What’s in the Szelhamos Portfolio?

There was a time, not that long ago, that a curse would visit me once each month. Sometimes those months had 4 weeks and sometimes those months had 5 weeks.

No this isn’t that monthly curse that mothers must instruct their daughters upon, although many would call it a miracle, rather than a curse.

But in my case this was the curse of wishes and hopes.

Now, by my own choice, I’ve invited that one time monthly curse into my life every week.

The problem with selling call options is that you often find yourself wishing for stock movements that are inconsistent with human hopes and desires.

Unless you’re a short seller.

But most normal people want to see an unabated rise in the stock market.

Up, up and away.

Although I’m an inveterate believer in covered call strategies, I certainly understand the flip side, particularly since I’ve lived through the agony of losing a stock to assignment after an unexpectedly large run-up in price.

My wounds are still fresh from having lost Green Mountain Coffee Roasters at $45 when it shot up to $65.

Did I mention that it was about $80 now? Although the cynic in me believes that there’s still another accounting issue on the horizon and it’s a much steeper drop from $80, than it was from $35 when Herb Greenberg first caught our attention with the peculiarities of their numbering system.

So when the unthinkable happens, there’s only one thing that you can do, since ranting and breath holding isn’t very adult-like.

Instead, you wish and hope for the price to fall. That’s much more adult like.

Even though you don’t really think of it in such terms, what you are really doing is wishing for financial pain to be inflicted on others so that you don’t suffer the pain of missed opportunities.

To explain that in terms a child could understand, when you get to the window to order your ice cream cone and are told that they’re all out of your favorite flavor, you secretly hope that the person next to you who got the last scoop suddenly drops theirs to the ground below.

Granted, that puts you at odds with everyone else and if your the kind the craves human acceptance, you really don’t want to be lumped in with short sellers in the eyes of society, or the type of people that wish to see ice cream cones littering the floor.

Now that there are far more stocks that have weekly options available the wishing and hoping comes far more often and societal scorn just gets heaped on and on.

This week just so happens to be the end of the June options cycle, but these days, the third Friday of the month just doesn’t carry the same cache as it once did.

Remember when triple and quadruple witching hours threw the fear of God into even the most hardened of traders?

Those too are just yawners these days.

Lots of people still talk about unusual price swings near the close of trading on options expiration, but really they’re just rehashing memories of a time long ago. They can’t face the reality of what their high school sweet-heart looks like at the reunion, so instead they remember the good old days, when men were men, screaming buy and sell orders at one another as the seconds were ticking away toward the close of another month’s options cycle.

Those days are gone, too. There’s not that much screaming anymore. Someone probably wished that away too, tired of all the noise and chaos, and ultimately ushered in electronic trading and settlement.

On Tuesday, after that beautiful day of gains across the board, I looked at where my holdings were standing relative to  their options’ strike prices and I saw that I was now on track to lose many of them to assignment if they stayed at those levels.

Granted, I had purchased some of those stocks on Monday, with the express intention of holding the shares for just a few days. But now I had come to think of them as my own and really didn’t want to lose them.

I bought Home Depot for the next day dividend. I also bought shares of Transocean, Google and JP Morgan and sold in the money options after they rose beyond their initial purchase prices.

So I did what the god foresaken short sellers do.

I hoped and wished for the market to fall.

Why not just my stocks? Why the whole market?

Because I have a well diversified portfolio. Unfortuntely, as smart as I was to diversify the holdings, I wasn’t smart enough to foresee that I’d be at risk for losing most of my shares.

So I hoped for a nice little drop in prices. The key word here was “little”.

In my ideal world, prices would drop just to the point that all of the holdings closed just below their strike prices and then we’d do the same thing over again.

Well, I got what I had hoped for, except a whole lot more than hoped for.

I just wasn’t being careful.

Even poor Pandora suffered in it’s IPO. Imagine pricing $4 above the high end of the expected range and then going as high as 60% above the IPO price, only to end up the day about 9%.

All in all, most people would be happy with with a one day 9% gain, but I don’t think that was the case today.

