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 punished if…
This morning (premarket) we sent a note to subscribers laying out some hedging strategies, should they be needed in the event of a continued rally. Happily, not only was that note totally unnecessary, but today’s fantastic drop has us ideally positioned going into next week.
As several members mentioned today in correspondence, the advantages of market-neutral trading strategies aren’t limited to markets that blandly drift sideways; being neutral is also a great way to avoid the day-to-day whiplash of the sort we’re…
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 came…
This week should be pretty volatile, with plenty of government data, earnings announcements, and Fed action to push markets to and fro. Many traders are paying special attention to the GDP announcement Wednesday morning and the FOMC news later that afternoon. As is our wont, we advise taking off some risk ahead of Fed meetings.
Markets were very quiet until the last forty-five minutes today, trading on very light volume, and the S&P 500 emini futures weren’t able to break above…
Friday’s selloff obviously relieved any overbought conditions that may have persisted, so before the Monday open here are some Reversal Readings we’re keeping an eye on. Remember that we consider any reading above 95 to be well overbought and any reading under 5 very oversold.
XLF – Financials – 0.39
EWA – Australia – 0.65
EWZ – Brazil – 6.22
IYR – Real Estate – 0.53
XLI – Industrials – 3.4
PHO – Water – 9.1
We already have a small bonus trade position in the financials and…
Monday, August 31, 2009
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