I'm short airlines. Could be a massive bounce soon, but I'll use that as an opportunity to add to my position.
Missed a bit of the action, what caused the market to shoot higher like this?Was it the confirmation of the ban on shorting by CNBC?
I am flat and will go long a bit lower than here (talking about equities). I think it's all the SNB. People selling CHF and buying equities. Spooz are the new safe haven!
Well, this is a trading call, not an economic forecast. Deep recessions don't happen in 1-2 months, which is the longest the elevated fear is likely to last before a rebound (which even the slightest bit of bullish news will trigger). More likely, it diminishes in a few days or weeks. But to address the economics side, why would this become 1932, if 2008 didn't? This is a crisis in Europe, not the USA. And why would a recession occur at all? External economic collapses have never caused a serious US recession, and are unlikely to - only a small amount of US GDP is external trade, the rest is domestic. Worst case is Europe has a deep recession, not that the USA has one. US banking system and industry is fine, earnings are beating expectations significantly. I doubt we'll see even a technical recession. Treasuries are currently priced for Depression anyway - 2.2% yield, 3.6% on the 30 year. The only way those values make sense is if we see negative inflation for the next 10 years and zero for the next 30. When an asset is so expensive that even the bull case says it's overvalued, it's probably time to sell.
Been buying shares in WMT, MSFT, TUP, XOM over the past days, also adding to long time holding of NLY Others to look at: ADP RDS.A SCHW BA (BAE systems in london, not boeing) CVX All of these guys yield well over Treasuries, highly profitable, are either buying back stock, or have the cash flow to initiate as such. MSFT would jump 50% in a day if the board stopped acting Japanese and committed to shareholder value. WMT is buying back so much, it won't even have a stock float in 15 years and will be worth hundreds of billions. It's time to buy now and get rich.
Things will look different than 1932 even if we get a replay because the dollar had a gold peg back then. What "value stocks" are you looking at? In my view the best way to play this climate is having longs and shorts to smooth out the bumpiness. When the daily swings in the indexes aren't > 2% every single day, then cover the short book and keep the longs. When the short bans go into effect, then guys like me have to dump long positions also.
Thanks for your detailed answer. I'm probably a bit more pessimistic on the US economy than you are. But I could be wrong.
Question for the options jockeys. I'm still short a bunch of August 29.5 FCX puts. Even though the stock has just barely above a 0 chance of hitting that, the market-makers are trying to rape me by asking $0.05 to buy them back. Can I just let them expire at what I assume will be zero?