If You Like Uncertainty……

If you like uncertainty, you may really love what’s ahead.

Of course, no one ever knows what is ahead, but I’m certain that it won’t be as certain as the market’s climb since Election Day.

Coming on the heels of Wednesday’s 300 point gain, today’s triple digit loss was muted, unless you were in metals and perhaps energy.

Those two certainly helped me out a lot in 2016 and had been pretty good to me in 2017, as well.

I put quite a bit of money into retailers in the past two weeks following the post-earnings swoons in L Brands, Target and Best Buy.

Abercrombie and Fitch, on the other hand, was just a lucky call, as it didn’t nosedive after poor numbers.

There was one other trade in the week that I didn’t report, because it was made in the final minute of trading on Tuesday and it didn’t involve the immediate sale of call contracts.

That was for Las Vegas Sands, which subsequently soared on Wednesday at which time I did sell some weekly calls, only to watch those shares give up much of their gain today.

But that’s the theme of what I really want to talk about.

If you don;t quiver too much, there have been some really good opportunities in some down beaten stocks.

You may have followed my recent trades in and out of Cliffs Natural Resources, for example. read more

Back From Vacation

This may be a little hard to believe, but the past 2 weeks have been the first “real” vacation that I’ve taken since retirement.

That “retirement” was about 6 years ago.

While I have gone away during that time, including a nice trip to England, at which time I had the good fortune of surviving a heart attack, I never had my laptop away from my side.

My wife still jokes about how I was unplugging monitors in the hospital to plug in that laptop and cellphone.

I don’t find it as funny as she does, however.

One of the really nice things about having pivoted away from the old subscription service (I can’t use its name for a year) is that I don’t really have any obligation to write something every day.

And so, I didn’t for the past 2 weeks. read more

All the Kremlin’s Victims

The list of murders laid at the feet of Vladimir Putin has gotten so long now that you need a chart to keep track of them. That’s just what the Association of Former Intelligence Officers produced in a recent edition of its quarterly bulletin, The Intelligencer. To be sure, AFIO, which represents 4,500 former CIA, FBI… read more

Trading on Trump’s Twitter Tantrums

When Donald Trump this week gave his first press conference since winning the presidential election, he alternately lauded the press and shouted down reporters he didn’t like with jeers such as: “Fake news!” He slipped into stream-of-consciousness rants about everything from Chinese hackers to hidden cameras in hotel rooms “all over the place.” And he denounced… read more

Senators’ Abnormal Gains Vanish After STOCK Act

Time was when U.S. senators enjoyed some “informational advantage” that helped them make some abnormal gains on the stock market – as much as 8.8% annualized. Such gains have vanished since an exposé by the legendary 60 Minutes television show, followed by the passage of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK Act in 2012,… read more