<p>The stock is hard to borrow…and when it is hard to borrow…</p>
<p>You may have to put up 100 Percent cash…no margin…</p>
<p>You can be charged high interest rates to borrow the stock…</p>
<p>Or…you can be bought in…your brokerage firm can buy the stock for you without you knowing…you get notified after the fact. Since I am hedged…if I get bought in…I will end up long…</p>
<p>You bought calls and borrowed stock that you shorted? Why would you do that?</p>
<p>Because the calls are underpriced…</p>
<p>I don’t think I would ever borrow stock to short, there is infinite risk. I prefer to buy puts or put spreads. As a matter of fact I prefer options to stocks for everything except high dividend paying stocks or those that don’t have much volume and therefore larger spreads.</p>
<p>If you are long calls and short stock…the same amount of each…you are equivalently long puts…You don’t have unlimited risk.</p>
<p>Remember I am hedged…</p>
<p>You can also be short deep in the money puts against stock…but then you are short calls…so you do have risk…</p>
<p>Everybody has to find what works for them…</p>
<p>I meant short deep in the money puts ( a long position) against short stock… ( a short position). I know you know this…just want to be accurate. :)</p>
<p>Sorry.</p>
<p>Hopefully everyone is done with their taxes or done in the sense that they just need a signature and a trip to the post office or an EFile. Switching back to jobs, the unemployment report went up yesterday to 380K which may be a setback.</p>
<p>This isn’t strictly an economic issue (or at least one related to investing) but it’s about jobs and demographics.</p>
<p>CBS Marketwatch has a chart on who the new jobs are going to. The chart is on employment growth from Dec 2009 to Dec 2011.</p>
<p>By age: 691K for 16-20, 52K for 25-54, 1.85M 55-69. That is really scary, scary stuff unless you’re a geezer (like most of us here). But even geezers want their kids and relatives to have jobs.</p>
<p>By sex: 2.6M Male, 200K Female. That’s quite the shocker too. (numbers eyeballed from chart)</p>
<p>By race: 1.8M White, 500K Black, 400K Asian, 1.2M Hispanics - the numbers aren’t that useful without adjustments for percentage of population. (numbers eyeballed from chart). With percentage numbers: Whites are 65% of the population and got 46% of the job growth; Hispanics are 16% of the population and got 30% of the job growth; Blacks are 13% of the population and got 13% of the job growth; Asians are 5% of the population and got 10% of the job growth.</p>
<p>(population percentage numbers from Wikipedia)</p>
<p>[Are</a> baby boomers taking all the jobs? - Rex Nutting - MarketWatch](<a href=“Are baby boomers taking all the jobs? - MarketWatch”>Are baby boomers taking all the jobs? - MarketWatch)</p>
<p>Well, there’s this:
So I don’t know how much you can read into these numbers.</p>
<p>Didn’t people move up from the group below them too?</p>
<p>Not in as large numbers as left the group:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>What do you think of the other demographics?</p>
<p>I am going to weigh our tax return on the scale when I figure out where my DH put it. Its probably holding open a door somewhere. We are also personally solving the national debt, as he decided to convert IRAs to Roths as there was a window of oportunity this year. So we have to pay the tax on them now (actually again next year too). College tuition seems like a comparative drop in the bucket!</p>
<p>Well, the author of the article says the statistics are “ultimately meaningless”, so I don’t know how much of value can be concluded from them.</p>
<p>The most interesting one is the M/F split, although I remember reading somewhere that the recession effected men much more heavily than women, so maybe it makes sense that men have recovered more jobs.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, it’s not entirely surprising. Men lost far more jobs in the recession than women did. While the number of employed women has held fairly steady, most of the new jobs are now going to men, who have been on more of a roller coaster.</p>
<p>Another factor here: public sector austerity hurts women far more than it hurts men, because the public sector workplace is disproportionately female. According to the Department of Labor, women are 50% more likely to be employed in public sector jobs then men. And there’s a bit of a time lag to this: an economic downturn translates to private sector job losses fairly quickly, but because of the way public sector budget cycles work, it’s typically only after a year of lower economic activity leading to reduced tax revenue that legislatures even begin to turn their attention to fiscal belt-tightening—and when they do, they’re budgeting for a fiscal year that may not begin for another 6 months and extends out to 18 months from when the decision is made. Add that all up and it could easily be a 2 to 3 year time lag. That’s part of the explanation for why women’'s employment held up better during the recession. But it also explains why there’s now a lag in job growth for women. Just as the private sector can cut jobs faster, it can add them faster. Having slashed their spending, many states are now seeing tax revenue recovering to the point they’re now generating budget surpluses. But it will be at least another budget cycle–and for political reasons, maybe much longer–before that increased public sector revenue translates into new public sector hiring.</p>
<p>dstark, I think that you asked me where I thought AAPL would be in a month and I said around $600. We’re a week away. Those $650 calls that I sold for $9.60 are now worth $0.83. The $640 May 21 calls are wroth $17+, about 2 bucks more than I sold them for so it looks like there’s still a lot of enthusiasm for AAPL.</p>
<p>That’s true…</p>
<p>Was thinking of buying the calls back as 90% of the value is gone but I’d like to see what happens through OEX. INTC calls are still about where they were when I sold them. even with only a week left. Those might get called out though I think that the odds are that they won’t. It will be nice getting 70 cents out of it whether it gets called out or not.</p>
<p>The one wildcard is that INTC reports this week and I’m guessing that earnings will be really good. Options expirations seems to trump earnings from what I’ve seen.</p>
<p>I am not sure what your last comment means.</p>
<p>The odds are that AAPL’s May option volatilty will drop after earnings…</p>
<p>With INTC, they can have great earnings during OEX and the stock will do nothing. Then it goes up the following week.</p>
<p>Ok…</p>