Sunday, November 18, 2007

Post Nov 16 Options Expiration Thoughts

After two days of not watching the markets, I used most of today to catch up on what happened on options expiration Friday. The Dow was up 66 points on Fri and finished the week up 1%. After looking at all the rhetoric from Barron's to various finance sites, I pretty much have to look at things from several viewpoints:

1) If I want to go long on anything, I'm going to have to cherry pick the top performer in a given sector. So if I'm making a list, let's go with this:

Primary List:
Solar - FSLR (+21 on Fri)
Brazil - EWZ (+3% on Fri)
Fertilizer - POT (one of the trader's mentioned this to me)
Copper - PCU (beware the 30-day trend of the spot metal is downward)
Metals - RTP (up $1 on Fri for a $440 stock)
Water - VE (a different trader reminded me it was on the Oxford Club portfolio)

Secondary List:
Consumer Staples - CL, CLX (both near 52 week highs)
Healthcare - ESRX (this might be a Dec play as it was a $7k winner in Dec 2006)

2) Keep those probe buys around $10k. I get a sense I want to be somewhat aggressive and go 15k on a first position probe.

3) I haven't heard much from Dana Telsey at Telsey Advisory Group. She has the best 10 year track record on evaluating the retail sector. I am guessing she has already advised her select cliente on who she thinks will be the winners for Black Friday, aka the unofficial first day of the Xmas shopping season. One interesting note, is this year's Xmas shopping season is one of the longest possible, its 32 shopping days. So that will make year to year comparison's to 2006 somewhat messed up. If I were to pick one retail winner, I will guess its COST (Costco), because its the only chart that I somewhat like.

Let's take it one hour at a time, and who knows, maybe we add some trades to wittle down that 79% cash position.

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