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I’m shorting my first stock in three and a half years, right now, as I hit the shortsell button on Lender Processing Services (LPS) in the thinkorswim.com account I’m managing my personal account from. With a stock price up 15% year-to-date, an LPS short offers
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Well, I was up at 5am here in NM time, talking about cattle trading, inflation, the fallacy of a difference between the Republican and Democrat policies despite each of their respective claims of being otherwise, and…the opportunity in buying long-dated, Cisco calls. The stock is trading at about
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I was hoping for a bigger hit in Ciena this morning so I could buy more and lower my cost basis by 7% or more, had the stock been down double digits, as I would have bought twice as much today as I bought yesterday, which would have brought my
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Ciena will likely be down 5% or more early tomorrow morning after one of its suppliers, FNSR, just blew up after hours by guiding estimates for next quarter’s sales and earnings down big time. I bought 1/10 of how much I’ll eventually want to own and will
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Another day, another dollar. I added four more net long positions in today’s action, just continuing my slow and steady building of the portfolio. There will be more fireworks, trading action and excitement in my trades, my sheets and in these posts after we’ve gotten things built up
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Buying common and sometimes call options on AAPL from $7 to $160 and GOOG from $95 to nearly $600 were some of the trades/investments that helped shape my career. I do expect I’ll get an opportunity to be more aggressive in each of these two stocks in coming
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I’m fighting the impulse to trade more. Now that I’ve started, I want more. I want to be more aggressive. I want to buy calls, not common! But those emotions and wants are the enemy that I’ll continually remind you to fight. It’s not about wants,
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I’m starting to scale into those aforementioned MSFT calls and I’ve settled on the Jan 2013 $25 strikes for less than four bucks (about $3.75 right now). Look at another way, I’ve now got 100 shares of upside leverage in every $375 I spend on each
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Nice rally out there and the bears are looking at oil pulling back and wondering if this market can hang as tough as it’s been and close on the strength it did yesterday what kind of rally could we see if oil pulls back to $90….$85? $75? (Nah,
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Let’s review the moves I made today — I used just a couple percentage points of capital to buy some long-dated, cheap call options giving me big upside exposure and limiting my losses — while still potentially 100% and with a expiration date to boot — on the downside to the
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We’ve seen the Nasdaq rally nearly a full percentage point heading into the close in the last hour here. Conventional wisdom says that’s bullish for the near-term, but we’ll see. I’m buying a little common stock in Nokia and Cypress, just about 5% of what
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It is definitely ugly out there and it definitely “feels” like buying today is the wrong to do. Which is exactly why, as I explained in today’s column from marketwatch, I just started scaling into some 2012 Corning calls. And yes, this time I am starting with slightly out
