There is nothing like a week of skiing to give myself a little break from obsessing about Greek debt issues. I highly recommend Taos to anyone who skis and hasn’t been there yet. I also got a chance to hit Snowshoe this weekend in West Virginia. Snowshoe has two runs on the western side that make it worthwhile and the advantage of only being 2.5 hours from my house. I will be hitting these slopes more often to keep my skills up before my next trip out west. I can only hope my Colorado trip in March is half as much fun as my two ski outings that I had this week… Your liver pays dearly now for youthful magic moments, but rock on completely with some brand new components.
Now back to making some money so I can afford my rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, I spent the day tuning up the portfolio and I tried to dump most of my more aggressive “defensive” options today. I got out of about half of them before the values got away from me. I need to use market orders when I just want to “get done”, being a dick for a tick has cost me some money today. I will now be keeping my March call options on the “2X Inverse S&P 500 EFT (SDS)’ until they expire next month since they have become a value play and they are now too cheap to sell. On the brighter side I was able get out of my calls on the Volatility Index (VXX) calls at a profit.
Gold: I was getting nervous with my gold investments last week and had been watching the 5o day moving average to see if it would cross the 200 day moving average (death cross). Luckily I was using this as my signal to sell the rest of my positions but the cross never occurred and I still have some investments in gold. Gold looks stronger to me now but I am not adding to the position at this time. I also like the Platinum/Gold spread. Platinum has been cheaper than gold for the first time in at least 10 years while being much rarer metal. It looks like the platinum may be returning to being the premium product once again.
Oil has me concerned at current levels; I am not sure how much many more price increases the economy can deal with before it affects the economy. If we run up to $125ish it would force me to sell everything (except my oil related stocks).
Hyperdynamics: I had a decent amount of speculative money invested in this oil exploration company. Basically they had enough money to drill one exploratory well and they completed the well but didn’t find oil in commercial quantities. The results do show that they potentially may have commercial quantities of oil on part of their concessions but at this point they would need to take on a partner to continue exploring. They would be negotiating with any partner from a weak position and any transaction would likely be extremely dilutive. If the stock breaks below $1.oo I may pick some up but most likely I am licking my wounds and walking away from this one with a large loss.
Bank of America: I am holding on to my April $10 calls for a little while longer. If it doesn’t make it up to $9 soon it may be time to lick some more wounds. My target is north of $12 by the end of the end of the year.
I still have my options on Toyota (TM) and I happy it has recovered. I plan to hold the $80 calls until they expire in April. My target is north of $95 on this one but oil may start hurting this one soon. How long will the workers keep building them new ones?
As of Friday 2/17/12, the S&P 500 was up 8.7% so far this year and my portfolio was up 27.4% YTD. This gives the portfolio an aggressive year-to-date beta of 3.1 times the S&P 500 but the beta has been tapering off recently and is closer to 1.8 times the market this month. My cash position is at an acceptable 5.0% of the portfolio and the margin reserve requirement is down to 10.9% due to my recent relative conservatism. Yeah, excess ain’t rebellion.
traderwasteland
mattmarsh
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