The world’s greatest stock picker? Bet you sold Apple and Google a long time ago

By John Mauldin

My good friend Barry Ritholtz, famous for launching The Big Picture blog (and since graduating to being a regular Bloomberg columnist as well as writing a weekly column for the Washington Post), is well-known for being a contrarian. Barry is a regular dinner partner when I get to New York, and he also participates in the annual Maine fishing trip. We frequently trade information … and barbs. The word colorful affectionately comes to mind when I think of Barry (and maybe opinionated would work).

I can usually count on him to find at least a few things to disagree with me on at our dinners. No matter what devastating arguments I produce to demonstrate the errors in his thinking, he conjures up new facts to support his flawed positions. We have had a few of these episodes as members of a panel in front of a large public audience, much to the amusement of the spectators (and watching Barry can be an entertaining spectacle). My only real frustration with Barry is that he is mentally faster than I am and he seemingly remembers every obscure data point from the last thousand years. I consider it a triumph if I merely hold my ground.

But one thing we do agree on and are both passionate about is that we human beings were not designed for these modern times. As I so often say, we evolved on the African savanna dodging lions and chasing antelopes. We have converted those survival instincts into an unwieldy approach to dealing with financial markets, which is not the optimal way to approach investing. Both of us write a great deal about behavioral investing and the foibles of human nature.

I was struck by the insights of Barry’s latest Washington Post column. How difficult it is for us humans to hold on in the middle of dramatic volatility. Don’t you wish you had held Apple for the last 10 years? A 1000-bagger is not to be sneezed at. But dear gods, the volatility! And what about the stocks that once looked like a better bet than Apple that went to zero? How do you decide when to hold and when to fold? (Cue Kenny Rogers.)

This is a short Outside the Box, but it’s one that should make you think, which is the purpose of this letter.
And in a departure from my usual close, I want to offer two links. The first is to a fascinating web post at something called distractify.com of 52 colorized historical photos. You  have seen most of these photos in black and white (or at least you have if you have reached my advanced age). Seeing them in color is quite another story.

Second, and not for the faint of heart, is a link to a rather heated exchange between Ben Affleck and Bill Maher over radical Islam and Islamaphobia. I generally find Maher annoying, sometimes in the extreme. But this “conversation” is instructive. It illustrates the tensions in the Western world around dealing with Islamic beliefs and the religion in general. The other guests chime in with fascinating anecdotes. You can decide for yourself who wins this argument, but it is one that is increasingly important in our world. And I am not sure anyone will be comfortable with the answers. This is courtesy of my friends over at Real Clear Politics.

I am still luxuriating in the aftermath of my birthday party on Saturday night. Friends flew in from all over the country (and from around the world) and surprised me. Too many to mention, but I was deeply honored and humbled. My staff and friends and family put the whole thing together (huge thanks to Shannon and Mary and Shane and my kids). My daughter Melissa put together a playlist on Spotify of all the songs she has heard me listening to over the years. Three and a half hours of one hit after another. We are working on making it available to those of you who are already on Spotify.

And just for the record, that morning I did 66 consecutive push-ups on my 65^th birthday. I then went on to do a total of 360 push-ups (50×5+44) in less than two hours, with the help of an Avacor machine to cool me down between sets, in a workout that included a similar number of abs, lat pulldowns, arm exercises, etc. Knock on wood, I do not plan to go gently into that good night. As a geek, I am coming late in life to loving the gym. But better late…..

It is time to hit the send button. I am off to the Great Investors’ Best Ideas Symposium here in Dallas. It is a who’s who of famous investors, all of whom agreed to speak and to give one investment tip to aid a great charity. Bill Ackman, David Einhorn, Paul Isaac, Bill Miller, Ray Nixon, Richard Perry, T. Boone Pickens, Michael Price, Tom Russo, and moderated by Gretchen Morgenson. Have a great week while thinking about how to get your human nature under control.

Your more human that I want to admit analyst,

John Mauldin, 
Editor Outside the Box

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The world’s greatest stock picker? Bet you sold Apple and Google a long time ago.

