Friday, October 28, 2011

Cracks already appearing; is Europe really saved? Using XLF

Today Italy's 10-year bonds hit record yields, this after Europe was 'saved" yesterday..

The solution so widely advertised does not really solve anything. The issue is timing.

These are straddles for XLF, the most popular financial ETF. XLF is currently trading near at perfect $14.


Computed with the free StraddlesClac tool.

Options are dangerous and may cause 100% loss. Please do your proper due diligence.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Preparing For Bank Earnings Next Week With XLF

JPM reported earnings today and the market was disappointed, bringing XLF down. Next week, several other major banks and financial institutions will report, including MS and GS.

These are particular interesting as JPM reports deteriorating trading income.

These are in-the-money and out-of-the money straddles for next week:



Options are dangerous and may cause 100% loss (not the ITMs above though, which may only cause "significant" losses. Please do your own due diligence.)

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

ETFs For the Downgrades of Italy, Belgium, Spain

As our readers know, we track all global ETFs live here.


Yesterday, the ratng agencies downgraded Italy, while the exptactions were for Belgium. The ETF for Italy is EWI:



The ETF for Belgium the aptly named, EWK:


Note that they are strikingly similar.

As for Spain, it is EWP:

Monday, October 3, 2011

Natural Gas Contango Spreads Even More, Bad For UNG

Here is the current natural gas situation: contango of 8.53% in the front two months. Terrible news for UNG. The correlations are very high as contango causes UNG to swap for fewer and fewer contracts..