While bargain clothes shoppers seem to be driving profits in a way Wall Street likes, it takes a certain kind of trader to buy stock in the company when it's making new All-Time Highs.
Well, I just happen to be that type of trader! In fact, one of my favorite setups is to buy stocks making fresh all-time highs. There is no overhead supply of bagholders looking to dump the stock to get back to even. Nothing but blue skies ahead.
And when options premium has collapsed, we can buy long calls to put ourselves in a position to enjoy the possibility of unlimited gains.
After some pretty significant broad market moves in both directions in recent weeks, it's starting to feel like market participants are a bit tired. And can we blame them?
While volatility is often beneficial to active traders who have a good game plan to pounce at opportunities that are presented in such environments, eventually, we get tired. It's exhausting.
Knowing this, we can take advantage of this potential situation by crafting trades that take advantage of the likely decrease of options premiums that often takes place when traders are tired and stocks and indexes start trading in smaller ranges.
So let's use the Utilities sector to express a bet on compressing ranges...
So we were talking about a guy who's apparently subsisting only on McDonald's patties for the next 30 days. Just the patty --- no bun, no condiments, no lettuce. He's trying to prove some kind of point that it's not McDonald's burgers that are unhealthy, it's everything else in a typical American's McDonald's order at the drive-thru window.
Ok. Whatever.
But all this "healthy McDonald's" talk got us thinking about the even healthier looking chart of its stock $MCD in recent weeks:
We've got an oil stock on the doorstep of multi-year highs, a recent shakeout that probably rinsed out the hot-money crowd that came into the stock following their latest earnings report, and implied volatility plumbing new yearly depths.
This sets up an excellent opportunity to take a flyer on a simple long calls trade.
There’s a profound mental shift that happens when you flip from being in positions where bad luck could damage or ruin your trading account, to being in a position where the unexpected might actually make you a ton of money!
For options traders, an excellent example of these two positions is a short straddle vs. a long straddle.
In a short straddle, a trader is naked short an equal amount of calls and puts at the same strike and expiration. The PnL graph of a hypothetical 100-strike short straddle looks like this:
You’ll notice that as long as the underlying price (as displayed along the x-axis) stays +/- $20 from today’s price of $100, the trader will likely earn a profit as options expiration approaches.
“Why do you rob banks?” authorities asked notorious bank thief Willie Sutton.
His response: “Because that’s where the money is.”
We're not planning on robbing anybody, but if today's trade plays out like we think it can, it might feel like we're stealing. Only, we won't need to worry about the authorities coming after us, nor will we need to feel bad about it.
Our Analyst Willie Delwiche says that a basic requirement for many bullish ideas right now is that any stock or ETF in question needs to be above August highs. Anything below August highs is subject to a rude reversal. I'm on board with this line of thinking.
So, today's trade is in an American bank that is above its August high and showing signs of wanting more.
Am I tinkering with new ideas, new money management algorithms, new mindsets, new products, new timeframes, or new workflows?
We don’t need to be trying all new things all the time. But spending time thinking about divergent ideas is a valuable practice.
When we exercise our creative muscles, we might find nothing other than a journey down an empty rabbit hole. But sometimes, we have epiphany moments that change the way we operate. These can be minor, value-added ways – or maybe even drastic, wholesale change kinds of ways.
With strength starting to stand out in more and more sectors, we have a few good setups that we like for long trades here.
In chatting with our Head Technical Analyst Steve Strazza today, he pushed me in the direction of today's trade by highlighting the fact that if this one moves, its likely to move much faster and stronger than a couple of the other ideas I was interested in.
And the options in this stock are set up in a way that we can play this idea with a simple long calls trade. I like that. So let's dig in.
And price continues to tell us the Energy bull market still has legs.
Today's trade is a case in point where trading action today announced a declaration that an old-school oil services name wants to continue climbing higher.
The concept of “Tilt” is often discussed when things have gone awry. It’s usually associated with poor risk management and sloppy trading that has led to larger-than-expected losses.
You can no doubt find endless stories of traders in every timeframe who have gone on tilt and proceeded to wreck their month, their capital, and sometimes even their careers.
We’ve all experienced some degree of this in our own trading. It comes with the territory. It takes a rare human who possesses the mental fortitude to stay completely focused no matter what’s happening to their portfolio. Those people are out there – but they’re hard to find.
The downsides of going on tilt when our trades or strategies aren’t working out are fairly obvious.
But we rarely talk about when we go on tilt with a winning position!