By Barry Ritholtz
The Washington Post, Oct. 4, 2014

Let’s imagine for the moment that you are the World’s Greatest Stock Picker. You have an uncanny talent for ferreting out “the next Microsoft” – companies that are on the sharpest edge of what’s next, that are about to undergo tremendous growth. These firms will rule the world: They will be the most powerful, profitable and influential corporate entities known to man.

Even better, your superpower is that you can find these companies when they are tiny, before they have had their explosive growth, when hardly anyone has heard of them. You find and buy these stocks while their prices are still in the single digits. Companies like Apple, Google, Tesla, Netflix and Chipotle that will one day measure their growth in increments of thousands of a percent.

Can you imagine how much wealth you could create?

I have some bad news for you, kiddos: Even if you had that superpower, it would be worth surprisingly little to you. The odds are that it would not create much wealth, and it might even cost you money.

How could that be possible?

The short answer is your brain. The three-pound ball of gray matter sitting atop your spinal cord was never designed to make risk/reward decisions in capital markets. It took about 100,000 years to optimize for its intended purpose: Keeping you alive.

The occasional Darwin Award aside, it does an outstanding job of keeping you safe from all manner of predators on the savanna. That you now live in a condo and enjoy lattes is irrelevant to its functionality. Its job remains keeping you alive long enough for you to procreate, pass your genes along and perpetuate the species.

This dynamic, opportunistic, self-organizing system of systems occasionally runs into trouble when we try to force it to perform other, “off label” uses. That includes buying and selling pieces of paper that represent tiny slices of companies. As we shall see, that big, under utilized brain of yours is no help anytime it gets over-stimulated by your emotions.

Which is precisely why being the World’s Greatest Stock Picker is unlikely to be how any of you is going to get rich. Let’s use the shares of five companies as examples: Google, Tesla, Chipotle, Netflix and Apple.
The performance of each since its initial public stock offering has been nothing short of astounding. Since going public, each stock has generated returns of more than 1,000 percent. A $10,000 IPO allocation in any one is now worth at least $100,000.

To give you an idea of just how phenomenal these companies have done, Google is the laggard of the lot. Since its IPO in August 2004, it has gained a mere 1,282 percent. Tesla edged out the boys from Mountain View, Calif., with a gain of 1,352 percent. And they did it in less than four years – Tesla’s IPO was June 2010 – vs. the decade it took Google to gain 1,000 percent.

Those spectacular returns look downright paltry compared with the 2,865 percent gain Chipotle has had since going public in 2006. And Netflix beats that, rising 5,816 percent since 2002.

Then there is Apple. It is a beast unto itself, racking up a mind-boggling 22,288 percent in appreciation since its 1980 debut. It has become world’s biggest company by market capitalization.

Even if you bought large chunks of each of these firms at their IPOs, the odds are that nearly all of these giant gains would have eluded you. Why? As I shall show you, each of these companies would have sent you running for the exits – repeatedly – over the years, screaming as if your hair were on fire.

Don’t believe me? Consider the facts:

• Netflix has lost 25 percent of its value on four separate days. Not over four days; on separate occasions, it lost 25 percent in a single day. In one four-month stretch in 2011, it lost 80 percent of its value. On Netflix’s worst day, it fell 41 percent.

• Chipotle has lost 15 percent in a single day on four occasions. During the 2007-2009 crash, it lost 76 percent of its value – about 50 percent worse than the market overall.

• Tesla went up 400 percent in 6 months, then lost 40 percent over the next 10 weeks. In one month, it lost about 25 percent of its value.

• Google lost nearly 70 percent in the Great Recession. During its worst quarter, its stock price fell more than 36 percent.

• Apple has lost 25 percent or more six times in the past 10 years alone. That was after its meteoric rise. During its worst week, it was cut in half, falling 51 percent. It saw similar damage during its worst month and quarter as well – getting cut in half in each time   period.

How often have you invested in a stock, only to get scared out of it when things grew shaky? That’s fairly typical behavior for investors.

Now imagine how you would have behaved if you happened to have a significant part of your net worth tied up in that one holding.

