Back into SPY — Covered Call at 111

I created a covered call position with SPY for a net investment of 108.43 per share,   bought SPY at 110.298 and sold Feb 111 calls  ( SPY 02/20/2010 111.00 C in Schwab speak) at 1.87.    I sold out of the money calls because I’m pretty optimistic the market will retrace the recent drop-off. Best case profit would be 2.57 per share or 2.3%. …

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Greed takes a holiday

I believe the best way to understand the ebb and flow of the market is to view it as the interplay of fear and greed.  Of course, economics are important, but I view human psychology as even more fundamental to the movements of the market. Tonight fear has the upper hand.   US markets have been down two days in a row, the Asian markets …

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S&P 500 Still Tracking 2004…

I updated my 2003-2004 compared to 2009-2010 chart for SPY/S&P500  with another week of data and adjusted the normalized volume scale so that I wasn’t chopping off the curve.  While the absolute value of SPY is almost identical to what it was 6 years ago the volume is about a factor of 6 higher, so the volume curves are only significant from a shape standpoint, …

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SPY — still on the trend line, just quieter

Early last December I thought the  S&P 500 had shifted from an upward trend line to a sideways trading –I was wrong.   Things are clearly still on the long term trend line, the only difference being that the volatility has really dropped.    Volume has been low–clearly a lot of people are on the sidelines, like me, waiting for a correction.