I didn’t wish that on Pandora and all the poor folks that got suckered into buying at at pre-debacle prices. The newly issued shares changed hands nearly three times. There are probably some very happy people and lots of very unhappy people.

Since I didn’t hold shares in Pandora, I found today’s minute by minute trading chart amusing. The rapidity of its fall from $26 was impressive and it just deteriorated through the day.

When the dust settled the day was just a mirror image of Tuesday. This time, it was a sea of red for all of my positions, no different from everyone else out there. Of course, the options sales offset some of those losses, just as they cut some of the gains on Tuesday.

I did get off a single trade yesterday. The same one that I had tried to do on Tuesday. I finally found enough buyers for the Sirius – XM Satellite Radio January 2012 puts that I had wanted to sell.

Puts are another strange universe, again hoping for market setbacks.

Since I sold puts I was actually banking on Sirius’ stock price to rise between now and January. Wouldn’t you know it, but Sirius actually went up yesterday.

Finally a position that went in the right direction, if only for a day.

So today, I’m hoping for a market climb nearly equivalent to Wednesday’s loss.

And then as long as I’m hoping, Friday would just roll over and flatline.

Isn’t that an uplifting image? But that’s just part of the curse.

The power of hope is pretty amazing. I just wish I could make up my mind and know exactly what I should be wishing for. That would make me a better person, one much more in tune with society.

Nah. Maybe next month.

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I’m essentially retired.

I work on rare occasions, today, coincidentally being one of those days. I have another 4 days lined up for the rest of 2011. If it weren’t for the varied attendant body aches and pains, I’d be very happy, instead of just very happy.

Besides what Sugar Momma brings home, it’s just me, my computer and my discount broker.

Today, she bought home a squirrel and some acorns, while I try to catch elusive trades. It would be nice if she actually bought home a pay check. Instead, it gets electronically deposited, which takes away a little of the excitement of fondling the money proxy.

I miss the days when I used to be paid in gold fillings. I admire the integrity and conviction of a toothless by personal choice Ron Paul.

So after giving up a very substantial income when I was on the dark side, we’ve had to learn to economize in all aspects of our lives.

First, we sent our youngest son to a state university. Much less expensive than our previous attempts at educating one of our kids. Although during my initial consideration of Altucher’s treatise on why college is a waste, I dismissed his theory, now I’m not so certain.

Next, we insisted that he enlist in the army. Any army, as long as they had a tuition benefit. He’s currently in basic training, having decided on the United States Armed Forces. They will be paying for his senior year of middle school.

Then we stopped checking the mail box and answering the telephone. I also conveniently forget to sign checks. There’s alot you can get away with if you blame it on age.

Of course, you already know that I use a discount broker. No need to splurge there.

But even during times of belt tightening, man needs a respite from the daily grind, so in that mindset, Sugar Momma and I decided that we needed a vacation.

Rather than out typical luxurious retreat and pampering, oh how I loved the chocolate hydrotherapy of our past life, the hot and cold running prostitutes and other regal amenities, we decided to be one with nature and went camping.

Among the things that I love and respect about my Sugar Momma is her ability to see outside the box, even if that’s no longer an accepted hip consulting expression.

The one thing that I would like to change about her is her inability to get out of the box when she accidentally gets entrapped.

Can’t tell you how many times she’d been unknowingly placed out with the recycling.

Anyway, instead of buying an expensive tent, she suggested we use one of her bras for shelter. She was always good for such thoughts. Unfortunately, the royalties on her patented use of bras as 2 chinstrapped Yarmulkes for conjoined twin Orthodox Jewish people with hydrocephalus had by now gone dry, along with their CSF.

(Too many obscure references?)

Regardless, another bra was a sleeping bag for two and a third one was used as a fishing net and it helped to feed an entire village.

Priceless.

You’ve probably already figured out that Sugar Momma doesn’t read my blog.

What prompted that line of thinking was her discussion with a neighbor last night regarding an upcoming “girls day” when they were going to go shopping for custom made bras.