Let’s say a decade ago, you put $15,000 into Apple. You bought 1,000 shares at $15 (with $13 cash) because you thought that newfangled iPod had some potential. Since then, it split two for one and then earlier this year, it split seven for one. You now are holding 14,000 shares of Apple. At the current price of about $100, it is worth $1.4 million dollars. For most people, this is a very high percentage of their net worth. How well do you sleep when 90 percent of your total net worth goes through giant swings?

Apple was worth about the same amount in September 2012 – just before it gave back almost half its value, falling 44 percent. Would you have held on? What about all of those prior 50 percent corrections?
This is not an academic theory. Consider how you have reacted to much more modest drops in your holdings. How often were you shaken out of a stock, only to see it rocket higher after you sold? And somebody was dumping stocks in March 2009; after all, selling climaxes (also known as capitulation) are how bottoms are made.

Some years ago, I recommended to the brokers I worked with to do just that regarding Apple. They bought millions of shares at an average price of $15. At $20 dollars, they were selling it, whooping it up and high-fiving one another. When I asked why they were selling it when my price target was higher ($30!), I was told: “It’s a 33 percent winner – time to ring the bell, Ritholtz!” That was even before any trouble had hit.
How many of you, dear readers, could hold onto a giant winner like these five for the duration? How do you know that any of these are not about to turn into a classic disaster stock? Think about once-giant winners that collapsed: Lehman Brothers, WorldCom, Lucent, JDS Uniphase.

All of these were one-time market heroes; all went bust in spectacular fashion. Your superpower gives you the ability to find the giant winners, but it does not give you the ability to hold onto them, nor does it give you the ability to distinguish between the superstars and the washouts.

As we have discussed previously, this is a feature, not a bug. The good news is your brain has kept you alive long enough to read this column. The bad news, it also made you sell Apple 10,000 percent ago.
The reality is, when it comes to risk/reward decisions, you are just not built for it.

Barry Ritholtz is Chairman and Chief Investment Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management. His columns on personal finance can be found at the Washington Post. His daily musings on all things finance- & Wall Street-related can be found on Bloomberg View. Be sure to check out Masters in Business, his weekly interview series on Bloomberg Radio. Follow him on Twitter @Ritholtz.

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The article Outside the Box: The world’s greatest stock picker? Bet you sold Apple and Google a long time ago. was originally published at mauldin economics

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Why Shareholders Should Fear the Hasty Corporate Marriage

By Dennis Miller

I never understood why Sears bought Kmart. Sears was a giant retailer, the dominant tenant in shopping malls throughout the US. Kmart was the spawn of S. S. Kresge’s dime stores. They served different consumer groups—different strata. When they came together, they combined a lot of the same merchandise in their stores, and they both lost their identities. I don’t see either surviving much longer.

Instead of allowing two companies to die, some embarrassed management teams settle on divorce, selling off the scraps for a fraction of what they paid—and leaving angry stockholders to ruminate over how management could have spent the cash better (think dividends).

How can titans of industry capable of earning and retaining billions of dollars also lose billions seemingly overnight in a bad acquisition?

To help answer that question, I’m going to focus on companies that merge with the intention of truly melding into one. They may continue to operate under separate names; however, management thinks the companies’ synergy will make both stronger—a true marriage.

How Three Strata of Consumers Buy

In my first career, companies hired me to improve their market share and gross profit margins. My team and I would start by surveying a client’s good customers, asking: “What criteria do you use to select a supplier, and how do you rank those criteria?”

The answer was always the same: service, quality, and price, and in that order. For individual consumers, though, the order of that answer varies.

There are three general strata of consumers. The first is the “carriage trade,” comprised of affluent people who live in expensive neighborhoods and might shop at Neiman Marcus. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, these folks drove Cadillacs. When we re-collated out our survey results by stratum, this group ranked quality first, service second, and price third.

If your business serves the carriage trade, you focus on product improvement, serving the customer better, and maintaining your profit margin. That’s how you beat your competition.

The next consumer stratum encompasses the middle class. Think Buicks and Oldsmobiles. These consumers rated service first, quality second, and price third. They could be swayed by a good sale occasionally, but it had to be a heck of a good deal.

