Week in Review – January 18 – 22, 2016

Consecutive gaining sessions and big ones, at that.

But this was the first week since early 2009 that I mad absolutely no trades.

I can’t recall whether there has been a week in the time frame or longer that also didn’t have a single ex-dividend position, either.

But that was this week. Nothing, nothing at all.

The themes for 2016 are pretty obvious.

It’s almost embarrassing just how tightly the market and oil are correlated. While China is a theme, too, there’s no escaping the incredibly tight tandem moves of oil and stocks as they continue to defy their normal relationship.

Oil moves and the market moves in the same direction and has been doing just that for more than a year at this point and yet it still seems so bizarre.

This week, though, for a change, that meant that in the latter half of the week the market went higher. Hard to believe, but the price of oil actually went up on the week,

It might have had gone even higher earlier in the week, but the strong advance by oil, which ha sent the market strongly higher, reversed itself.

You can probably guess what the market did at that point. It gave up its big gain on the day, just as had oil.

There wasn’t much reason to support the nearly 20% gain in the price of a barrel of oil for the week other than the price had been beaten down so much and so fast.

Ultimately, that’s not a very good reason to keep iy going higher, so I’m not expecting too much as next week gets ready to begin and we get back to 5 days of trading.

Still, it was nice to end the week with the S&P 500 moving about 1.6% higher, especially since 2016 had already seen a 10% decline on the year.

Since that 10% decline came during the course of only 11 days of trading, it’s plausible that the entire loss can be offset just as quickly, but what would be the catalyst for supporting that kind of rally?

That’s hard to say, unless earnings can have some kind of meaningful turnaround from where they have been going.

With still very little cash in reserve and absolutely no positions set to expire next week, there are at least some ex-dividend positions.

But I don’t expect to be an active participant when it comes to adding any new positions during the week.

Since it has been a while since a few positive days have been strung together, I’ll have to see the proof before spending any money.

I would definitely much rather, though, see the market continue going higher and get a chance to find any uncovered positions to sell a call upon.

There were a few times this past week that I thought that was going to happen, but it just wasn’t there.

Maybe next week will be different, but it will take a lot of those different kind of weeks to make up for the damage done in just the first 2 weeks of the year.

.

This week’s details may be seen in the Weekly Performance spreadsheet * or in the PDF file, as well as in the summary below

(Note: Duplicate mention of positions reflects different priced lots):



New Positions Opened:  none

Puts Closed in order to take profits:  none

Calls Rolled over, taking profits, into the next weekly cycle: none

Calls Rolled over, taking profits, into extended weekly cycle:  none

Calls Rolled over, taking profits, into the monthly cycle: none

Calls Rolled Over, taking profits, into a future monthly cycle:  none

Calls Rolled Up, taking net profits into same cycle:  none

New STO:  none

Put contracts expired: none

Put contracts rolled over: none

Long term call contracts sold:  none

< sp an style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">Calls Assigned: none

Calls Expired:  BAC

Puts Assigned:  none

Stock positions Closed to take profits:  none

Stock positions Closed to take losses: none

Calls Closed to Take Profits: none

Ex-dividend Positions:   none

Ex-dividend Positions Next Week: F (10/27 $0.15), FAST (1/27 $0.3), KMI (1/28 $0.125(

For the coming week the existing positions have lots that still require the sale of contracts:   AGQ, ANF, AZN, BBBY, BBY, CHK, CLF, COH, CSCO,  CY, DOW, FAST, FCX, GDX, GM, GPS, HAL, HFC, HPQ, INTC, IP, JCP, JOY, KMI, KSS, LVS, MCPIQ, MOS, NEM, RIG, WFM, WLTGQ, WY (See “Weekly Performance” spreadsheet or PDF file)



* If you don’t have a program to read or modify spreadsheets, you can download the OpenOffice Suite at no cost.