I read an interesting piece on the CNBC website by John Carney regarding the SEC freezing the assets of a Goldman trading account that made a very suspicious trade in HNZ options right before the takeover was announced. John raised the idea that the SEC is overreaching by freezing the assets of the account without any evidence beyond the suspicious … Read More
Should Short Term Traders Consider News–Part III
On Friday I was chatting with a non-SMB prop trader that I trained several years ago. He was long DLTR when the WMT “news” broke around 2:00PM. From the chat messages you can see that we were in agreement that there was a short term “fading” opportunity in the retail names that had been quickly hammered based on a leaked … Read More
SMB Trade of the Week: Failed Breakout (CMCSA)
For the intraday trader we look for opportunities where stocks are: 1) Clean 2) Trend 3) Wound up to move 4) Controllable, meaning you can control your risk 5) Scaleable, meaning you can add significant size In our SMB Trade of the Week we had all of these. See the power point slides above. Would you have made this … Read More
What is a Counter-trend Trade?
The counter-trend trade has been the trade of the year thus far in the market. The trade is expressed via a long position in the SPY after a down move to recent support. The idea behind this trade is the market has a strong underlying bid and when it pulls back to a prior support level buyers will step into … Read More
How Are Those New Year’s Resolutions Going?
Maybe it’s the bubbles in champagne, or the sound of the cork popping, but New Year’s always brings out a rush of emotions. The end of one year naturally lends itself to reflection on the past. As the calendar turns over, people wax lyrical about another year passing. Taking stock of the past year, people figure out where they are … Read More
Not So Fast
One of the more common patterns seen in a strong market are longer term players buying stocks that have gapped lower after earnings. Sometimes this plays out on Day 1 with momentum buyers aggressively buying the stock leading to a gap fill. But many times a gap fill will play out in the days following the earnings release once the … Read More
Recording: Seth Freudberg: Heart Friendly Butterfly Review
SMB’s Options Tribe is an online community of options traders dedicated to sharing successful options trading ideas with all of our members worldwide. Each week the community will meet online for the primary purpose of watching live presentations made by veteran options traders and experts in the world of options trading. In this presentation, Seth Freudberg reviewed the Heart Friendly … Read More
Learn To Take A Loss
I was trading GMCR this morning. I consider it to be a Top 8 “momo” stock. It would probably be #2 behind NFLX if it hadn’t done a dopey 3/1 stock split a couple of years ago. “Momo” stocks are stocks that “fast money” hedge funds are constantly pushing around. GMCR gapped lower on earnings last week and had a … Read More