Consumers in the third stratum want only one thing: the lowest possible price. These consumers clip coupons and are willing to drive several extra miles to save money. This is why Walmart stores have much larger trading areas than their competition. Walmart does a great job in this stratum by advertising price as the primary reason to shop at its stores.

If you do business in the third stratum, you look for every possible opportunity to cut your costs so you can beat your competitor by offering lower prices while maintaining your margins.

As an investor, if the strata of two merging companies don’t line up, be cautious of any hype. If you don’t think it’s a good fit, move on to the next potential investment.

Culture Conflict Brews Animosity

Conflicting corporate cultures should also send up a huge red flag in investors’ minds. The unwritten rules within any company that dictate its internal and external behavior matter, and they don’t change easily.

Think of any married couple you know with conflicting beliefs and values. Those marriages always struggle; daily life becomes a constant negotiation, and that can go on for decades. The couple quibbles over how to spend money, how to discipline children, which other couples to socialize with, and just about everything else. Frugal Fred throws a fit each time Spending Sally comes home from the store. He thinks Sundays are for football, while she wants to spend the day antiquing. She’s dead set on sending their kids to private school, and he thinks it’s a waste. Ultimately, one partner has to adjust his or her core values, or these conflicts will foster resentment… and often end in divorce.

Similar conflicts take place in the corporate world. If the unwritten norms, beliefs, and values of the merging companies don’t synch, they’re heading down a rocky path, possibly to Splitsville.

Dominating a Stratum Develops a Culture

When a company dominates a stratum, a distinct culture emerges. Think of Apple, which dominates the high-end computer sector. It’s constantly looking for ways to improve and innovate its product lines so the company can raise prices and increase its margins. I just bought my first Apple computer, and I’ve found that its customer service is far and away the best.

Contrast the attitude of Apple’s employees with those at Walmart. Walmart’s corporate employees focus on negotiating better prices from vendors and cutting costs anywhere possible. Walmart passes those savings along to customers, and its in-store employees, in turn, offer minimal assistance.

Apple and Walmart are both profitable, but their corporate cultures are worlds apart and could never produce a happy marriage.

On the other hand, consider Beats, the manufacturer of headphones and speakers that Apple purchased for $3 billion. There’s controversy as to whether Apple overpaid, and only time will tell.

The two companies’ cultures seem to be a good fit, though. Beats products are expensive, and every technician I ask recommends them. Apple stores sell several brands of expensive, high-quality headphones, but Beats’ headphones will be in Apple stores soon, designed specifically for Apple products and Apple customers. Many of the other brands will probably disappear.

Miller’s Money Chief Analyst Andrey Dashkov adds that, “Synergies tend to materialize when the customer base and approach to the market are the same between the two parties. Kraft’s acquisition of General Foods is a good example.”

He agrees that the Apple/Beats deal looks good for many of those reasons.

When Management Doesn’t Fit the Mold

There are dozens of other invisible aspects of corporate culture. One past client of mine was a corporate travel agency. It priced its services by rebating part of the commissions the airlines paid travel agents. My client didn’t want to get caught up operating on razor-thin margins, so it looked for ways to bring extra value to its clients to justify its pricing.

One of the company’s potential clients was a very profitable member of the Dow 30 Index—let’s call it the Big Name Company. My client secured its business after making a presentation to the corporate vice president of sales by asking, “Are you aware that over 90% of your sales people are traveling between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday?”

The vice president was shocked. Face-to-face selling time in front of customers is gold. My client pointed out that Big Name Company was losing potential sales time to travel, and it was costing the company.
I asked my client why he’d done that analysis. Turns out, he had a friend who worked for the competition, and every time it hired a salesperson from Big Name Company, the company ran into difficulty. The new employee couldn’t adapt to its culture of working 50-60 hours a week.

The focal point of management is another key aspect of company culture. Some companies micromanage the smallest details from the corporate level. These companies haven’t developed managers who are risk takers and independent thinkers. If such a company merges with a decentralized company, the transition can be particularly difficult. In these situations, it’s not unusual for top managers to leave shortly after the merger because they just don’t fit the mold.