I have no clue what a custom made bra costs, but I’m guessing that her material costs alone will be substantial. Much less so for the neighbor.

The two joked that they would tell the salesperson that they were sisters. I don’t dare post their pictures, but trust me, they’re not spitting images.

So as a result,  I’ll have to trade more for those luxuries in life.

Trading more has come as a by-product of weekly options. The weeklies have been so nice to me, although they’ve complicated my life and made it harder to keep track of my holdings.

As has Twitter.

Specifically, its been a little more difficult to keep track of what positions have been hedged, which ones are weeklies and whether split priced positions were priced at different strikes.

Since I’m new to the weeklies, I haven’t yet designed a simple color coded spreadsheet to help me mindlessly be aware of my envoronment. At home, I know to match my crocodiles with crocodiles and my lion clothes with other lion clothes, but it’s not so easy when it comes to trading.

Yesterday was another one of those near perfect days that have been fewer and fewer recently, Although we had one of those jjust 3 trading days ago, it still seems so distant.

WIth the exception of a very small and new position in Bank of America and the predictable laggards AIG and RIMM, everything else was up today. Somewhat disappointingly, so were some of the positions I was hoping to pick up next week.

But there’s still plenty of time. After all, whereas we had the great day 3 days ago, the very next day more than erased the jubilation.

What seemed different today was that there really was no jubilation. None of the talking heads seemed to be saying that we were heading even higher, or the typical “we’ve turned the corner”.

That has to be bullish, but in my own proprietary indicator, I saw bearish signs.

So I did what I usually do when the market has a strong upward move. I try capitalizing on the bullish sentiment and sell those call options while the premiums move higher on bullish sentiment. As many as I can.

That’s what I did today. Resold the Transocean options that I bought back yesterday and then sold calls for shares in Freeport McMoRan, British Petroleum and, yes, wait for it, my small position in Google.

Finally, “Mission Accomplished”

However, was not all joy, as I took a very small loss as I closed out my short put position in Yahoo.

But you’re wondering what my proprietary indicator is, aren’t you? No you’re not, because in all likelihood you haven’t even made it this far down in today’s blog.

Who are you kidding?

Well, just for my own satisfation, that indicator is the number of clicks on Google ads on this site.

The more clicks I get, the more likely that we’re at some kind of a top. Who clicks on these kind of financial ads anyway, unless they think there’s an opportunity awaiting them?

Oh yeah, that and tomorrow’s Pandora offering. Somehow, this great service, but lousy business model, got the much coveted single letter stock designation of “P”.

No short term or long term prospects of profits, but just as with LinkedIn, the offering size and price per share have ratcheted upward.

That can’t be good either.

But once again, I don’t really care, since I don’t play that game of chasing hot stocks. Even solid companies like VMWare, after a meteoric post-IPO rise cooled off pretty fast after liquid nitrogen got poured over it. A little too fast for normal people to bail.

Instead, I’m just going to take one of those idle bras and fill it up with today’s trading profits and wait for the next boring opportunity.

Then I’ll just perch my lazy boy on the La-Z-Boy to watch my wife run around the house trying to find all of her bras.

Priceless.

It’s pretty fascinating how a word or phrase can change its meaning from one generation to another.

For example, there was once a time that if you called someone a “two bit whore” that meant that you could procure their prostitution services for a mere 25 cents.

These days, if you call someone a “two bit whore” they likely can’t be had for less than 25 dollars.

Imagine how Rip Van Winkle would have been confused.

Well, that and the Dutch Guilder thing.

There was also a time that “mission accomplished” was an expression used with much pride. A smile, a thumbs up and a jaunty gate all spelled “mission accomplished”.

Today, “mission accomplished” is often said with much derision, almost like “Heckuva job, Brownie”. In fact, if I could find a universally recognized font for heavy sarcasm, I would have used it, but that too might be subject to generational interpretation.

I start each day with some objectives in mind. Some days those objectives are achieved and other days I just ignore the preceding 24 hours.

