Currency ETFs: Jim Rogers Says U.K and Other European Countries Should be Downgraded

Jim Rogers commented on his blog that the U.S. has been downgraded but countries like the UK have very high debt will have to be downgraded too.

"You can’t have the UK as triple ‘A’ and the US as not a triple ‘A’. You need to be asking S&P or Moody’s why they haven’t got around doing that. I don’t think, the European countries deserve their ratings."

And he told te FT: that he would not buy the euro now but "I am certainly not selling it as I expect it to go up. If you want to buy a currency I would rather buy the dollar today of those two but I am not doing either".

The Euro has taken a little beating lately (down 4% since May) as investor ran for the US dollar, as bizarre as that sounds.

The ETF for the Euro is FXE.

We track currency ETFs live here.

Markets Dive Again: Huge Profits on ETFs

Here is the current situation with our ETF straddles:

Not bad at all.

Gold soars, so do gold ETF holdings: list

(Courtesy of Bloomberg)

We track gold ETFs live here.

The Stock Markets Are Collapsing: Relative ETFs, Which One To Buy?

Multi-year view of SPY:

Looking for ETFs that might potentially recover faster?

QQQ was obviously due to fall the hardest. Whether XLF, i.e, the banks, can recover faster is a tough proposition.

Big profits post debt-ceiling mess through ETF options

This is an update from our July 27 post. Here are the results, from this AM.

Our favorite ETF for straddles, IWM,  met expectations, and shows a profit of +80.50%. GLD is 2nd, at +24.5%. FXY is near break even:

The debt ceiling crisis: profitting through ETFs, either way, up or down

The debt ceiling crisis in the U.S. is  a prime situation for straddles. If the crisis is not solved, stocks will go down crashing. It is solved, then gold will come back down.

Straddles allow an investor to profit either way, up or down, provided the underlying stock moves a minimum amount.

There are straddles for August 2011, using three very popular ETFs: IWM (Russel 2000), GLD (gold), and FXY (Yen):

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

Commodifty ETFs: Cocoa

We track all commodity ETfs live here.

Ghana is the world’s second-largest cocoa producer. It announced today that plans to increase production to about 1.2 million metric tons per year by 2015 because of new tree plantings.


According to Bloomberg, As much as 600,000 hectares (1.48 million acres) will be replanted as part of a six-year program which ends in 2017, Yaw Adu-Ampomah, deputy chief executive officer of the Ghana Cocoa Board, said in an interview in Accra on July 15.

The board will provide the seedlings and fertilizers to assist farmers in the planting of new seeds, he said. The cost of the project is an estimated 200 million cedis ($132 million), with the government spending 126 million and the rest from companies including Mars Inc., maker of M&M’s,

UNG options for today: up or down

Inventories will be released at 10:30AM.

Here are straddles (strangles) for UNG, for both July and August. These were computed with the free online StraddlesCalc tool.

The number indicated is the percentage move required for the position to be profitable, either way, up or down.

UPDATE 10:35AM.

Inventories rose by 95Bcf, causing UNG to drop to $10.35. Here are the results:

ROI on August was +41%. This is higher than expected as options prices rise when the stock drops, the move needed becomes lower.


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