Sunday, January 19, 2025
Investors never know for sure if a company is going to post better earnings results than expected. That’s why there are always earnings surprises. However, that doesn’t keep traders from making educated guesses. In the case of Amazon (AMZN), a trader recently purchased 17,000 bullish call spreads that expire the day after earnings come out. […]
High current yields and growing dividends are the cure for the directionless market. And if we are in for a “lost decade” from the stock market, yield plus growing dividends is one strategy that will still produce positive total returns. The strategy works in any market—bull, bear, or stagnant. Let me show you. Over the […]
ETFs can often make for effective covered call trades because the price tends to be more stable than single stocks. In the case of SPDR S&P Metals & Mining ETF (XME), the stock has been range bound for much of the last six months. From a block trade we saw last week, a trader is […]
With the fall of Silicon Valley Bank, the financial news media has remained focused on finding the next “crisis” of the day. The so-called banking crisis petered out after a couple of weeks, but that didn’t stop the pundits from using it to proclaim that commercial property values and commercial mortgages would be the next […]
I put out calls to traders and managers I know on Wall Street to get their take on the recent economic data. This is data the Federal Reserve also uses to make decisions… And they told me some surprising things. One of them being that bond yields look as if they’re about to collapse. We […]
Natural gas prices have been in a significant down trend since the middle of last year. A popular method of trading natural gas, the United States Natural Gas Fund (UNG) has gone from a high of over $30 to 52-week lows of around $6.50. However, a large options spread could suggest gas prices are set […]
Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) fully participated in the 2022 bear market. Unlike the tech sector’s apparent recovery during the first quarter of 2023, REIT share prices have not shown signs of life. Broadly speaking, REITs are down about 30% from the late 2021 highs. That means now is a good time to make some […]
A typical trade-off for most high-yield investments is that they pay non-tax-qualified dividends, which would be taxed at your marginal income tax rate. Not a lot of investors know that there is a way (outside of qualified retirement accounts) to earn tax-advantaged, high-yield dividends. The benefits can be substantial. So let me show you how […]
One of the most heavily traded ETFs in the world is the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ). The Nasdaq 100 tracking ETF trades over 50 million shares on average per day and nearly 3 million options on top of that. Last week, an institution or fund purchased a whopping 65,000 puts in QQQ that expire in […]
Gold just rushed past $2,000 for the first time since Covid first struck (and people were panicking). Does that mean you should be buying? For many, they look at gold mining companies as a ‘gold alternate’ to capture bigger gains as gold moves. Today, I’m going to share more about if this is a good […]