As you know, I always check the New York Times Obituaries to ensure that I’m not among the very recentlu honored.

Once that’s cleared out of the way, CNBC is turned on, coffee is poured and I look at my spreadsheets and portfolio screen to map out possible action for the day.

Today, there was a little extra, however.

Today was the day to drastically reduce the number of people that I was following on Twitter. The very same people that were my followers and that I had I just started following on Saturday to see whether there would be any impact on my overall numbers.

And was there. A 30% increase in followers. All for just selling my social media soul.

But as I thought, whatever potential guilt I might harbor about just using and then tossing them aside was short lived. As opposed to your brokerage and the SEC, there’s no penalty for “free riding”. Go ahead, game the system.

I cut about 190 Twitter accounts that I had been following over the course of the previous 24 hours and, so far, no ramifications. No loss within my ranks. In fact, I picked up even more followers today.

Mission accomplished. No sarcasm intended, although I’m also assuming that those people don’t read the blog. If they do, I may have to call in an outside conultant to deal with the bad publicity and the premature call to victory.

But wait, if you read on, there’s even more.

Knowing that some of my shares in AIG, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs were going to be assigned, I had already planned to pick up some new shares. It was all scripted out.

Funny thing, though.

I looked at my portfolio holdings and it still showed all of my shares in Goldman and JP Morgan. I had expected some to remain, as I wasn’t fully hedged, but there was no rationale for all of them being left in my account intact.

I called my E*Trade “Platinum Group” and on their end they didn’t see the shares. Problem was, though, neither did they see the cash the should have been available to allow me to make more trades from the assignment of my shares.

They were convinced that I needed to clear my cache for the cash to appear, or maybe it was the other way around.

We went through all of the little mechinations, but alas, “bupkis”.

So I was told that they would do a manual balance reconciliation.

FIne.

That is until I tried to pick-up shares in Transocean and was told that there wasn’t sufficient cash in the account.

Just a little setback in the script.

Back on the horn to E*Trade, while I watched Transocean move from $62.85, where I had placed my ill-fated order to $63.40.

But no problem, because by the time they were finally able to resolve the issue, Transocean was back down to my price. The E*Trade guys offered me some commssion free trades, which I thanked them for, but declined, as they have always been excellent in every phase of execution.

Anyway, I finally picked up shares and promptly sold in the money $62.50 options. I did that because a “buy recommendation” had just come out on Transocean. I always use those things as contrary indicators.

Worked.

While I was in the neighborhood, in a middle fingered salute to diversification, I also picked up shares in Halliburton. Sold options and then watched shares fall.

No worries, though. That’s what the options are for, and Halliburtion is volatile enough that the options premium is always especially nice.

Then, as planned, I also picked up shares in Home Depot, whch goes ex-dividend tomorrow. Double dipping. Dividend and options premium. Maybe even capital gains on the shares, all by this Friday.

What I hadn’t planned on was buying back shares of JP Morgan, which initially dipped belwo the assigned price and later in the day had a nice surge. I bought those in two pieces and sold options at $41 and $42, for this Friday’s expiration.

Those shares were a much better deal than picking up XLF shares. Besides, in the tax-deferred account that those shares were being held, the wash rule doesn’t apply. So no loss on the previous assignment, in fact, now a lowered cost basis and even more options premiums.

Mission?

Accomplished.

Now, what I really hadn’t planned on doing was picking up shares of Google. I haven’t owned shares in about 4 months or so, but found the price irresistable at $506.

Unfortunately, the market didn’t find it that way and Google just meandered lower.

If any company hasn’t earned the “mission accomplished” accolade, its been Google, unless you mean “mission accomplished“which is “mission accomplished” in the most sarcastic font that I could find.

But as the market went up, then down, then up again, only to end the day flat-lined, I felt that the day’s overall mission had been accomplished.

At the end of the day report and summary to the shareholderd, I had gotten down to a managable and respectable number of people I’m following on Twitter, made some spending money and even sold a few more books.

Then reality hit. Like Donald Rumsfeld’s worst nightmare.

