Tag Archive for 'INTC'

Slick oil

Published on August 25, 2010, 10:34 pm in Opinions and Trading. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

One of those weird days when gold, oil and the dollar, along with stocks, were up! As expected Durable Goods and the New Home sales sucked. Unexpected was the big oil inventories build-up, which sunk oil prices. But, like the last time this happened in late May, traders saw opportunity and started buying oil futures. And like it has done all year, oil led a move to the upside for stocks.

Keep an eye on oil to see which way we go stockwise. If oil continues its bravery, watch UCO USO and ERX.

Semiconductors also had some oomph in its step, most likely with the help of AAPL and INTC, but also watch XLK and SMH.

The crash for the day belongs to golfer Jim Furyk: Jim Furyk is disqualified from Barclays for missing pro-am tee time. Gee if he traveled more often he would know wbout hotel wake-up calls! :cry:

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What Fun!

Published on July 13, 2010, 10:55 pm in Charts and Trading. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

I hope everyone had a great day trading today! It looks like tomorrow may get a little wild also. INTC had blowout earnings and the futures reacted with splendor immediately, gapping up at the open and staying up there.

The SPX closed while wrestling with its 50ma.

Sure, it’s a speed-bump maybe, but a test of the 200 should be in the cards.

And look at these Advance/Decline volumes today: Russell 2000 +16:1 and both NYSE and Nasdaq +12:1 Those are some impressive numbers. Do they continue? I think tomorrow should be a high volume day…all the people sitting on the sidelines will say, “What the fuck? I’m going in!” and all the shorts will say, “I’m fucked! Let me out.”

And people wonder how I got the name of this blog. 8)

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Kickoff time

Published on July 11, 2010, 11:21 pm in Trading. Closed Tags: , , , , .

AA will kickoff earnings season on Monday after the close, and then we got some biggies the rest of the week: INTC GOOG JPM GE BAC C. Earnings for the 2nd quarter should be good, but it will be the guidance for the 3rd quarter and 2nd half that will control the market direction.

Futures this evening have been quiet with no volume….Asia still waking up….have to wait for Europe to kick it in the ass.

Only 3.6 billion shares changed hands on the NYSE tape on Friday….not much. This is definitely a contributing factor: Small Investors Flee Stocks, Changing Market Dynamics.

Guess I should rest up for the morning. 8O

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Party like it’s 1999!

Published on April 14, 2010, 9:19 pm in Opinions and Trading. Closed Tags: , .

The futures hit new contract highs and the indexes hit new highs and there was a large number of stocks hitting new 52-week highs. I’ve been here before…in 1999! CBOE Equity put/call ratio today hit .35 – you have to go back ten years to find a lower closing reading. The cumulative TICK on the Nasdaq hit an all time high, never ever seen before.

So what did I do? I’m giving this market enough rope to hang itself. Something is going to trigger a down move…maybe Greece, maybe interest rates, maybe a missed earnings report. Whatever it is, this cannot continue. I picked up more on the short side and cashed out half my long positions. I’m now cash/long/short at 50/10/40%.

Besides the great earnings reports we had today, there was news that hiring is picking up. INTC said they would add 2000 people, and JPM to hire 9000. So if some other companies can come up with another 9,989,000 jobs, we should be in good shape! ;)

And read up on some of the other encouraging news:

US home loan demand slumps to lowest in 3 months

Optimism at Small Businesses Falls

Lehman Brothers Was Insolvent Well Before Bankruptcy, but amazingly all fed officials admit that their biggest mistake in this whole crisis was NOT saving LEH…the one thing they did right in this mess, they now wish they hadn’t? What the $%@&*!

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Crazy Train!

Published on April 13, 2010, 10:43 pm in Opinions and Trading. Closed Tags: , , , .

As Ozzy Osbourne sings, “Crazy, but that’s how it goes…. I’m living with something’ that just isn’t fair.” And boy was today a crazy train!

The top 5 active stocks represented 20% of the volume today. Four of those stocks are under 5 bucks, ABK C BPOP FNM. Only BAC was over five dollars. Not what you would call a healthy market. Pathetic volume to begin with and then 5 most active are government-welfare financial stocks! :cry:

One trade I made today was to cash out some UNG calls for 38%. A nice take on a two-week hold. I also sold my SPY puts on that morning run down. I felt particularly good about that after the reversal and continuing grind up in the markets….crazy.

In case you haven’t heard, Recession is not over yet, says US panel.

And I find this disturbing: For Consumers, Time to Shop Until the Mortgage Drops. You’ve got to wonder how we have record consumer spending and record housing defaults.

INTC blew away its earnings and went nuclear after hours….which isn’t unusual for them. Actually that’s very predictable. And more often than not, it gaps up the next day and then reverses. So we’ll see.

Okay, we’ve reached the hump on OpEx week. Remember, after Monday and Tuesday even the calendar says W T F . . .

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The show has started

Published on April 12, 2010, 10:14 pm in Tools and Trading. Closed Tags: , , , .

Earnings season had its opening pitch today from AA…and boy did it suck. Not really that bad, but the hype and anticipation had traders looking for more….and they’ve just got to be disappointed in the morning. Tuesday will bring more reports to light including CSX and INTC among others.

Monday continues its pattern of being a green day… it’s been an up day 28 of last 32 Mondays!

The S&P 500 has risen on Monday 80 percent the time during the past six months, compared with 52 percent for Friday, Bespoke said. It averaged gains of 0.17 percent and 0.05 percent on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, and a loss of 0.04 percent on Thursday.

Read the whole story at Bloomberg.

And speaking of patterns, VIX now below the 2008 intraday low, which was the start of a 15% correction. The last time it closed this low was July 2007 which was the top before a 9% correction to the S&P. Just a little nudge for you to be careful out there. Here’s more info on the VIX from TraderFeed and the Daily Options Report.

I misspoke in my Saturday entry when I stated I was long/short at 35/65%. It is true but it looked like I was 100% invested. I should have pointed out I was 55% in cash. So a truer picture would have been a cash/long/short positions of 55/15/30%.

Either way I’ve been waiting for even a slight correction to cash the shorts, but now I’m thinking it may be a bit more than slight. Will AA earnings start the ball rolling down? Maybe INTC gives it another nudge down? I’m thinking even good reports, unless they’re blowout great, markets will sell the news. Wait and see.

Futures this evening are heading down, as are Asian markets. You can check the futures market here. So for now I’m content to have cash as my largest position. It would be good to have some resolution with a big volume move…in either direction. Volume continues to make new record lows. Sure would be nice to have more traders around. :D

P.S. I haven’t been updating the old blog over the weekend, mainly because this cold keeps me drowsy and lazy. So make sure this URL: http://wtftrading.com is your main link! And update your RSS feeds.

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