When the market seas get choppy, options premiums tend to inflate everywhere you look. Investors get scared and Speculators smell opportunity, both putting a bid under calls and puts as each is willing to pay up for protection and good fortune, respectively.
However, regardless of market direction, options premiums tend to mean revert. In other words, they tend not to stay high for very long before retreating back to some version of average. This creates an opportunity for nimble options traders to profit off of others' misguided notions.
This being our current backdrop, I've identified a nice instrument for fading the current volatility spike.
Since not a lot has changed at the TSX Composite or TSX 60 level, we want to take another look two months later to see what's developed under the surface and where there are opportunities to profit.
These are the registration details for the monthly conference call for Premium Members of All Star Charts. In this call we will discuss the global market environment and how to profit from it. As always, this will include Stocks, Interest Rates, Commodities and Currencies. The video of the call will be archived in the members section to re-watch any time and the PDF of the charts will be made available as well.
This month’s Conference Call will be held on Tuesday August 13th at 7PM ET. Here are the details for the call:
There's a lot going on in the world right now, and India specifically, but one positive to come out of all this mess is we may be seeing a more clear trend develop in USD/INR.
Ari Wald is always one of my favorite Technical Analysts. Him and I were trained around the same time so we look at the market in a very similar way. Today Ari is the Head of Technical Analysis at Oppenheimer in New York and we're very lucky to have him on the podcast. If you're interested in learning more about Ari, go back and listen to his guest appearance in Season 1 (EP 2). In this episode, Ari and I discuss the current state of the US Stock Market. Included in the analysis are breadth measurements, important levels, smoothing mechanisms and sector rotation. Him and I can talk forever about this stuff so the time felt like it flew by. We covered a ton of material in a very short period of time. I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did!
Copper is important for a variety of reasons, but it's often discussed within the context of global growth expectations.
Given we just hit 2-year lows it may be a good time to discuss Dr. Copper, why he may be headed into "critical condition", and what it could mean from an intermarket perspective.
We're below former resistance levels in all of the major US Indexes. While structurally, longer-term uptrends are still intact, there is short-term risk of price volatility and/or opportunity cost. This is where establishing your time horizon is important. We laid out important levels from an intermediate-term horizon earlier this week. I think we're in for more of a sideways mess than anything else for now.
Historic breakouts are rarely clean. Go back and look at the early 80s. If we are to resolve this 18-month range in US Indexes higher, with European Stocks also breaking out, I'd argue it's a historic market event. If that happens, a bumpy start would not be anything we haven't seen before at other important points in the past.
With that in mind, let's take today to focus on where we stand in momentum.
Believe it or not, there are still some stocks at or near all-time highs in this current market environment. And if we're of the mind that the recent selloff is just another "glitch" that repairs itself through price and time, then we'll want to position ourselves in the leading stocks that will drag us higher in the next upswing.
We've identified one stock doing the heavy lifting for a sector that is showing signs of mean-reverting higher and offering a good potential payout if it works out.
For those new to the exercise, we take a chart of interest and remove the x/y-axes and any other labels that would help identify it. The chart can be any security in any asset class on any timeframe on an absolute or relative basis. Maybe it's a custom index or inverted, who knows!
We do all this to put aside the biases we have associated with this specific security/the market and come to a conclusion based solely on price.
You can guess what it is if you must, but the real value comes from sharing what you would do right now.Buy,Sell, or Do Nothing?