No, not Baathists, “dead enders,” Al-Qaeda sympathizers or crazed Shiites being attacked by sedate Sunni’s.

No, nothing like that at all.

Sugar Momma returned from work and did a once around, taking note of the unfinished chores she had left for me.

Laundry room a mess, didn’t sweep in the kitchen and recycling not cleared.

Oh well, you can’t please everyone, right Brownie?

There’s always tomorrow.

 

I never really thought of myself as a “user”, but obviously I’ve been in deep denial.

Years ago, I saw an obscure movie on HBO. It probably had a very short theatrical release. Up until 5 minutes ago, I thought the name of the movie was “Dutch Treat”, but a check of IMDB finds a different movie by the same name.

For me, the most memorable line of the movie that I seem to have forgotten was “You car is your dick. RIght now, you have a really small dick”. That was the life lesson taught to a mid-west kind of innocent guy who moved to California.

Well, Twitter is the same.

I think you measured by your number of followers and your “Klout”.

Yesterday, I decided to take some drastic actions to increase my number of followers and “Klout”, since both had stalled out in the past week after some nice and steady growth. Like most men, I wanted bigger Klout.

I wanted to cast a Klout shadow that would make Anthony Weiner envious.

First, I opened a Facebook account.

I actually had one, that was closed to everyone. I used it only to be able to place Facebook ads. I was proud to have no Facebook friends. I actually worked that fact into nearly every converstaion that I had with real people.

But since I now want to sell books, I was told that I need a Facebook presence and a page for Option to Profit.

Okay. The page went up and I was immediately stunned to see how many suggested friends were out there for me. Some names sounded slightly familiar, most not at all. Was I getting Alzheimers? Was there a reason I wasn’t remembering my “friends”? WHo were these people?

But before I get back to Facebook, I also decided to start following all of my Twitter followers. Previously, I had about a 4 to 1 ratio. I followed relatively few people and maybe, as a result, I had relatively few followers.

Maybe, the reason for that was my content was “drek”, but I’ll choose to ignore that possibility.

So follow I did and lo and behold, I increased my number of followers by about 20%.

I’m a user. No doubt about it. Facebook, Twitter. It’s all about getting people and then getting their people and their people’s people. All to buy books.

That’s when the reality hit.

If I thought that my Tweets were tripe, that all changed when I saw what was now pouring into my Twitter stream.

Holy tripe.

Here comes the guilt.

I need to unfollow most of those new people. I feel badly about that.

I do, because when someone no longer follows me, I feel just a little bit sad, although I often wonder why they were following in the first place. Was there anything in my Tweets or blogs that indicated I would be a good place for learning a daily Russian word?

At first I thought that I just couldn’t do that sort of thing, because I really wasn’t that kind of person, but then came the realization.

I stopped being a guilt ridden person that day that I gave up on buy and hold stock strategies. It has to all be about the outcome, not the process.

These days, I’m in and out. Not quite a day trader, but one whose trading pattern more befits my attention span. I also have way too much regard for my mental well being to be a day trader, although I do make about 4 trades a day.

For example, I expect that today, I’ll be buying shares of Home Depot, Transocean and the Financial Sector SPDR, with the cash that will come pouring in from assignment of my shares in AIG, GS and JP Morgan.

I plan to write in the call options immediately on all three, with expiration this Friday.

Home Depot, in fact, goes ex-dividend on Wednesday and if it gets exercised, I’ll be happy and just buy something else and again sell call options.

No guilt there. Just want to wring every cent out of those shares as quickly as possible. Sort of like Jack the Ripper.

So I started the Twitter pruning this morning with a newly discovered guilt free feeling. Sorry “Great Deals in Southern Florida” peddler. Sorry “Job Bank in Sacramento” guy.

And so it went.

But being a cautious kind of guy and still wanting to retain my followers, I hedged my bets. Not much of a surprise, considering how I trade.

I decided to start by dumping those people that had lots of followers. Looking through their Tweets, I couldn’t understand why they had so many, but I figured they would never miss me and would be less likely to reciprocate.