Investment Implications

As an investor, I only consider betrothed companies as investment candidates when they have similar cultures and values and operate in the same market stratum. When you read about a potential merger or acquisition, look beyond the hype. If companies are a good fit, there are a lot of hidden synergies which can lead to pleasant earnings surprises. There are terrific opportunities out there for folks who crunch the numbers and evaluate strata and corporate culture.

For more commonsense financial insight and timely investment news, sign up to receive your free copy of our e-letter, Miller’s Money Weekly, every Thursday.

The article Why Shareholders Should Fear the Hasty Corporate Marriage was originally published at millers money

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Is Apple Watch a Needle Mover?

By Adam J. Crawford, Analyst

The investment community has been up in arms over a lack of innovation from Apple. After all, the company hasn’t launched a new product line in quite some time… that is, until now. Meet the company’s brand new smart device: Apple Watch. Investors hope the product will send Apple’s stock to new heights. Is that wishful thinking?

Apple brings its new product into a hotly contested space, with the likes of Sony, Nike, and Samsung all offering a competing smartwatch. But there’s a common theme with reviews for these gadgets: not enough features, not enough style. Apple aims to fill this void… and will charge a premium for doing so, of course.

Apple Watch will retail for $349, notably higher than most competing watches. Since Apple is notorious for putting the squeeze on retail margins (it reportedly allows retail as little as 3% on tablets), retailers would likely make 10% on the Apple Watch, placing Apple’s revenue per watch at around $315.

In 2013, Apple sold 150 million iPhones. It would be an extremely tall order to sell that many watches, especially at $350 a pop. So for a base-case scenario, let’s say that 30% of iPhone buyers will purchase an Apple Watch. For a bullish scenario, 50%. And for a bearish scenario, 10%. Using these adoption rates yields the following annual unit sales.

	Bear	Base	Bull
Percent of iPhone Sales	10%	30%	50%
Apple Watch Annual Units Opportunity (Millions)	15	45	75

At a projected price of $315, we get the following projected revenues.

	Bear	Base	Bull
Apple Watch Sales as a percent of iPhone Sales	10%	20%	50%
Annual Units Opportunity (Millions)	15	45	75
Price per Watch	$315	$315	$315
Revenue (Billions)	$4.7	$14.1	$23.6

Over the past four years, Apple’s profit margin has ranged from 19.2% to 26.7%. Let’s assume a 23% profit margin on the Apple Watch. With shares outstanding of 6 billion and at Apple’s current multiple of 15, here’s our calculation of the impact on share price for each volume scenario.

	Bear	Base	Bull
Revenue(Billions)	$4.7	$14.1	$23.6
Profit Margin	23%	23%	23%
Profit (Billions)	$1.1	$3.2	$5.4
Shares Outstanding (Billions)	6	6	6
EPS	$0.18	$0.53	$0.90
Multiple	15	15	15
Apple Watch Share Price	$2.70	$7.95	$13.50

Smartwatches will be a nice addition to Apple’s product line in that they will further institutionalize an already iconic brand. However, in looking at just the annual hardware sales, our projections suggest anywhere from a 3% to a 13% impact on share price. At the low end of the projections, the impact is anemic. At the high end, the impact is significant, but hardly seismic. There may be a host of reasons to buy Apple stock, but the Apple Watch by itself isn’t one of them.

The better investment option is to look at companies that supply Apple; this is one of the things we track at BIG TECH. One Apple chip supplier, Avago Technologies, yielded our subscribers over 100% return in just over 12 months, piggybacking on the rise of the iPhone.

For access to our unparalleled investment advice, simply sign up for a 90-day risk-free trial of BIG TECH. If you decide to keep your subscription, it will only cost $99 a year. If for any reason you’re unsatisfied, simply cancel for a full refund. No questions asked.

The article Is Apple Watch a Needle Mover? was originally published at caseyresearch.com.

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Watch a "small account" Become an Internet Sensation

Whether you are trading gold, oil, stocks or currencies there is no shortage online of stories about legendary trades. What there is a shortage of is proof that the trades actually took place.

