Making Money on Put Strategies

As I mentioned before in a previous post, some very successful traders use put strategies to make a lot of money in the market.  This was a very lucrative time for many traders who do.  The market was going up and people didn't know where it was going to stop.  Then instability came into the market through Cyprus, Greece and now with the attacks in Boston.  You can almost guarantee something is going to happen in a two-month time period to cause markets to destabilize and when they do the S&P, DOW and NASDAQ all go down.  The best play of course is the SPY because it responds directly to big dips in the market.  The options are also real close between the Bid and Ask price so this makes it easier to get in and out of your trade.

The market always goes up slowly and comes down fast.  You will almost never catch the market going up fast unless it is on some news that nobody but insiders know and when it does it is usually in after hours trading so you missed the run (case in point: Sprint shot up a whole point over night the other day after Dish Network said it wanted to buy them).  So the play is to wait for the market to go up and then place put options at various points going at the most two months out.  For example the market is already down today so I would wait until SPY gets back to 157 and then as it goes up place put options for the June 155 strike price.  Then wait and see what happens.  You can place your stop at 159 and your limit at around 153 (I know the options order window in TOS doesn't show the strike price but after you play around with adjusting your trade price it will show you on the chart where your options orders are).  

Yes it's great to have stop and limit orders but always watch your trades.  There are sometimes your bid doesn't go through as quickly as you would like and you could miss some profits or worse lose money.  When you see your profit margin approaching it may be a good thing to call your broker and ask him/her to place the trade for you at your trade price.  Depending on the brokerage firm they can actually execute your trade for you better than your computer.  They can find a buyer for you and make you some good money.  I've had good experiences with Trade King and highly recommend them.

Market Update #2 7-5-12

So here’s the setup…The ECB cut rates as expected and the ADP report was better than expected.  Also the jobless claims number was down and Central Bank of China has cut rates.  All the news is positive however the market can react in very strange ways even with positive news.  Since some investors were expecting QE3 (Quantitative Easing) because of the downward situation in Europe they may think that the Fed (Federal Reserve) will hold off on QE3 because of positive numbers in jobless claims and the other reports.

Bottom line…wait and see what the market does after the opening bell  

Stocks to watch:

SNE – Big release of Spider Man this week.  Target price 15.72 off of technical set up from the Daily chart

S (Sprint) – The technical setup looks good for Sprint.  I see a target price of $3.71 but if it breaks that level it could go higher

T – Dividend declaration at end of trading day

AAPL – British judge ruled against AAPL in its four patent infringement claims against HTC, they also are going to release a smaller ipad