If that works, then it’s time to prune down those that seem to have a strong evangelistic tone. I’m all for religiousity, but I want mine in spasms of more than 140 spaces.

As the soon to be old saying goes “You lost me at Lord”.

Now, back to Facebook.

My sister immediately found my presence. I had long resisted her suggestions to join and become a part of “communities” of our past.

Her response was “OMG” and then posting a photo of us taken in a photobooth, probably about 45 years ago, back in the days when we had such things as booths.

My oldest son, posted this one Twitter: “Just received a #facebook friend request from @theacsman #sellout”

I’ll have to agree with both of them.

Not being one of great diplomatic talents, Sugar Momma and I went out for dinner last night with two friends. Interestingly, they had also found me on Facebook and sent in their “friend requests” an hour before our dinner.

 I accepted. What else could I do?

Then at dinner we spoke about many things.

I only wanted to know how to go about “de-friending” people. Not them, of course, just people.

Forget the guilt.

As I was starting to look at the “wall”, that monstrosity that I had somehow created, all of these obscure friends of friends were now appearing. There was no “greater plan” and my Option to Profit book theme was getting buried.

Remember, all I want to do is sell books. I really didn’t need to know about little Moishe’s bris and how scrumptious the whitefish was.

It’s not becasue I’m anti-social, I just don’t care.

And that too, extends to stocks. I really don’t care about all of the details. I don’t even necessarily want to know wehat a company makes or what services it provides.

I’m a user. I just want it to make money for me.

Is that so bad?

Now, if it turns out that the Facebook page gets my “friends” to read this blog, I’ll have some explaining to do, but then at least I’ll know that the advice to start a Facebook page was a good one. Better yet, increasing book sales would really make the point.

My new friend, Adam Pflantzer, at Shmish.com (a nice financial news aggregator site),  has told me that I need to put my facebook address out into the ether, so here it is: http://www.facebook.com/TheAcsMan

There’s nothing like profits to ease the guilt pangs.

So here’s to friends and followers. Especially the ones that buy books, post on their walls and the walls of their friends and their friend’s friends.

And so on and so on.

 

We have a 15 month old long haired miniature Dachshund, named Laszlo.

When we got him, my Sugar Momma very specifically told me that I couldn’t refer to him as a “replacement” for our dearly departed Golden Retriever, Murray. We had to love him for his own self and respect his own identity.

Well, Laszlo has this bad habit and he certainly has an identity all his own

He howls incessantly. Perched on an easy chair top and peering out the window of our cul-de-sac, whenever he sees a jogger or any casual stroller, he goes beserk. If you don’t immediately let him out, he starts a pitiful whining noise.

Murray, bless his soul. was as dumb as a door knob, but he was incredibly sweet. Don’t let the mortarboard on his head fool you. He wasn’t even GED material. But the personality more than offset the lack of intellect. Sure, he barked as well, but only because he wanted to play with people.

Laszlo just wants to bark.

When he gets near people, he just does more of the same.

There’s another important difference. Murray only breached the electric fence once in 12 years. He may have been stupid, but he wasn’t dumb. We’d let him out into our substantially sized yard and never have to worry whether he would chase some innocent passerby.

Laszlo seems to care less if he gets zapped. He spits in the eye of the invisible enemy. He never seems to get tired of barking sheerly for barking’s sake.But he’ll also then lunge past the boundaries when someone passes by. Occasionally, he’ll do that with a car, as well.

I have long thought Laszlo to be very smart, but still he is the Spawn of Satan.

He’s also seemed to learn how to communicate. We can tell the difference between his barks for people, other dogs and birds.

A lot of good that does us.

But, the really annoying habit is that at about 3:30 or so each morning, and the time has gotten consistently earlier as we approach the summer solstice, Laszlo has been catapaulting out of our bed and howling, while he runs downstairs to the front door.

