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Daily Market Update – October 20, 2014 (9:00 AM) There was a time when earnings reports like this morning’s delivered by IBM would have cast a pall on the market, especially coming before the opening bell on a Monday. Luckily, it’s not your father’s IBM, anymore. You do have to wonder how the company has seemed to lose its way and there certainly can be a new and better era ahead of it, but more importantly you have to wonder in this day and age how any company can ever maintain its predominance. With the DJIA being price weighted, IBM plays a big role in its calculation, although no quite as much at the moment. Still a lot, though, as it accounts for the entirety of the pre-open futures decline that at least temporarily puts a damper on Friday’s strong rally. Hopefully the week will see some kind of price stability in net terms, although I would love to see lots of intra-day movements. In an ideal market there’s minimal net movement but lots of activity. That inefficiency in net movement is great for premiums. Coming off last week and having finally gone a week without any new purchases, it may be easier to resist spending any money this week again. Certainly easier than the first time, as there’s still no reason to believe that any given day’s strength is the antidote to the past 4 weeks of declines. As tempting as so many stock prices look right now there have been so many reasons to avoid those temptations, but like most everything in life, it takes a good degree of hindsight to have some certainty about that conclusion. Without a doubt, at some point in the future, hindsight will also question why those purchases weren’t made sooner, forgetting all that transpired before. Last week, other than a few new sales of option contracts on existing positions, was so devoid of activity. I don’t really want to repeat it, but at least there was an overall out-performance in a market that is still trending downward. Imagine where that market would be if those explosively higher moves hadn’t occurred? While those higher moves may have sucked people back into the market chasing new positions, even if they represent false promises, at least they have tempered the decline. Without those 200 and 300 point like moves higher we would have been looking at a 10% correction level from the wrong side of 10%. So this week is another in which I don’t anticipate much in the way of new position additions. Unlike last week, which was also the monthly cycle ending with the smallest number of expiring psotions that I can recall in years, this week already has double the number of last week. I would just love to see some assignments from among that group, but would really be content if at least the opportunity to execute rollovers and mak While volatility took a little decline on Friday’s straight climb higher, there may still be reasons to consider some longer term option sales if the forward week premiums show some evidence of that volatility. The diversification by time that was re-initiated a few weeks ago as those premiums started to climb has already had some benefit by being able to lock in some of those premiums and to not be entirely at risk on any single day. Given the kind of price movements that we’ve seen in the past month, any single day could fall on just the wrong day as it comes to risk of a contract going unassigned, so it is nice not to have all of those contracts subject to the whims of an irrationally adverse price decline. For the week there may also continue to be opportunity and reason to pursue DOH Trades and attempt to squeeze whatever income is possible out of beaten down stocks, especially if receiving what may be a temporary bump higher. Any little bit helps.
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