I haven't posted much about the stock market lately because I haven't been involved in it for a while. But I, like many many  other people, bought some Facebook stock. I'm happy to say I was smart enough not to buy it on the opening day. I felt sure the price would be pumped up before the markets even opened. I'm not certain if that's what happened ( Read more... )

The bears were in charge on Wall Street yesterday. The Dow closed down 348 points, and at one point was down 998 points. So it's interesting that there was another story about a bear today. It seemed a bear had wandered onto a golf course up in Minnesota. He was eventually shot by a police officer. Given that the stock market is still nosediving ( Read more... )

As I write this, the stock market is down, although not by a lot.  What's more significant is that it is down nearly 25% year-to-date, and it is only March.

I don't really have a trading portfolio anymore. I was smart enough for most of it to be in cash, which I have now taken out. It does contain  a couple of ETF's that I am going to hang onto ( Read more... )

The stock market plummeted again today, but I managed to make a little money. I bought DXD (an ETF that goes up twice as much as the Dow goes down, and vice versa) this morning after the Dow had begun falling, and sold it this afternoon for a small (2%) profit.

I am not doing as well with this inverse ETF's as you might think. I had DOG and SH in my ( Read more... )

My trading portfolio closed up .46% today. Not great, but much better than any of the major indices. Thank heaven for inverse ETFs.

I don't want to give the exact money amount, but here are the weights of what's in my portfolio.

DOG
11.40%

DVY
34.73%

DXD
11.28%

SH
12.05%

CASH
30.53%

DOG, DXD, and SH are all inverse ETFs.Given ( Read more... )

All three major indices closed up today. So did my trading portfolio and my IRA. Most experts believe it was because of the proposed bailout of the financial markets.

It's good to be thankful for small blessings, but I'm not sure that this is unalloyed good news. The rise  seems a little artificial, since it is because of the bailout.

I haven't ( Read more... )

I have mentioned before 2 ETF's I have in my portfolio that track commodities futures. These are USO, which tracks oil  and UGA, which tracks gasoline.

I have gotten stopped out of both of them in the last two days. USO was a trailing stop so I made money. UGA was a plain old stop order so I lost money on that.

Both of these events occurred after ( Read more... )

And I am doing...well, not completely horribly,especially considering how badly the market has been doing.

I've talked about inverse ETFs before. These are the exchange traded funds that short stocks and go in the opposite direction of the market.
One of them is SH, which shorts the S&P 500. Surprisingly, it is down from when I bought it at the end ( Read more... )

Provocative title, eh? Actually, this is yet another post about options trading. :) A straddle is an options strategy where you buy a call AND a put for the same security, with the same strike price and expiration date  on each one. The idea is that if there is a big price move you can sell the losing option and ride out the winning one.

I didn't ( Read more... )

The good news is that the Dow climbed 338 points today. The bad news is that it fell 466 points for a net loss of 128 points. The drop was inevitable, and the rise was probably a result of the Fed rate cut of 75 basis points

I didn't do too badly. My trading portfolio, thanks to the presence of short ETFs, closed up .1%. That's not much, but ( Read more... )