D, After Friday I have sworn all I am interested in is the timing of reports and only if they occur after 9:30. The night before, I analyzed, did my homework and arrived at the thinking that if there was a gap down, a rally to Thursday's high was a near certainty... Friday morning I read the sales report.. bad numbers.. From then on I am thinking short and lose money shorting a 20-plus NQ run which I would have DEFINITELY taken had I not read the report... Really, I am done reading reports as it needelessly complicates one's thinking. Eliminate EVERYTHING that is not a trade decision maker... The Internal turmoil we feel while trading is almost always due to price not doing what we would like, which is the result of bias derived from too much useless data. It will help you Robert.
Rashid, Thanks for your post and taking the time to read my journal. I do for the most part agree with you. Of course one trade does not make your statement more or less true. I use reports (earnings mostly) as a tool in making trades. Its one of many and it receives less weight than the technicals but can be valuable when used. For example if a stock is already in what I would consider overbought territory and an earnings report comes out that is not all that great but the stock soars higher I will fade the move at a different level than if the report is a game changer (like both top line and bottom line are relatively better than the gap up price change). From my mistakes in gap ups after earnings I now will actually long a stock if other conditions warrant it.(something I learned by losing money on some gap ups) My main point is that one should not have or lose faith on the results of a few trades either way. A 3-5% edge(or negative edge) is hard to really see either way when using a small sample size. Best to you and your trading Robert
BP still dragging its feet and moving way to slow I was short puts going into today but at least I declined to buy and go long BP for over the weekend. Simply said I have lost much of the faith I have had in BP getting anything done ahead of time. I am now planning on them taking their sweet time and if they have a problem then worrying about what to do next. I guess I donât have any problems finding those that share my feelings as the Coast Guard has been telling them they need back up plans. Hard to imagine they are so stupid as to have one oil barge going back and forth. Simple things like that show that they have not considered redundancy to be a priority. Anyway I am frustrated and the good news is that money is still to be made with BP. I will be shorting near term and going long October options. I seriously doubt based on what I have read and the videos that I have been watching including the live feeds and the press releases that any real type of progress is going to be made before the end of the month and probably if all goes well for BP it will be sometime in mid July before we start to see a reduction. A bear call spread will most likely do the trick for July which will also partially offset and provide some hedging for the Oct puts I am going to write. BP â 245 most of the loss was during the opening and I took a stop loss. bought 100 shares near the end of AH trading BP- Jun 27.5P + 36 Jun29P +53 Jun 30P + 9 Jun 32C -186 (not sure how I lost money with being short calls today but I found a way) Jun 33C + 115 Jun 35P â 550 Jun 26C + 22 Jul 37C + 544 Jul 40C + 15 Jul 47.5C + 479 C Sep5C + 43 this was rolled over to DEC CVC + 78 MTXX â 54 took stop loss + 363
The only wise thing would have been to stay out of it in the first place and not generate theories on something that is only a fool's bet. This does not shine positive light on your or other BP traders' knowledge. No one knows what will happen for a company in this situation, and any day could be good or shocking news that will blow out anyone who also decides to seriously leverage on a BP play.
Another crazy ride on the BP express Obama keeps talking and I have to say that no one is helping big oil more than he is. I think net net Obama is actually helping oil more than Bush ever did. The more he talks the higher oil prices go. I have to wonder what they is going to do in terms of getting more Americans working but he better hope that this clean up doesnât end before the election or what we will be left with is a lot of people that are currently working out of s job and higher oil prices on top of that. I traded BP all day today and even in after hours. After hours was the only time that really didnât go my way but I was net short in the front month with options and long in the back months like Oct so this price move may turn out to be pretty good. I did buy some BP stock in after hours so I would like to see it pop higher in premarket. When it does pop higher in premarket it seems to settle back more often than not. With the second collection system about to go online Thursday provided they donât have their usual 5000 delays due to piss poor planning they should be able to collect a lot more of what we see pouring out on the videos. Lots of trades today including being net long and short. I made a big effort to roll over front and near month longs into Oct and may start with Dec as well soon. I am net long the stock and more than fully covered with calls that expire on Friday but I also have some ITM puts that expire on Friday that I expect if the price of the stock does not move higher by the open I will be covering and rolling into July/Oct. I also tried to trade the CBOE which was an IPO but I wanted to stay focused on BP I have been watching the BP video feeds for so long I can tell the spill rate just by the video. I would love to see BP start the second part of the recovery tomorrow but I surely will not be holding my breath. I does appear that I should give them some credit that while slow getting up to speed management seems to be starting to get things done. Even if that requires the coast guard to tell them basic things like âyou need redundancyâ. I have said it before and I still think that BP has allowed way to many things to be part of the plan without anything behind it if anything should go wrong. The fire on the Enterprise today is a case in point. What the hell would happen if that fire went out of control? would that take another two weeks for another ship to sail there? My gut tells me that it would as they have not thought through having another ship standing by. It really does come as no surprise that they have so many accidents compared to their peers. CBOE + 37 Rest are all BP BP + 45 Jun27.5P + 83 Jun30C â 91 Jun30P + 218 Jun 31C +1 Jun32C + 99 Jun33C + 186 Jun 35P â 337 Jul 25P +8 Jul 27.5P + 32 Jul36C + 17 +303
Thoughts on BP as Obama and the top executives of BP meet today (I started to write this about three hours ago and just finished it up as I heard a deal was done with Obama and BP) Some backroom out of the camera deals I would imagine will be made or have already been made. Obama gets the escrow of maybe 10-20 billion dollars within 90 days (BP needs to raise the money). BP in return gets a limit in the amount of fines and penalties it has to pay the government. This works well for Obama as it makes him look good and it puts a number around the costs that BP will end up paying the government. Obama can not risk that he pushes BP to far and they pull the plug and simply file for Bankruptcy and leave the bill on Obamaâs tab. Politically this would be a negative at a time when Obama does not want to appear to be in less control then he already is. If BP goes along which I will guess they will this also means they do not think they are going to file bankruptcy and who better to know than BP along with the help of Goldman Sachs. This will be a good thing for those on the sidelines waiting to get in and especially those that have been holding on.