Laszlo is smarter than we are. He knows that we won’t be consistent with him in our approach to his behaviors. Our kids had us figured out like that, as well. When she was just my wife and not my Sugar Momma we would argue over issues like that with the kids. Now that we are empty nesters and she is, in fact, my Sugar Momma, I defer to her on all issues of behavior management.

We’ve tried just letting him bark, figuring that he would poop out, but that has yet to be the case. He goes on and on, howling over some unseen critter in the yard. Since we’re surrounded by sheep, cows, horses, deer and Lord know what else, I assume he hears soem rustling and wants to fetch us a varmint.

Although we still haven’t figured out at what point Laszlo will give up, even a brief moment of silence would be incredibly welcome .

That was precisley the atmosphere in the markets today.

Six straight losing days. It just went on and on and on. There really wasn’t any end in sight. Despite the typical onslaught of economic data and political events, there really was nothing out of the ordinary.

At this point, how are we going to be surprised by disappointing jobs numbers? But dispite the release of the ADP numbers last Wednesday and the absolute conviction with which the official government numbers would be dreadful as well the following Friday, the market dumped yet again.

How long have we known about the Greek crisis? Did it take a genius to realize that the Japanese disaster would also wreak havoc on the earnings of a number of American companies?

Even more maddening, almost like a momentary stop in the spine tingling barking, there were a few days in the past couple of weeks that it appeared as if the markets were going to eke out a gain.

I’ve lost track of how many days in that time period I saw five digit gains turn into losses. I was actually ecstatic for the one day that a five digit gain remained that way, just as long as you counted the decimal points at he the end of the trading day.

Even when all of those nice kind hearted buyers just wanted to pick up some shares, the market just barked at them.

But you just don’t know what to do. Just like with Laszlo, I know that yelling won’t help anything. Giving in, selling shares at a loss only reinforces bad behavior.

Sometimes all you can hope for is that the evil beast poops out and just has to take a breather.

That’s what happened today.

By 3 PM, the market had reached a gain of about 130 points. I squeezed out a few trades to capture a couple of more pennies from those weekly call options.

I bought back some $42 JP Morgan options and quickly resold them at $41. I also sold some AIG calls on my remaining shares. Both closed the day in the money.

I also sold some weekly $135 Goldman Sachs, which briefy went over the mark, but settled the day below $134.

I’m not sure what statment I was sending with those trades, other than my desperation to bring in a few more dollars of income, which is how I treat the options premiums.

In reality, I was saying that I didn’t believe that there would be follow through on the upward climb on Friday, the expiration date of many of my call options.

I was betting that the barking would start all over again.

Playing to script, by the time the final bell rang, the market closed up a respectable 76 points, but still, that was a sizeable drop from its intra-day high.

Was today just a Satan like breather or are we going somewhere far better?

It felt so good to see that everyone of my holdings stayed in the green. In all, only 4 of the 60 or so stocks that I follow lost money today.

Even RIMM and Goldman Sachs closed higher today. When was the last time that happened?

Even though I’m usually an optimist, I don’t think Laszlo will mellow out in the near future. I think that he’s going to continue getting up at ungodly hours until the frost comes. I think that whatever sounds of silence that we hear will just be momentary spells of silence, when he’s just a bit too tired and needs to actually breathe.

As far as the market goes, even though I made a few  bearish kind of trades today, I’m still hopeful. Hopeful that todays gain, despite the breather at the end of the day, is part of the market returning to a more acceptible behavior.

What really bothers me about this bearish beast of a dog is that he is also very hard to catch. Good old Murray would walk right up to you and never tried to run away. Laszlo plays this game and scampers away whenever you get close. Tantalizingly close, but not close enough. Just like market profits these days, he’s very elusive.

But at least I went to bed last night a little less nervous and at the very least, I can still dream about Murray while Satan is at my back.

As I do so, I think what we need is just a big capitulation. I think I need to let the dog out, just get it out of his system.

Maybe that’s what all of the barking is about. Once he realizes that he can’t catch the critters grabbing his attention, maybe Laszlo will throw it in and exorcise his demons.

Hmm. Maybe the market needs to do the same.