Late on Monday we issued an alert to buy calls on Bank of America (NYSE: BAC). It looked perfect to make a great return. Then after the market closed North Korea launched a missile flying it over Japan. Futures tanked and the next morning we were stopped out of BAC. Then late in the day Tuesday (after being stopped out) if is announced that Billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who came to the aid of a struggling Bank of America back in 2011 with a $5 billion investment, has turned that into a paper profit of more than $11 billion after exercising his right to buy 700 million shares of the bank's common stock at a bargain-basement price. After Tuesday's market close, Bank of America confirm
One of our philosophies at Optik is to focus on the SPY as well as other ETFs. Why do we do this. It is because of the susceptibility of a stock to be damaged by any type of news or analyst downgrade. Just recently we have two prime examples of this. First, the CEO of Best Buy (BBY) was reporting on an excellent quarter for BBY but in his report he decided to state that Best Buy can’t maintain it sales. The stock suffered its worst decline in more than a year after CEO Hubert Joly provided that warning. The stock moved down about 12% and the options dropped incredibly. In a second example, Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant took an unexpected shot at Under Armour (NYSE:UA) yesterday d
North Korea fired a missile that flew over Japan and has escalated world tensions and sent the VIX up. This will have an adverse effect on the BAC call alert that we issued today. The missile landed in waters off the northern region of Hokkaido. Experts say that North Korea appears to have developed an intermediate-range missile. Markets are on edge because Trump may take action against North Korea to support our Japanese allies. South Korea’s military said the missile was launched from near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, just before 6 a.m. (2100 GMT Monday) and flew 2,700 km (1,680 miles), reaching an altitude of about 550 km (340 miles). Minutes after the missile was launched, res
The coming week is shaping up to push the markets lower. Hurricane Harvey that hit the Texas and Louisiana coasts is still dumping rain overtop of the damage it has already inflicted. Some analysts think this could drive down the GDP as well as send gas prices higher since refineries (10) are shuttered. Gasoline futures have shot up as a result. This could present a good opportunity to buy oil companies! Also this coming Friday will be the jobs report. Other events that may impact the market this week include: Trump tweets; Wednesday at 0830 a GDP Report; Wednesday at 10:30 EIA Petroleum Report; and Friday at 10:00 the ISM Manufacturing Index. It should be a bumpy ride this week in the
On October 1st the U.S. Government will supposably shutdown unless Congress passes legislation be it a stop gap measure or a full budget – more than likely it will be a stop gap. Why? Because the number one priority for our elected officials is getting re-elected. Most of them are professional politicians and if faced with getting a real job would be on the street – there is very little most of them can do in real life. Nonetheless, this issue is a concern since the President announced that unless he gets his wall that the government will shut down. Of course he is pointing the figure at Congresses inability to work together and do the right things for the country and Congress points the
Markets were down noticeable this morning at the open and never recovered. The catalyst for the down market has been attributed to Trump’s threat last night in Phoenix to let the federal government shutdown if Congress does not fund his wall with Mexico. Lawmakers are on break and will be returning to Washington in early September but the funding to run the government will die on October 1st. Both parties had expected to pass a temporary spending bill. This new threat from Mr. Trump now places the path forward in question. The GOP is prepared to dig in over the $1.6 billion for the border wall, one of Trump’s top campaign promises. August is a soft month for the markets and it appears it
On August 22, 2017 the Dow closed at an all-time high. Was that the end of the bull market? Dow Theory is the oldest of the stock-market timing systems in use and it still remains in widespread use today. William Hamilton created it over 100 years ago. He was the editor of The Wall Street Journal at the time. So what has to happen for the bull market to end under the Dow Theory? Basically, three events have to occur as follows: 1. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Dow Jones Transportation Average (both) must show significant declines (lets say 5%) after hitting new highs. We are nowhere close. We just had a small dip in the historically weak month of August. 2. After this decline
Equities fell today with the DOW closing down -274 points. Technology was hit hard with the NASDAQ losing 1.9%. There’s a number of factors that contributed to today's selloff including concerns that Trump's pro-growth agenda could be dead on arrival in Congress because many are echoing that is will be the end of their political careers to work with Trump. As an example, numerous CEO’s resigned from Trumps advisory panels and some of the panels we disbanded. These CEO's felt that they could not afford the negative impact, to include the loss of customers (i.e. sales), due to any association with Trump. The selloff seemed to accelerate when there was news (true or fake) that Trump's chief e
Today Optik broke through 700% return YTD with its two alerts from last week on the SPY and Blackstone (BX). There was a confluence of factors that pulled the markets down last week to include North Korea, profit taking, markets being overbought and oil moving down. Oil weakness was created because the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA) last week said oil production from the cartel had risen in July to almost reach 33 million barrels a day. The increased production came as Libya, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia ramped up output as well. As we continue to watch for dips in this bull market we are hopeful in reaching an overall return f
We issued an alert today to enter the SPY ETF and we are up 9% as of this blog. The markets are very soft right now with fear injected by the geopolitical situation with North Korea. The SPY position we have is the Sep 15 2017 249 Calls. We expect that these will provide a good return and hopefully propel our YTD gain to over 700% Apple hit a new high today and gold moved up as well. If the rhetoric dies down we could see good advances in the markets for the remainder of this week.
The escalating rhetoric between Trump and North Korea was finally enough today to impact the markets sending them down from all time record highs! Luckily, we have been closely monitoring the geopolitical issues and exited our position, in IWM, just prior to the downturn. In doing so we were able to long a 20% gain. Had we held the position it would have ended in the red for the day. Presently, futures are negative with the S&P -9.00 / -0.36% at the time of this writing. This could present a significant buying opportunity tomorrow. However, we will have to wait and see what tomorrow brings. Defense stocks could soar since some of the neighboring countries, to North Korea, want improved we
We issued an alert today on the Russell 2000 - it appears to be at or very near a bottom. We are looking for a gain of 50% on this alert. The chart provided is a 4 month period showing the daily price and as you can see it looks like a bottom. Lets hold and see if we can achieve the 50% or better return.
The Dow Jones industrial average closed Friday at its 8th record setting level in a row after a very strong jobs report. It hit a record high and closed 66.71 points at 22,092.81. Goldman Sachs (GS) contributed the most gains. Earnings have been very good and that has contributed to the market gains as well. The dips we watch for have become increasing fewer but they will occur. Since 1950 August has been the worst month for the Dow, according to the Stock Trader’s Almanac edited by Jeffrey A. Hirsch. And, in a note written along with Christopher Mistal, Augusts in years after presidential elections have been especially treacherous. The VIX remains at historically low levels. The geopoliti
Apple (APPL) reported last night and beat! It looks like it will drive the DOW to a new all time record high as well as Apple to a new high. It beat on earnings and revenue and an adjusted EPS: $1.67 per share vs. $1.57 per share expected by a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate. Revenue was $45.4 billion vs. $44.89 billion projected. It has a market capitalization of over $830 billion.