positions long enough to make them pay for those losses 4 times over.

Despite our best intentions, we only managed to pare 17 positions off the Short-Term Virtual Portfolio and much of that is only because I moved several complex plays to a new tab calles "Spreads" as the size of the STP was starting to annoy me from a tracking perspective.  Taking these slow moving, multi-leg trades out of the Short-Term Virtual Portfolio let's us concentrate on the things that actually need watching during the day.

Our Long-Term Virtual Portfolio has dropped from last week's gain on capital of 77% to just 60% this week as we removed a few huge winners and we now have just 50 open positions with an average gain of 363% on 70 average days traded.  All this is part of our slow retreat to cash as we prepare to ride out a possible market correction.  The shorter investment horizon of our new $10,000 Virtual Portfolio leads us to be slightly more aggressive and we finally made a few plays this week and picked up a quick 75% on the $2,642 we did end up putting to work, leaving the balance at $11,994 for the week.

Our very dull Stock Virtual Portfolio had a good week and our 25 positions there wound up with a 34% average gain and a cash gain of 8.25% after 65 average days (Yawn!).  The majority of those positions have been shut down in last week's purge but luckily a lot fo that money went to FIZ, which we've been accumulating since 5/1 and got a great pop (get it?) on Friday.

The new Spreads Virtual Portfolio is pretty flat with positions on AAPL, EBAY, HLYS, JWN, MRVL, SHLD, TSO and YHOO and are up just 6% so far but these are mainly premium plays which are prone to jump into expiration.

All in all it was an excellent week and I think we all went into the holiday weekend well hedged and in a fantastic mood as we hit the nail on the head with every twist and turn for the past 3 consecutive weeks.  Sure we could have been a little less cautious and made a little more but there's a value to being able to head to the beach this weekend without worrying about which end will be up on Tuesday.  Usually I review the week but I doubt too many people are here to read it anyway and, if you don't have anything better to do, just browse the whole week's predictions as it was one of my best streaks in ages!

Have a great vacation!

– Phil