My OPTION TRADES..... part 2

Haha sarcastic bastard.... I'm sorry I forgot you know everything

 

Are you implying the library doesn't carry it?
I've seen plenty of investment magazines there over the years.

 

It's not about complicating things, it's simply about running a balanced business that does not blow up. There is a reason I run over 20 different distinct strategies and keep researching new ones.

Are we supposed to be impressed? Ok, I have a PhD in the same field (computational biology, to be specific, but "officially" biophysics). Anyway, good education (as opposed to a degree) should have given you sufficient mental flexibility which i did not notice so far.

 

20 distinct strategies and you call that not complicating things?
I'm guessing you enjoy the thrill of the chase,... so to speak.
Given that you are either bullish, bearish or neutal at any given time on any given stock,... wouldn't it be more effective (profitable) to become expert and comfortable with just a few strategies for each situation?
Aren't you getting into the BECAUSE I CAN mode, implimenting so many strategies? Do you do that because there is a specific benefit to doing that, or simply because it's fun and you enjoy the challenge?

There are about 20 styles and topings of pizza available.
And I could try each one if I wanted to.... BECAUSE I CAN.
But I've been pretty happy and successful, sticking with just a few styles and toppings. That being, keeping it simple.
Isn't successful option investing, based on pretty much the same thing?

 

American Airlines and US Airways Enter Merger Talks

American Airlines and US Airways said on Friday that they had started confidential merger talks, bringing them one step closer to a possible merger.

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A combined US Airways and American Airlines would be on par with the world’s largest, United Continental Holdings.
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“It does not mean we are merging — it simply means we have agreed to work together to discuss and analyze a potential merger,” US Airways’ chief executive, W. Douglas Parker, said in a letter to employees Friday.

Such a merger would put the combined airline on par with the world’s largest, United Continental Holdings, and the slightly smaller Delta Air Lines. The merged entity’s position as the No. 1 or No. 2 airline in the world, based on how many miles its passengers fly, would depend on how many routes antitrust regulators forced the combined airline to abandon.

Many industry experts say the only way American and US Airways can compete with larger rivals is by merging their strengths. US Airways would gain American’s lucrative international routes, while American’s larger hubs would be fed passengers from US Airways’ network in smaller cities across the nation.

For passengers, a merger would have no immediate impact. But a year or two into the combination, changes would ramp up: Frequent-flier programs would merge, fares could rise, planes would take on American Airlines’ colors and glitches could surface as the airlines’ reservation systems integrated.

Mr. Parker has been pushing for a merger since American’s parent company, the AMR Corporation, entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Nov. 29. American Airlines’ chief executive, Thomas W. Horton, has said his airline is weighing several options, including remaining independent or merging with one of several airlines, including the US Airways Group.

One wild card is British Airways’ parent company, the International Consolidated Airlines Group, which confirmed on Friday that it, too, had signed a nondisclosure agreement with American. Foreign investors are prohibited from owning more than 25 percent of a United States airline, but a cash infusion from British Airways could help American remain independent or give Mr. Horton enough leverage for his leadership team to call the shots in a merger with US Airways.

 

How Is H.P.’s WebOS Doing? Hundreds No Longer Work on It


Hewlett-Packard says its WebOS mobile operating system is still alive and well. On Friday it released an early open-source version of the software that will allow outside companies and programmers to use it however they want. But it’s not clear how much muscle H.P. itself is planning to put behind the WebOS effort. Hundreds of employees who used to work on the project have either switched to new jobs at the company or left to work somewhere else, according to their online profiles.

In December, H.P. said 600 employees were working on WebOS. On Friday, the company declined to say how many people were still working on it. A search on LinkedIn, the social networking Web site for professionals, shows that roughly 300 people who work at H.P. mention WebOS in their profiles. Of that 300, about 170 say in their profile that they have a current job working on WebOS, and about 90 listed a role in WebOS as a previous job before they moved to a different department. (The others only mentioned WebOS in their profile without specifying whether they have worked on the software.)

Many people who used to work on WebOS appear to be spread across nine companies. About 240 ex-WebOS workers say on LinkedIn that they hold current positions at Apple, Google, Nokia, Sprint, Qualcomm, Intel, Microsoft, Lab126 and Barnes & Noble.