If you are a regular reader here at The Crude Oil Trader then you are probably familiar with our trading partner John Carter. John has recently made quite a name for himself as he began sharing his methods of trading that could be done with any size account.

John is shaking things up again with a new video that shows a recording of John trading LIVE with his REAL accounts on a day he made over $223,000 in one day.

The trades were.....

$97,000 on Apple, ticker AAPL
$93,000 on Google, ticker GOOG
$104,000 on Priceline, ticker PCLN

John will show you exactly how he traded the above trades, what he did right, what he did wrong, and what YOU can do to trade like this. And he points out what a 'small account' really is and how the overall goal is to not only make successful trades but to make a regular income source from your trades.

Watch the video here and please feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think of John's new simple trading system.

See you in the markets,
Ray's Stock World

View "Watch a small account Become an Internet Sensation" right now!

Has Apple Lost Its Way?

In a recent Bloomberg news poll, 71% of investors believe Apple has become less innovative. Has Apple lost its way? In today’s short five minute video, we will be examining Apple stock (NASDAQ:AAPL) and investigating what drives the price.

We’ll look to see what pushed Apple’s stock price over $700 and what caused Apple to crash below $400 in such a short period of time.

For more information on the tools we use in this video, click here to visit MarketClub.

MarketClub gives your portfolio the edge, online trading tools you won't find anywhere else....click here to visit MarketClub.

Making money with Apple using any size account AAPL

If you missed John Carter's webinar last week you missed how he explained his favorite trade setups. In the last couple of days he has used these exact setups to make himself some killer profits trading Apple [AAPL] options. And the best part about these trades is that they can be profitable with any size account.

Watch John's latest two part video HERE

In this free two part video he explains his EXACT entry signal, and how he managed this trade. It's actually really simple and you've got to see this.

And John is holding another webinar Wednesday night at 8 p.m. eastern, in which he explains his trade setups for trading options in detail. So while you are there make sure to sign up for the webinar before all the slots are taken.

Click here to watch two part video and sign up for webinar

See you Wednesday night!
Ray C. Parrish
Ray's Stock World

AAPL Trade Considerations for Option Expiration Week

Option trading is not “just the same as stocks.” It turns on the three primal forces ruling an options trader’s world....time to expiration, price of the underlying, and implied volatility.

As expiration approaches, the forces of time exert their strongest influence of the cycle on a trader’s positions. In today’s blog, written as August expiration is but a few days away, I want to call attention to some of the practical considerations traders would be well advised to incorporate into their trading plan.

Pundits have long cited the aphorism that there are only two sure things in life, death and taxes. Options traders must incorporate a third inevitability, the time component (aka the extrinsic component) of an option premium goes to zero at the closing bell of options expiration. This occurrence is neither negotiable nor avoidable and it occurs with clockwork like precision.

A recent change to the market has introduced an important new element to the long standing monthly expiration cycle. The tremendous popularity of weekly options has rendered every Friday the end of an expiration cycle.

It is critically important to recognize this new phenomenon because it allows tailoring of strategies to fit more precisely the anticipated time frame in which the trader’s hypotheses play out.

Let us consider some of the practical implications of this cyclical pattern. I have discussed before in this blog the fact that erosion of time premium is not linear across the life of an option but accelerates dramatically as expiration approaches. Expiration week is where this acceleration reaches its greatest pace as it heads to zero at Friday’s closing bell.

What is often not immediately understood by the new option trader is the radical change in the risk / reward ratio of a trade produced by this erosion. Consider a simple one legged trade. A trader who was bullish on AAPL during the price weakness in late July could have chosen to sell naked puts to reflect his price view. The graph below shows the trade of selling short the August 545 strike put at mid day on Thursday July 26 with 23 days to expiration:

The trader would have taken a credit of around $425 for each contract he sold on this trade with a probability of success of 84%. The trade could have been closed last Friday for $16/contract locking in $409 per contract less commission.

While the probability of AAPL trading below the 545 strike as August expiration approaches is close to 0, it is not O. To accept the risk of a Black Swan event occurring in order to capture the remaining 3.8% of the initial credit is not smart trading. The general rule of thumb I follow in this type of trade is to close or roll up the position to a higher strike when 80% of the initial credit received has been captured.

