Posts Tagged ‘Derivatives’
Options Trading Newletter Subscription Services!
Looking for a newsletter that provides aggressive high profit option trades? Morningstar’s OptionInvestor (see 1st link below) is a good subscription service in terms of being both educational and fairly profitable; but it mainly deals with Long-Term Equity Anticipation Securities (LEAPS) and not the more aggresive, short-term options that tend to have more immediate pop to them. Having said that, Schaeffer’s Investment Research (see 2nd link below) is also very educational and has a lot of different subscription service offerings in term’s of mixing and matching different Options types. I currently have a subscription to SIR’s “Expiration Week Countdown” service, which keeps me on my toes during the option expiration week of each month. Finally, OptionMonster (see 3rd link below) also has various subscription services based on one’s level of trading experience and desired level of risk. It too has a good educational section as well. Anyway, these are three of the more popular Options based subscription services that have recommended some real winners for me in the past. But my overall returns from them have usually been tempered with additional recommendations (or “ideas”) that do not work out so well, so one needs to be aware of the overall picture here in terms of trying to achieve any semblance of consistent profitability. Having said that, some additional technical/fundamental analysis and/or research on one’s part may be required in order to proactively eliminate the additional recommendations/ideas that won’t work out so well in order to increase one’s level of profitability.
Specifically, for services that identify short-term opportunities that are about to pop, several of Schaeffer Investment Research’s services may fit the bill for you. The “Expiration Week Countdown” service (which I currently subscribe to) specializes in these types of opportunities, as do Schaeffer’s “Event” series and “Players” series services. The Expiration Week Countdown service cost me $395 for a year-long subscription, whereas the Event and Players series can be subscribed to (for lifetime) for $495 each. Another service that one might look into would be the options subscription service from TheStreet.com. And thinking in terms of comparing these different types of services, I actually believe that quite a few of them (except for Morningstar’s OptionInvestor service) tend to ”borrow” from each other to a certain degree and then repackage the information per their ongoing marketing models. In fact, Schaeffer’s and Zack’s partner-up on some of the services offered by Schaeffers, and OptionMonster and TheStreet.com may also have some common ties based on what I have read. Finally, I find that most of the “popular” services out there will recommend some big winners for you, but (again) you’ll have to be able to weed out the non-winners that also get recommended in order to make this “option” a profitable venture on a consistent basis.
Additional Comment: As I alluded to above, my overall returns from the above mentioned subscription services in the past have usually been tempered with the many additional recommendations/ideas that do not work out so well, so one needs to be aware of the overall picture here in terms of trying to achieve any semblance of consistent profitability. Having said that, some additional technical/fundamental analysis and/or research on one’s part is always required in order to proactively eliminate the additional recommendations/ideas that won’t work out in order to increase one’s level of profitability. I find that these services will recommend a few nice winners for you, but you’ll definitely have to be able to weed out the non-winners (or losers) that also get recommended in order to make the service a profitable venture on a consistent basis. In fact, I’ve gotten to the point with the Schaeffer’s Expiration Week Countdown service where I will weed out all but one or two of the recommendations during each expiration week of each month. For example, last month (August, 2010) I eliminated from consideration all of the recommendations offered but one, which was one of the Netflix (NFLX) call options that was set to expire at the end of that week (Call -> NFLX -> AUG 21, 2010 -> Strike Price $110). I selected this particuar one out of the bunch they recommended due to the recent high levels of volatility associated with NFLX’s stock price and volume at the times. And this particular option call did quite well that week (i.e., more than enough to cover the cost of my annual subscription). In a nutshell one is usually able to select one or two winners to play with from the list of recommendations made each expiration month; but my experience has been that most of them are usually worth ignoring after doing a little bit of research on them.
Hope this helps!
http://option.morningstar.com/Newsletter/Options.aspx
http://www.schaeffersresearch.com/cart/ViewAllProducts.aspx#aggressive
http://www.optionmonster.com/about/products.jsp
Note: See link below for an enhancement of finance professor Peter Carr’s instructive paper on the implementaion of the Black-Scholes call/put options pricing model on the HP-12C programmable finance calculator by Tony Hutchins. http://www.hpcc.org/datafile/V23N3/V23N3P25.pdf
The Proposed Financial-Transaction Tax Bill Issue!
There is a financial-transaction tax bill being proposed by the U.S. Congress that intends to levy a 0.25% tax on all equity trading transactions. The passing of this bill would severely marginalize the financial trading industry, making our financial markets even less efficient than they have already become. The end result would be the loss of untold numbers of jobs, and financial markets would become even more susceptible to crashes due to the resulting lack of liquidity. Obviously the passing of this absurd bill would negatively impact the financial trading (and related) industries; but it would also severely curtail a critical market capitalization vehicle used by small to medium sized companies, thus rendering them less able to compete and grow. And with banks and other financial service entities either unable or unwilling to capitalize small to medium sized businesses these days (but able and willing to pay out absurd bonuses to undeserving executives), taxing financial trade transactions would only serve to make the current economic downturn more pronounced, possibly leading to even more disastrous consequences down the road. The resulting dissipation of market liquidity, trading volumes, and market price discovery, along with widened bid/ask price spreads, would destroy the positive aspects afforded by arbitrage and speculative trading. Along with the addition of other possible government regulatory actions, this problem would then be further exacerbated by the resulting mass migration of American based trading volumes over to foreign (i.e., non-taxable) exchanges.
The one thing that really irks me about the proposed financial-transaction tax bill is that it is being framed as a so-called “sin” tax by its partisan proponents in order to appeal to the current populist mindset that the financial industry as a whole is guilty for the current state of the economy (i.e., high unemployment levels, etc.). Basically, the transgressions of a few that were enabled by the lack of understanding by government officials and regulators per the complex financial-engineering instruments being utilized are the primary culprits here. The imposing of a financial-transaction “sin” tax by the government is not a good substitute for developing an understanding of the new financial order and obtaining the level of competency necessary to effectively regulate the industry, thus establishing a stable (level) playing field for the economy as a whole. So in my mind, this proposed financial-transaction “sin” tax is nothing more than an attempt to sweep a certain portion of the blame (or responsibility) for the current state of the economy under someone else’s rug. In addition, the potentially negative impact of this “sin” tax would be exacerbated by the resulting changes in premium requirements by investors across the board due to the tax costs being passed on to them. The potential drain on market liquidity and the resulting decrease in the capital available for struggling small-to-medium sized businesses would be hard to justify, especially for reasons of partisan politics. So this proposed tax is not a viable solution or option in my mind, as it conceivably could lead to even more problems down the road as the state of our economy continues to evolve (or unwind).
Finally, perhaps the biggest question in my mind is why do some of our elected government officials seem “hell bent” at times to make things worse for us rather than better (i.e., at both the micro and macro levels) in order to pursue partison based agendas? This potentially dangerous bill needs to be dismissed (or vetoed) ASAP before it has a chance to cause serious long-term damage to our still frail (and unwinding) economy. Click on the URL below to sign the revised “Financial-Transaction Tax is Detrimental to Many Industries” petition and have it forwarded to your representatives:
Larry Fry