While not every living person is on LinkedIn, the numbers available still indicate that WebOS isn’t as strong a force as it once was at H.P. — which is not surprising given the software’s history. It was best known for its appearance in the TouchPad, a would-be iPad competitor that lasted just seven weeks on the market last year before the company killed it, citing weak sales.

H.P. said in December that it was planning to open-source WebOS. On Friday the company released an early beta of a working build. Enda McGrath, director of worldwide developer relations at WebOS, said it took this long to release it because the proprietary parts of the operating system had to be replaced with open-source code.

Still, H.P. has high hopes that other companies will take WebOS and push it beyond smartphones and tablets. Opening up the software could bring it to newer types of mobile devices, sensors, security devices, even robots. And the company says it will continue to work hard on the system.

“It’s not that we’ve released it and thrown it over the fence into the wild, and are waiting to see what will happen,” said Martin Risau, senior vice president of WebOS. “It’s our plan to continue to develop WebOS.”

 

Barclays is moving to restore its reputation by overhauling its culture. We explained the trouble with closed-end mutual funds that invest in start-ups and provided analysis of a deal that helped one of the nation’s bigger regional banks catch up in capital.

A look back on our reporting of last week’s highs and lows in finance.



Carlyle to Buy DuPont Unit for $4.9 Billion | The private equity firm agreed to buy the maker of automotive paints as its drumbeat of acquisitions continues, Evelyn M. Rusli reported. But “the business, which has about 35 plants worldwide, is heavily exposed to the weak European economy.” DealBook »

Maker of Air-Conditioners in Japan Is Said to Buy Rival | Daikin Industries agreed to buy Goodman Global from Hellman & Friedman for about $3.7 billion, Michael J. de la Merced reported. The private equity firm began shopping Goodman around early last year. DealBook »

News Analysis: Deal Helps a Bank Catch Up in Capital | Peter Eavis explains that Buffalo-based M&T Bank‘s $3.7 billion acquisition of Hudson City, a struggling mortgage lender, shows a bank well below regional peers in important capital ratios. DealBook »

Best Buy Will Open Books for Founder | The two parties agreed that Richard Schulze “would have to wait until January to make a second offer if the board rejected his first formal proposal,” Mr. de la Merced reported. DealBook »

Hertz and Dollar Thrifty Announce a Merger Deal | “Both companies now believe that, with a concrete plan to sell Advantage, the [$2.3 billion] deal will be blessed by the Federal Trade Commission,” Mr. de la Merced reported. DealBook

 

New Drug For Prostate Cancer Gets F.D.A. Nod

The Food and Drug Administration approved a new life-prolonging drug for men with late-stage prostate cancer on Friday, adding to an increasingly crowded field.

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The new drug, which will be called Xtandi, was developed by Medivation, a small San Francisco pharmaceutical company, in partnership with the Japanese firm Astellas Pharma.

In clinical trials, men who received the drug, which was previously known as MDV3100, lived a median of 18.4 months, nearly five months longer than the median of 13.6 months for those who received a placebo.

While the approval was not a surprise, its timing was. The F.D.A. approved the drug after only a three-month review, three months ahead of the deadline in late November. This is fairly rare, although a number of other cancer drugs have been approved at least a month ahead of deadline in recent years.

“The need for additional treatment options for advanced prostate cancer continues to be important,” Dr. Richard Pazdur, the director of the agency’s cancer drug office, said in a statement.

Xtandi is one of several new prostate cancer drugs that have come to market in the last two years after a long fallow period. While the new drugs have been good for men with the disease, they could add billions of dollars to the nation’s medical bills.

Xtandi will cost $7,450 a month, Medivation said. That is higher than some analysts had expected.

Before 2004, the only drug shown to prolong the survival of men with advanced prostate cancer was the chemotherapy drug docetaxel. Now there are four others on the market — Jevtana from Sanofi, Provenge from Dendreon, Zytiga from Johnson & Johnson and Xtandi, which is known generically as enzalutamide.

