<p>Hi Doc, do you not believe the Santa Claus rally? I am all in</p>
<p>Looking back, we are having a great rally. </p>
<p>Being at home since the 17th, I have done several trades. The best one was getting into GILD at high 80s and got out at high 90s, made almost $9 a share. </p>
<p>This isn’t the bragging thread. That’s a separate thread.</p>
<p>And those short term capital gains can take a bite by the taxman. Requires the cash to cover that. Can sometimes be a challenge for “dirt poor” people to come up with that.</p>
<p>Anyone buy Lending Club, IPO? I bought some. It is a great concept. If you have great credit, you get a much better rate than the banks are giving.</p>
<p>I think I mentioned a while ago, that I was thinking of investing in it. Looking at their site, I see that they are offering ~7.64% for grade A notes.</p>
I have been contemplating possible conservative strategies to try and capitalize on the oil situation. If I understand the situation correctly, the Saudis have been flooding the market to make fracking unprofitable. If it works, at some point the price will go back up. Analysts differ on the time frame for this, but the most pessimistic that I have seen is a bottom of $40. So what we appear to have right now is a falling knife with a floor.
The best idea that I have come up would involve buying USO (currently trading just at 19.89) and selling Jan. 16 or Jan 17 20 call options. The bid for the January 16 is 3.20, which would be 19% ROI if oil stays flat; January 17 is 4.40, which would be a 28% ROI if oil is flat.
So what if oil drops to 40 and stays there? USO should then be about 15 and, at based on the current return for out the money call options, you could get 4-5% each year by writing one year 20 calls. Not the worst situation in the world if (as all of the analysts that I have seen predict) you will pick up the gain from (for example) 16.69 (19.89-3.20) in the not too distant future.
Anyone have any reactions?
What happened tho this thread? Did it die because posters are now posting in the retirement thread?
@EMM1: Firstly, I’m about as incompetent a trader as you’ll get, so read my analysis with this in mind. When OPEC had its meeting late last year just before oil began taking huge hits, I decided they’d cut back and prices will go up, so I was researching USO, USL, DIG, DUG, DBO, various ETFs and ETNs, as well as oil futures, and my strategy was to buy it, hold it long enough for the oil prices to go up and then dump it. I thought DBO was my best option, and that’s what I went with. You know what happened after the meeting. I’m happy I didn’t actually buy futures which, based on my limited research, involved base amounts in the hundreds of thousands.
My interpretation was many of these instruments are not a direct play on spot prices, but some relationship between spot and futures based on the models they used. eg. an ETF could hold everything today in May futures, and as May approaches, sell it and buy June. You also have ETFs that take their total holdings, divide by 12 and create 12 buckets of May/June… Apr '16 futures, and just trade one bucket each month. You also have those that base it on not just oil but other oil related products.
Practically all of the ones I looked at suffered from “contango”. Since everyone knows that on a given day each month, the ETF will sell a lot of current futures and exchange it for those of a later date, traders ensure the current futures are sold at a discount and push up the price of what the ETF needs to buy. So the one holding the ETF gets a performance significantly worse than what it’s supposed to be tracking.
I hope you have better success playing the oil market than I did.
I think this thread might have died because the market has sucked this year – what with all of the volatility. Definitely a roller coaster. I’m risk-averse, so I am sitting things out for now . Given the volatility, there are also a lot of opportunities for sophisticated traders … but the more I have learned about the market and trading, the less I feel I know…
But this thread has ridden the ups and downs of the market. I feel like a complete novice and am in awe of the knowledgeable folks here.
Well, this thread started in 2012… and the market was pretty must straight up from 2012 through July or August of 2014, when it started to get bouncy.
Virtu is going public today.
The company is a high frequency company.
The chairman and ceo were on cnbc today.
The company trades about 11,000 products in 34 countries.
What I like is Virtu gave an example of how much it makes in an individual issue. Virtu has about 5 percent market share in trading GE. Virtu makes $800 a day.
There is a lot of criticism about hft firms. Before hft, if you traded 5 percent of the market, you could make a lot more than $800 a day. Profit margins have decreased as the bid/ask spreads narrowed.
Also, we used to read how hft firns create volatiity. Used to hear that quite a bit in 2008-2011. Hft firms still exist and volatity has been quite low over the last few years.
So I looked up GE’s trading volume. GE has been averaging 43 million shares trading a day. So, at 5 percent market share, that would be a little more than 2 million share trading a day. Virtu averages $800 profit a day in GE.
Etsy.
Yeah…I see Etsy. I have no idea what Etsy does but it seems very popular today. 
There were many threads about Etsy here in the cafe. It is a marketplace for artists and crafty folks.
Ok…I am not artsy or crafty.
Did you buy etsy on the ipo?
I had a chance to buy virt and pcty but not etsy. I didn’t buy. I wasn’t paying attention.
I should have bought BioMarin which isn’t an ipo. D@@@ it.
No… I wish I did - it is a very easily hyped stock. 
Did they get their wish of selling 5 (or 10)% of shares to the artisans in small lots? I heard there was some talk about that.
Their S-1 is full of color:
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1370637/000119312515077045/d806992ds1.htm
How bout that NFLX, huh? I went back and checked my records. I traded NFLX once in my entire life. Back on 1-5-2010 I bought 100 shares at 50.90 !!! … and later that day I sold 100 shares at 51.20 !!!
BunsenBurner, I don’t know etsy at all. I watch cnbc once or twice a month. I would never have heard of etsy if I didn’t turn on the tv today.
NFLX. It is the old Peter Lynch strategy. If a lot of people use the product… Buy the stock.
I don’t get nflx as a stock but I like the product.
What about Shake Shack? I hear raves about the product but the stock price scares me.
Panera Bread? What is going on there?
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000370940
Virtu on CNBC. Virtu makes .0004-.0006 per share traded in and out.