Perhaps the most nuanced effect of time to expiration is seen in the behavior of the butterfly trade construction. To review briefly, remember that the classic butterfly is constructed in either calls or puts and consists of both a debit and a credit spread which share the same short strike.

Butterfly positions have the interesting characteristics of responding only minimally if at all to price movement when far out in time from expiration. These same trade structures will react violently to price movement when little time to expiration remains.

An example could be constructed during the July AAPL price rout. Let us assume a trader was sufficiently prescient to predict the price recovery. In order to capture this hypothesized movement, he could have purchased the August 605/-625/645 in a (+1/-2/+1 standard butterfly ratio) call butterfly spread on July 26th. This trade structure is a defined risk position where the maximum risk is the cost of entering the position.

This position would have been very inexpensive because of two factors:

1. Implied volatility was elevated, rendering the butterfly cheap.

2. The center strike where the options were sold short and the point of the theoretical maximum profitability had less than a 5% chance of being in-the-money.

The P&L graph for this position at the time of entry is presented below:

Several practical points bear emphasis. First, the maximum potential profit from this low probability trade is in excess of 1800%. This trade construction which cost around $100 per spread at the time could have been closed last Friday for a profit of over $850 per spread.

Second and the point germane to today’s discussion is the behavior of the trade with regard to time. Notice that the broken lines, representing intermediate time points in the trade achieve nowhere near the full profit potential that exists when expiration arrives.

However, not to be missed is the fact that the range of profitability narrows dramatically as expiration is approached. It is for this reason that most experienced butterfly traders remove profitable trades before their wild relationship to price is activated as expiration gets quite close.

I want to be very clear about this demonstrated butterfly trade. This is not a typical trade I would enter because of its low probability of success. I present it as a purely educational exercise to demonstrate the behavior of these frequently encountered trade structures.

I invite you to try my service to follow my trades and understand how the nuanced behavior of options can be used to deliver highly profitable trades.

Happy Trading!

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Just click here to join me at Options Trading Signals today and enjoy a 14 day FREE trial!

J.W. Jones

The SP 500, Apple Earnings and Feeding The A.D.D. Monster

The last hour of trading was intense on Tuesday and then all eyes were focused on Apple’s earnings which were released around 4:30 ET. The initial reaction to the earnings release is negative although as I write this AAPL is bouncing sharply higher in after market trading on strong volume.

To put the final hour’s volatility into perspective, at 3 P.M. Eastern Time the S&P 500 Index was trading at 1,217. A mere 12 minutes later the S&P 500 Index pushed 15 handles higher to trade up to 1,232. Then sellers stepped in and pushed the S&P 500 lower by nearly 12 handles in the following 20 minutes.

The price action was like a roller coaster and I was sitting watching the flickering red and green bars in real time with the anticipation of a child. It was the most excitement I have had in quite some time, but please don’t hold that against me. I don’t know whether reading my previous line makes me laugh or cry, but the truth must be heard I suppose.

Enough self deprecation, I want to get down to business with some charts and what is likely to happen in coming sessions. The sell the news event in AAPL has the potential to really change the price action tomorrow. If prices hold at lower levels, the indices could roll over sharply tomorrow. The S&P 500 E-Mini futures contracts are showing signs of significant weakness after the earnings miss by Apple in aftermarket trading.

Some other potentially game changing news items came out of Europe where Reuters reported earlier today that the Eurozone will likely pass legislation that will ban naked CDS ownership on sovereign debt instruments. Additionally, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner stated this morning that a forthcoming FHA announcement involving a new housing refinance plan was going to be made public in coming days. The statement regarding the new FHA plan helped the banks and homebuilders show relative strength during intraday trading and likely were behind much of the intraday rally.

