Author Archive

• Great Trade from an IWO Subscriber
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | January 11th, 2010 at 3:26 pm

  

  With the recent pullback in some energy names one of my subscribers took profits on a name that was put out nearly a month ago.

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• A New Chart Pattern to Watch For
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | January 8th, 2010 at 4:31 pm

  

  I don’t know if there is a name for this pattern, but I’ve been seeing it a lot lately. I guess we can call it failed-breakout-range-base-then-rip-higher. It’s sort of the cousin of the failed breakdown patterns I’ve been seeing recently, but the supply/demand structure is different.

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• Bullish Breakdown Patterns
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | January 7th, 2010 at 7:59 am

  

  Anyone using traditional technical analysis over the past 9 months or so to predict bearish patterns have, for the most part, been sorely wrong. Quint over at tickerville has a name for this: bearish patterns turned bullish breaks– it’s when a pattern which should breakdown only starts a downtrend for a short period of time and then we see momentum quickly reverse to the upside.

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• How Our YGE Trade Turned Out
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | January 6th, 2010 at 7:56 am

  

  Yesterday YGE was starting to coil up in price and was on the verge of breaking out. Several people on the stocktwits stream mentioned it, and it was explicitly called out by alphatrends on stocktwits.tv.

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• What is the Expected Range for the Market This Year?
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | January 4th, 2010 at 12:39 pm

  

  Aside from macro and technical forecasts, one of the more overlooked areas to examine this new year is the current volatility environment. How well the market will trend and mean revert should be considered when you are developing your trading plan for the year ahead. So with that in mind, I’m going to share my thoughts in this area.

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• How Option Expiration Turned Out for My Subscribers
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 21st, 2009 at 12:38 pm

  

  I love opex. Equity options have very interesting characteristics like discontinuities in gamma and very fast theta (time decay).

  So when opex comes around, I provide my subscribers with a list of ideas for trading that day– this month we focused strictly on option selling with 1 day left. I also provided a video explaining the techniques for trading at opex as well as a spreadsheet of what I think would work. They are below– do note that the prices for these straddles were from Thursday close and weren’t indicative of opening prices:

  

• How Gordon Ramsay Will Make You a Better Trader
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 16th, 2009 at 10:27 am

  

  Over here in the states, Mr. Ramsay is better known for his foul-mouthed antics on “Hell’s Kitchen.” That’s the show where he’s prodded on by the U.S. producers to berate and belittle the kitchen staff all while underperforming chefs battle it out to get a job. That show sucks.

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• Intermediate Term Technical Analysis on Gold (GLD)
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 15th, 2009 at 10:42 am

  

  Please click continue reading to view the video.

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• How to Trade Options on Leveraged ETFs
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 14th, 2009 at 9:37 am

  

  Before I start with how to trade Leveraged ETF options, let me remind you that I believe we are at the start of an etf creation bubble, in which retail investors are getting exposure to financial instruments that they don’t need– the capital base is not large enough to warrant that sort of exposure (Case Shiller ETF??). Also, many of these etfs have structural issues that cause them to consistently underperform the instrument they claim to track — see USO and UNG for examples.

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• Update to Retail Index Vol Short
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 11th, 2009 at 11:35 am

  

  After 3 months of consolidation, it appears that XRT is on the verge of a breakout:

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• MRVL Trade Management
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 10th, 2009 at 11:34 am

  

  So with MRVL breaking out above 1810, we’ve had a nice AM rip, but it is wise to take profits.

  So there’s two ways to go about this.

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• PDLI Options Volume Points to Higher Prices
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 8th, 2009 at 11:30 am

  

  Seeing some very interesting options action going on in a spec Biotech name:

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• My List of Easy Options
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 7th, 2009 at 12:06 pm

  

  If you’ve traded options for a long enough, there will come a point in time in which you experience the “options squeeze”– that is where you have a position (probably a sizeable one) in which the underlying takes a strong move against you.

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• Brunch With Steven Place
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 6th, 2009 at 11:16 am

  

  Click here to watch part 1.

  Click here to watch part 2.

• My Comments on the Trader Tax
  Investing With Options, Steven Place | December 4th, 2009 at 8:14 am

  

  There is a bill being drafted by Representatives DeFazio (Ore.) and Perlmutter (Colo.) called the “”Let Wall Street Pay for the Restoration of Main Street Act.” This legislation would charge a percentage tax to help fund the cost of the Bailouts in 2008. At first glance, this seems like a knee jerk populist reaction, akin to limiting pay for a certain unsavory bunch of suits.

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