Black Man Coming

The night is warm

Streetlights shining bright

You're walking with your lover

Arm in arm, I'm the only one in sight

your breath kinda shallow

You force a smile

Footsteps now sounding hollow

911 ready to dial

I calmly walk by

With a friendly nod, a calm goodnight

You turn to your lover and say

"See baby", they're not so bad, no need for your fright"

Reentry

Ok so its been over 6 months since my last entry, but I'm BACK!!!

Of course that doesn't mean much, since I'm the only one reading this blog (proof, 67 hits, how pitiful is that). Of course it might just be a case of "if you build it they will come", but come on now, only 67 hits??? Clearly my writing is not for the masses.

So anyhow, My lil' sis Nat calls me the other day, to tell me how baby sis Chris has been posting very mean things on various family member's Facebook pages, resulting in a virtual Facebook war.

The end result of this virtual war is an all too real family strife, split along not very clear familial lines. At times like this I'm glad I'm not on Facebook. I can now safely play Switzerland and remain neutral. That is, unless they discover this blog and decide to take the family war to a new medium. Luckily I'm in control of this land (courtesy of Google) and can choose to exterminate any ugly sentiment that dares to rear its ugly head here.

Of course, you can do the same thing on Facebook, but then it kind of defeats the point of having, Facebook, doesn't it?

Being trigger happy makes you not so much

So of course, the day I sold my calls on JPM, I go out and buy puts, also on JPM.
Bad, bad idea.
Since JPM moved based on market news (huge writeoffs by UBS and others that seem to have led investors to believe that the markets had bottomed), as well as bullish sentiment on JPM's upcoming earnings, buying puts so quickly was probably a pretty bad idea.
Not bad in terms of buying the puts, but buying them before the stock had a couple of days to establish a range, which would have allowed me to assess the right price point to jump in. Now as it turns out the puts are right where I bought them, rather than the nice price increase I would have had if only I had waited. :-(

So, note to self - look (for a couple of days) before I leap (no pun intended, although only option traders would get that one).

JPM's next move

Sold my JPM Jan 55 Cs today. The stock is up on a combination of the following;
1. industry write downs (UBS wrote down $19B!!!) - reading this Mr. Market seems to think that the stock market's bottomed.
2. The US Treasury's proposed overhaul of financial regulators
3. Goldman Sach's comment that JPM will have next to no writedowns this quarter

Now I figure that what goes up must come down, so will be buying JPM puts. We'll see how well that plays out...

From Trading to Handyman

One of the things I pride myself on is being a jack of all trades. I may not be the best at any one thing, but I'm pretty decent at most things.

Now I figure just because I work in an office doesn't mean I can't work with my hands. With that mindset I happily spent two full weekends putting up a backsplash that I could have paid someone $500 to do in half a day. And with that same mindset, I spent this weekend putting up a shower door. Took me a pretty long time, but I got it done! I'll post a pic of it later.

Now back to my day job, and back to trading. JPM's up $1 on the day so far, and the market's flat. As are my calls. Come on JP, do your thing.

Super Fast Trade Execution

I had the fastest fill I have ever had on an options trade today. I mean, I literally pressed the button, flipped over to the order status screen, and read my status "filled". Now besides the sense of foreboding that this made me feel (I mean if the market maker's that willing to jump on a bid it makes me kind of nervous), I have to say that I was pretty impressed with the speed of the fill. I bought 6 contracts of JPM Jan 55 Calls, so we'll see soon if that was a good idea or a bad idea.

Commission Fees

About a year and a half ago i left the blue bank to go work at the green bank.

Being a bit lazy / nostalgic / comfortable, I kept trading at the blue bank.

Recently though I've been feeling like a bit of a bad team player by doing this, so I moved the proceeds of one option trade over. The plan was to buy 30 contracts of E-Trade April 4 Calls in my green bank discount brokerage account. Total would be about $1300 + commission. But holy sticker shock batman!!! The cost of the same trade at the green bank is a whopping $145! vs a paltry $43 at the blue bank! That's over 10% of the cost of the trade! The option would have to go up over 25% just to break even! Needless to say I will now have to rethink my trade.

Now I obviously want to be a good corporate citizen, but this differential in cost makes it pretty tough to do so - at least with respect to option trades.

At any rate, I'm going to have to explore some alternatives here, because this is definitely not a good scene.