I would point out that the S&P 500 Index (SPX) broke out slightly above the August 31 highs before rolling over. The reason that is critical is because the S&P 500 E-Mini futures did not achieve a breakout, but tested to the penny the August 31^st highs. I am going to be totally focused on tomorrow’s close as I believe it will leave behind clues about the future price action in the S&P 500 leading up to option expiration where volatility is generally exacerbated. The daily chart of the S&P 500 Index is shown below:



If Wednesday’s close is below the recent highs near 1,230 we could see this correction intensify. The price action on Tuesday helped stop out the bears and if we see a significant reversal tomorrow the intraday rally today will have been nothing more than a bull trap. The price action Tuesday & Wednesday could lead to the perfect storm for market participants where bears were stopped out and bulls are trapped on the potential reversal.

Another interesting pattern worth discussing is the head and shoulders pattern seen on the SPY hourly chart. The strong rally to the upside may have indeed negated the pattern, but if prices don’t follow through to the upside in the near term and the neckline of this pattern is broken to the downside we could see serious downside follow through. The hourly chart of the Spider SPY Trading ETF is shown below:

Ultimately there are two probably scenarios which have different implications going forward. The short-term bullish scenario would likely see prices breakout over recent highs and push higher toward the key resistance area around the 1,260 price level. The 1,260 price level corresponds with the neckline that was broken back in August that led to heavy selling pressure.

Bullish Scenario
If we do breakout to the upside, the longer term ramification may wind up being quite bearish as most indicators would be screaming that price action was massively overbought at those levels and a sharp selloff could transpire into year end. The daily chart of the S&P 500 Index illustrates the bullish scenario below:




Bearish Scenario
The short term bearish scenario would likely involve a break below Monday’s lows that would work down to around the 1,140 level or possibly even lower. If a breakdown took place, a higher low could possibly be carved out on the daily chart which could lead to a multi month rally that would likely see the neckline mentioned above tested around the holiday season. The daily chart of the S&P 500 below shows the bearish scenario:



There are a variety of reasons why either scenario could unfold. Most of the analysis that I look at argues that the bearish scenario is more probable. However, based on what happened in the final hour of trading on Tuesday and the surprise earnings miss from Apple anything could happen.

I will likely wait for a confirmed breakout either to the upside above recent highs or to the downside below the neckline of the head and shoulders pattern illustrated above before accepting any risk. I am of the opinion that risk is exceptionally high in the near term. I am not going to try to be a hero, instead I am just going to wait patiently for a high probability setup to unfold.

Until a convincing breakout in either direction is confirmed, I am going to sit on the sidelines. I am quite content just watching the short-term price action without taking on any new risk. For those that want to be heroes or feel they have to trade, I would trade small and use relatively tight stops to define risk. Risk is excessively high!

Subscribers of OTS have pocketed more than 150% return in the past two months. If you’d like to stay ahead of the market using My Low Risk Option Strategies and Trades check out OTS at Options Trading Signals.Com and take advantage of our free occasional trade ideas or a 66% coupon to sign up for daily market analysis, videos and Option Trades each week.

JW Jones

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New Video: Could Apple Be The Hottest Stock in The World!

It would seem that investors and traders cannot get enough of this stock. Yesterday it came as no surprise that Apple announced huge earnings, over three billion dollars, just about the same as Goldman Sachs. Now who could have predicted that just a few years ago?

So is this the beginning or the end Apple's record earnings?

In this very short video, we will show you what our targets are for Apple and how our "Trade Triangle" technology absolutely nailed this move. No matter what happens to this stock, our "Trade Triangle" technology has a winning edge that you can watch in our new video.

Enjoy the video and as always please feel free to leave a comment.

Watch > Could Apple Be The Hottest Stock in The World!


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How High Can Apple Go?

In this short video, we will take a look at Apple, Inc (NYSE_AAPL). I have to admit it seems like everyone loves Apple products. .

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But no matter what we think about their products, we tend to be fickle with the stock. Thanks to our “Trade Triangle” technology, we have fallen in love all over again with Apple’s stock. We had been looking for this market to move lower based on the economic conditions and the market action, however this proved to be a false indication as Apple has moved to its best levels in quite some time.

We just finished a new video on Apple, our first video on Apple in a while. Take a look and we’ll give you our thoughts and target zones for this very exciting stock.

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How High Can Apple Go Video

Good luck in the markets today!