Stocks Options

Goaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal! We are over our $50,000 mark and right on schedule at the halfway mark! Not bad considering we began with our aggressive $10,000 virtual portfolio last year, which we ran up to $36,630 – put that $11,630 back in the virtual bank and began this year in February with a $25,000 Portfolio. The last major update to our virtual portfolio was back on May 21st. We do send out Alert updates on a regular basis and discuss the trade ideas daily in Member Chat. Now we can start July off with a clean $50,000 Portfolio with the same goal – to double up in 6 months but sticking to the same small allocation hit and run trade ideas that we used (mostly) in the first half. I urge you to read the original post and the update if you haven’t already to get an idea of what we are trying to learn by following this "hyper-aggressive" portfolio model. As promised,...

I strongly believe that the marketing and distribution of auction-rate securities was the single greatest scam perpetrated on investors by Wall Street. While a full forty months have passed since the ARS market failed that fateful day in February 2008, approximately $100 billion of the original $330 billion ARS remain frozen. Many thousands of investors continue to wonder if they will ever get a full return of their cash locked up in these supposed ‘cash-alternative’, ‘cash-surrogate’, ‘totally liquid’, ‘as good as cash’, ‘money market type’ instruments. Forty plus months. $100 billion. You think you have stress. Place yourself in the position of these investors. Sense on Cents continues to bang the drum for ARS investors and now we witness two more ‘wins’ but one real ‘disappointment’ on the ARS front. Let’s navigate.  Last we heard from the crowd at Raymond James, they were claiming they had a ‘meritorious defense’ in their marketing and distribution of auction-rate securities. Well, it would now appear that RJ’s meritorious...

Spread betting is a risky game of trading in which you can lose more than you have in your account. That's because of leverage. Every time you buy or sell a market, you just need a small fraction of your total trade – a margin, which can be as low as 1-2%. If the market goes against you quickly, then you could be in trouble. That's what most people think – but are they correct? Spread betting has in fact some risks, and losing more than what you have in your account is a real possibility, but depending on your provider and on the type of trades you carry, it can be a really low one. Before going broke, there is a margin call trigger, in which most providers will automatically start closing positions you have in your account until the margin is again satisfied.

On CNBC's Options Action, Mike Khouw suggested that investors should consider a long position in Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC). He explained that Intel (INTC) struggled recently, but usually it bottoms around 9.5 times earnings. Intel (INTC) is currently trading at 9.6 earnings, and Mike Khouw thinks that it would be a good idea to have a long position in this stock. He thinks that it is better to use options to make that purchase. Specifically, Mike Khouw wants to buy the May 20 call for $0.40. The break even for this trade is at $20.40, and Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) closed today's session at $19.49 with a decline of 1.17%.