36 Rubles to the Dollar this morning.
That's down 13% this week as the Ukraine bursts into flames live on TV as protestors are willing to die rather than accept Putin's puppet President. Thousands of demonstrators have packed Independence Square since November, when President Viktor Yanukovych reversed a decision to sign a trade deal with the European Union and instead turned toward Russia. The unrest intensified after an anti-protest law went into effect. Throngs of demonstrators took to the streets to protest the law.
These are the sort of Geo-Political events that don't seem to bother investors – until they suddenly do and now we're seeing a precipitous drop in the Ruble, which destabilizes Russia as well as the already destablized Ukraine and bad timing for Putin as the entire world already has thousands of bored reporters hanging out in Russia – just looking for an excuse to cover something besides curling.
The MSM keeps saying that these protest MAY lead to a civil war, but that's nonsense – this is already a civil war and, apparently, currency traders have figured that out this week.
This works out fine for us as we shorted oil as it made it's silly run up on the premise that the Dollar was going to bottom out at 80 because CLEARLY we were not THE WORST currency on the planet. It seems it's only taken one day for Russia to prove our point and the Dollar is up to 80.065 this morning and our Futures are down about 0.3% with the new oil contracts (/CLJ4) trading at $102.50.
We did a Live Futures Trading Workshop yesterday at 1pm (replay available here) and I'll be on Business News Network this evening (7pm) with a couple of new trade ideas for the viewers. BNN is very happy with me, as last year's Trade of the Year on AAPL turned $14,000 (10 contracts) into $97,600 in 12 months (up 597%), handily beating the S&P's 32% gain.
Canada's Loonie is trading at just 0.90 US Dollars so congratulations to them for having a currency even more pathetic than our own. That's keeping the price of oil coming down the Keystone Pipline relatively cheap and is good for VLO, if they ever approve it. We used to have a rule to always buy VLO below $20 but now it's $50.74 so we'll need a new rule if we're going to play it up here.
You can sell the VLO 2016 $33 puts for $2.50 and buy the 2016 $45/55 bull call spread for $4.30 for net $1.80 on the $10 spread so a potential for 455% of upside on a trade that's starting out $5.74 in the money and the worst-case scenario is you own VLO for net $34.80, which is a 31.4% discount to the current price.
See – we can always find something nice to put our cash into when we focus on BEING THE HOUSE – Not the Gambler!