Xtandi is expected to compete most directly with Zytiga. Both are pills, while the other drugs are given intravenously. And both are aimed at the same patient population — men whose cancer has spread elsewhere in the body or recurred despite treatment aimed at suppressing production of the hormone testosterone, which fuels prostate cancer growth.

Both drugs are approved for men who have already tried docetaxel, though both Medivation and Johnson & Johnson hope to eventually win approval for their drugs to be used before docetaxel, a potentially much larger market. Many patients would prefer to use the pills before having to try chemotherapy.

Zytiga prolonged median survival by 3.9 months, as initially reported, though Johnson & Johnson later updated that figure to 4.6 months. Zytiga, which was approved in April 2011, had worldwide sales of $432 million in the first six months of this year.

Xtandi and Zytiga have not been compared head-to-head in a clinical trial. But some analysts say Xtandi would have an edge because it does not have to be given with prednisone, a steroid, to minimize side effects, as Zytiga does.

Xtandi has its own side effects, however, the most worrisome being seizures, which were suffered by about 1 percent of men taking it in the clinical trial.

There are expected to be about 241,000 new cases of prostate cancer this year in the United States and about 28,000 deaths.

Many men are treated with drugs like Lupron that, in effect, induce a chemical castration, suppressing production of testosterone. But the cancers can eventually become resistant to castration therapy.

Xtandi works by blocking the downstream effects of the action of testosterone, rather than by turning off its production.

It is the first product to reach the market for Medivation. The company previously developed an old Russian antihistamine as a potential treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, signing a big partnership with Pfizer. But that drug failed in late-stage clinical trials.

Shares of Medivation closed at $104.86 Friday, up nearly 8 percent. The share price is about six times as high as it was before Medivation announced the results of its clinical trial last November.

 

Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds


While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.

The disappearance of midwage, midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has probably been accelerated by government layoffs.

“The overarching message here is we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have a ‘good jobs’ deficit,” said Annette Bernhardt, the report’s author and a policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy group.

The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010.

The job market has turned around since then, but those fields have represented only 22 percent of total job growth. Higher-wage occupations — those with a median wage of $21.14 to $54.55 — represented 19 percent of job losses when employment was falling, and 20 percent of job gains when employment began growing again.

Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth.

The occupations with the fastest growth were retail sales (at a median wage of $10.97 an hour) and food preparation workers ($9.04 an hour). Each category has grown by more than 300,000 workers since June 2009.

Some of these new, lower-paying jobs are being taken by people just entering the labor force, like recent high school and college graduates. Many, though, are being filled by older workers who lost more lucrative jobs in the recession and were forced to take something to scrape by.

“I think I’ve been very resilient and resistant and optimistic, up until very recently,” said Ellen Pinney, 56, who was dismissed from a $75,000-a-year job in which she managed procurement and supply for an electronics company in March 2008.

Since then, she has cobbled together a series of temporary jobs in retail and home health care and worked as a part-time receptionist for a beauty salon. She is now working as an unpaid intern for a construction company, putting together bids and business plans for green energy projects, and has moved in with her 86-year-old father in Forked River, N.J.

“I really can’t bear it anymore,” she said, noting that her applications to places like PetSmart and Target had gone unanswered. “From every standpoint — my independence, my sense of purposefulness, my self-esteem, my life planning — this is just not what I was planning.”

As Ms. Pinney’s experience shows, low-wage jobs have not been growing especially quickly in this recovery; they account for such a big share of job growth mostly because midwage job growth has been so slow.

Over the last few decades, the number of midwage, midskill jobs has stagnated or declined as employers chose to automate routine tasks or to move them offshore.

Job growth has been concentrated in positions that tend to fall into two categories: manual work that must be done in person, like styling hair or serving food, which usually pays relatively little; and more creative, design-oriented work like engineering or surgery, which often pays quite well.

Since 2001, employment has grown 8.7 percent in lower-wage occupations and 6.6 percent in high-wage ones. Over that period, midwage occupation employment has fallen by 7.3 percent.

This “polarization” of skills and wages has been documented meticulously by David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A recent study found that this polarization accelerated in the last three recessions, particularly the last one, as financial pressures forced companies to reorganize more quickly.

“This is not just a nice, smooth process,” said Henry E. Siu, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia, who helped write the recent study about polarization and the business cycle. “A lot of these jobs were suddenly wiped out during recession and are not coming back.”

