We generally restrict iron condor trades in our paid newsletter and managed accounts to index products. For those who prefer ETFs, we look at SPY, DIA, IWM, QQQQ; otherwise, SPX, RUT, NDX, DJX are bigger proxies, or on the futures side of things we’ll look at the Emini S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100 (ES and NQ). The reason we trade index products is that diversification reduces the impact of company-level surprises: an iron condor on, say, RIMM will get…
Saturday, April 18, 2009
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While the broad market rally since March 2008 has been breathtaking, returns over the same period in emerging market stocks have been even more significant: EEM, the ETF that tracks the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, is up 42% from its low on March 2nd versus a 29% return for the S&P 500 over roughly the same period. The chart below plots the 50-day moving average of the daily logarithmic return of EEM, subtracted from the daily logarithmic return of SPY. …
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Forgive us a short rant this evening. This country is sick. When the three main engines of growth – consumer spending, real estate, and financial services – are broken, it’s just not possible to make any economic progress. And for just a moment, let’s think about how pathetic those key sectors really are. Cogent analysis of our per capita consumption requires some historical knowledge, since no contemporary people compares with our particular level of decadence. At least the Romans had…
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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Times like this are tough for traders who insist that their positions have some kind of story supporting them. Technology is strong and probably always will be, but it’s not going back to dotcom levels; China, everybody’s favorite narrative for this decade, seems sort of broken; the agriculture and solar stocks look ready to return to earth after a high-flying run; even oil is looking overextended. And it’s still not safe to talk about real estate or financial stocks. Tim…
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
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The Dow shed one hundred points in the last hour and a half of trading. The Dow and S&P held onto some gains, but the Russell 2000 and the Nasdaq 100 actually closed the morning gap and ended the day in the red. The late day selling seemed to be led down by large cap tech, as GOOG AAPL RIMM BIDU all moved lower. Volume was a bit higher – back toward average levels at least, though most of that…
Monday, August 31, 2009
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