What a crazy day and that says a lot considering I been trading BP for the last few weeks. I carried long shares that I bought in after hours trading and I thought there was a good chance that the stock would pop up nicely on the news that BP was going to meet with Obama. This seemed pretty simple to me. Obama would give up holding high fees and fines in return for BP agreeing to put up money into an escrow account. I didnât realize what a great deal BP would get in the end but I have to say that it sure appeared to be a win/win for everyone. Unless of course you count the taxpayers that have been sold out to make Obama look big and tough against the oil company. As it turns out all the money BP will be putting up was what I would consider âdead moneyâ anyway. BP will be putting no more money into the pot than what BP America can generate on itâs own so if things go bad it is still a no lose deal for BP. Plus while no one is going to talk about it I would believe that the fines have been set along with many other terms that will allow BP to continue to salvage as much as they can from the BP America assets. Really what other options could possibly be on the table? BP even agreed to pay the workers that are laid off from the ban on drilling. If you believe that this is really being paid by BP than I have some lovely ocean view property to sell you here in Wisconsin. You can bet that the numbers made good sence to the executives at BP and they are not giving away company assets because they want to be nice guys. They are not paid to be nice guys they are paid to make the best choices they can in terms of what is best for the owners of the company. At some point the leak will be stopped and yes BP will pay a large fine but it is in my opinion a fixed amount and an amount that works along with maybe some other possible bills going away or reduced that the public will have long forgotten about or donât know about (think coast guard / Navy). Plus a settlement like this means that they can expense the costs and reduce their taxes unlike fines that are not tax deductible. To be sure BP still has many civil suits to deal with and will for years but at least from the government point of view they will not have to file for bankruptcy right now and this gives back some level of confidence that was missing yesterday. I had a lot of trades today and at the end of the day I still have more concurrent trades on than I would prefer but it was a very good day especially considering the large stock carryover that I had when I woke up. I covered my loss in pre market trading with the thought that it would open lower and actually went short into the open with stock and the front month options. At the open I did not cover as much as I would have liked to with the calls that I had wrote in hindsight but they acted as a partial hedge against ITM money puts I wrote. I covered my short with the stock and started covering calls soon after the opening bell. Once we went under 30 I believed that the stock was priced for BP America going bankrupt and I felt that was unlikely given what Obama had said. The only way he was going to force BP to provide an escrow account is if it made financial sense to BP. That meant either Obama would have to come back on the TV and say he couldnât get the job done and the stock was more or less priced at that result or that a deal would be made and BP would be able to avoid bankruptcy at least from actions of the Federal government. So I started buying up shares of stock but mostly I started covering calls that I wrote. I also rolled over some calls as I bought shares as a hedge. At the end of the day I had a good day trading and I closed out a nice gain and my current NAV is much higher as well. I am still very long BP with the OCT puts I wrote and I plan to add or at least hold them until something else comes along to change the situation. On a side note IB was terribly slow and I missed several trades (some very important) today that ended up costing me a lot of money. Not sure what to do about it but I will be looking at doing something. BP + 692 (not bad since I started out at the opening bell down 1100) all the rest are BP options Jun 30C + 266 Jun 31C â 28 Jun 32P + 111 Jun 33C + 91 Jun 35P + 878 ( I covered these right at the top of the move in the 32.50-33 price range due to getting a short signal) Jul 27.5P + 96 Jul 33C â 132 Jul 35C â 70 SUN + 175 gap up trade that I would have liked to have been more aggressive with but did not want to lose focus on BP which seemed to be offering a big pay off today. + 2081
Robert, you've focused a lot of your attention on 1 stock(BP) the last month or so, I'm wondering how much you're up on it?