On top of private sector revamps, state and local governments have been shedding workers in recent years. Those jobs lost in the public sector have been primarily in mid and higher-wage positions, according to Ms. Bernhardt’s analysis.

“Whenever you look at data like these, there is this tendency to get overwhelmed, that there are these inevitable, big macro forces causing this polarization and we can’t do anything about them. In fact, we can,” Ms. Bernhardt said. She called for more funds for states to stem losses in the public sector and federal infrastructure projects to employ idled construction workers. Both proposals have faced resistance from Republicans in Congress.

 

Fed Chairman Makes Case, in Strong Terms, for New Action

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, delivered a detailed and forceful argument on Friday for new steps to stimulate the economy, reinforcing earlier indications that the Fed is on the verge of action.

Calling the persistently high rate of unemployment a “grave concern,” language that several experts described as unusually strong, Mr. Bernanke made clear that a recent run of tepid rather than terrible economic data had not altered the Fed’s will to act, because the pace of growth remained too slow to reduce the number of people who lack jobs.

The federal government said on Wednesday that the economy expanded at an annual rate of 1.7 percent in the second quarter, slightly higher than its initial estimate of 1.5 percent but lackluster in normal times. A measure of consumer confidence hit a three-month high on Friday, but that, too, was impressive only in comparison with the immediate past. The government will release a preliminary estimate of August job growth next week; it is expected to show that the unemployment rate remains above 8 percent.

Mr. Bernanke said that the Fed’s efforts over the last several years had helped to hasten economic recovery, that there was a clear need for additional action and that the likely benefits of new steps to stimulate growth outweighed the potential costs.

“It is important to achieve further progress, particularly in the labor market,” Mr. Bernanke said. “Taking due account of the uncertainties and limits of its policy tools, the Federal Reserve will provide additional policy accommodation as needed to promote a stronger economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions in a context of price stability.”

In setting the stage for action when the Fed’s policy-making committee meets in two weeks, Mr. Bernanke appeared to defy political pressure from Republicans to refrain from new measures. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has said such action would be counterproductive, and has pledged to replace Mr. Bernanke at the earliest opportunity.

“Policies from Congress, not more short-term stimulus from the Fed, are the ingredients necessary for restoring growth in the American economy,” Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, said in a statement after Mr. Bernanke’s speech.

On the other hand, Democrats welcomed Mr. Bernanke’s remarks. There is little prospect that Fed action will lift the economy before the election, but party officials fear the opposite possibility — that inaction could undermine economic confidence — and so they greeted the speech with relief.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Mr. Bernanke “should not let any political backlash deter him from following through and doing the right thing.”

Mr. Bernanke did not announce any new steps in his speech, delivered here before an annual monetary policy conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Nor did he indicate which steps were most likely, a reticence that reflects his desire not to give details ahead of the Federal Open Market Committee, which convenes in two weeks.

Some analysts expect the Fed to announce a new round of asset purchases after that meeting, further expanding its holdings of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities to reduce borrowing costs and spur investment. Others expect that it will instead announce its intent to keep its benchmark interest rate near zero beyond its current forecast of late 2014.

Jan Hatzius, chief United States economist at Goldman Sachs, said he was now convinced that the Fed would extend its forecast, because Mr. Bernanke described benefits but not costs of that approach. He said he also expected the Fed to announce new asset purchases, but not necessarily in September. The speech, he said, made the Fed’s intentions clear, “but it still doesn’t really tell you the timing.”

Stocks fell slightly after the release of Mr. Bernanke’s remarks, then climbed again. Commodities like gold and oil also increased.

Mr. Bernanke devoted much of his speech to asset purchases. He said past rounds of purchases had produced “economically meaningful” benefits, contributing to lower borrowing costs for corporations and a general rise in stock prices. He cited one study that found that the combined effect of the Fed’s three rounds of asset purchases raised output by 3 percent and increased employment by two million jobs.

He provided a shorter description of the benefits of policy forecasts.

In both cases, after reviewing the costs of existing actions and the potential consequences of doing more, Mr. Bernanke rendered a clear verdict on the balance.