Sunday, November 29, 2015

John Carter's Next Free Webinar "How to Grow Your Account and Grow it Fast"

Our trading partner John Carter of Simpler Options is back with another one of his wildly popular free webinars. And as always this class will fill up fast so get your reserved seat asap, sign up here.

John always comes to us with a game changing timely trading method for current market conditions that we can put to work immediately, and this class is no different. John gave us a taste of what he has in store for us with a new free video this week. If you have not seen it watch "John's Proven Strategies for Q4 and 2016" here.

This weeks free webinar is Tuesday evening December 1st at 8 p.m. eastern time.

Reserve Your Seat to "How to Grow Your Account Fast" Now!

Here’s what you’ll learn from our free webinar:

  *  How to find stocks that are bucking the trend of the general market

  *  What are the key market internals to watch every day for early signals

  *  How to know which options to buy and when

  *  How to trade from the road

  *  How to trade for multiple account sizes

      and much more

Get your seat now and we'll see you Tuesday evening,
The Stock Market Club

P.S. Don’t worry if you can’t attend live. We’ll send you a link to the recorded webinar within 24-48 hours.


Get your reserved seat now....Just Visit Here!

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Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Proven Strategies for Q4 and 2016


 
There are very few traders that have as unique of a story as our friend and trading partner John Carter. From watching his dad place his trades as "hand draws" to becoming a successful trader himself. It wasn't an easy path he took.

There have been lots of bumps, direction changes, and heartbreak along the way. But through time John has learned that if you want to have a 6 figure trading account like his, options are your best way to get there.

Today John is sharing with us his latest free video that will give us an insight into how he will be using options to close out the year and moving forward into 2016.

WatchJohn's Proven Strategies for Q4 and 2016

In this FREE video from John will give you two proven strategies he's using in 2016 that are sure to work for you. Now, when a trader like John Carter says "hey, here are my two best strategies" you'd be nuts not to at least hear him out and see if it can be applied to what you are doing.

So click here for his best two 2016 strategies

And here's what else he's showing you in this free video:

  *  His two proven Strategies John used to make 30k last week!

  *  How to make and find successful trades from your phone

  *  How to Successfully Trade 2016 Economic Disasters

  *  How to find trades that won't run your stops

John even shows you exactly what he's currently trading. This is my favorite part.....just watch!

See you in the markets putting this to work!
The Stock Market Club



While you are here get John's latest FREE eBook "Understanding Options"....Just Click Here!


Thursday, November 19, 2015

The “Bloodbath” in Canada Is Far From Over

By Justin Spittler

The oil price crash continues to claim victims…and many of them are in Canada.The price of oil hovered around $100 for most of last summer. Today, it’s trading for less than $45. Weak oil prices have pummeled huge oil companies. The SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP), which tracks the performance of major U.S. oil producers, has declined 36% over the past year. The Market Vectors Oil Services ETF (OIH), which tracks U.S. oil services companies, has declined 30% since last November. Weak oil prices have even pushed entire countries to the brink. Saudi Arabia, which produces more oil than any country in the world, is on track to post its first budget deficit since 2009 this year. If oil prices stay low, the country could burn through its massive $650 million pile of foreign reserves within five years.

Oil’s collapse is also creating big problems for Canada’s economy.....

Canada is the world’s sixth largest oil producer. Oil makes up 25% of its exports. Last month, The Conference Board of Canada said it expects sales for Canada’s energy sector to fall 22% this year. It also expects the industry to record a net loss of about C$2.1 billion ($1.6 billion) in 2015. That’s a drastic change from last year, when the industry booked a C$6 billion ($4.5 billion) profit.

Major oil firms are slashing spending to cope with low prices. Last month, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell plc (RDS.A) said it would stop construction on an 80,000 barrels per day (bpd) project in western Canada. The company had already abandoned another 200,000 bpd project in northern Canada earlier this year. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers estimates that Canadian oil and gas companies have laid off 36,000 workers since last summer. Most of these layoffs happened in the province of Alberta.

For the past decade, Alberta was Canada’s fastest growing province.....

Its economy exploded, thanks to the booming market for Canadian tar sands. Tar sand is a gooey sand and oil mixture that melts down with heat from burning natural gas. More than half of Canada’s oil production comes from tar sands. In Alberta, they account for 75% of oil production.

Tar sand is generally more expensive to produce than conventional crude oil. Canadian tar sand projects made sense when oil hovered around $100. But many of these projects can’t make money when oil trades for $45/barrel. Last year, Scotiabank (BNS) said the average breakeven point for new Canadian oil sand projects was around $65/barrel. This is why giant oil companies are walking away from projects they’ve spent years and billions of dollars developing.

All these cancelled oil projects are making Alberta’s economy unravel.....

Alberta lost 63,500 jobs from the start of year through August. It hasn’t lost that many jobs during the first eight months of the year since the Great Recession. The decline in oil production is also draining government resources. Last month, Reuters reported that Alberta was on track to post a $4.6 billion budget deficit this year. Economists say it could be another five years before Alberta runs a budget surplus. The crisis isn’t confined to the oil patches either.

A real estate crisis is unfolding in Calgary.....

Calgary is home to 1.2 million people. It’s the largest city in Alberta and the third largest in Canada. On Tuesday, Bloomberg Business reported that Calgary’s property market is starting to crack:
Vacancy is already at a five-year high in Calgary and rents are the lowest since 2006 after thousands of office jobs were cut. In downtown Calgary, the vacancy rate jumped to 14 percent in the third quarter, the highest since 2010 and compared with 5 percent for downtown Toronto, according to CBRE Group Inc. .... That doesn’t include as much as 2 million square feet of so-called "shadow vacancy" or space leased but sitting empty, which would push vacancy to 16 percent, the most since the mid-1980s.
Demand for office space is falling because of massive layoffs in the oil industry. That’s because oil companies didn’t just lay off roughnecks. They also laid off oil traders and middle managers, which means they need a lot less office space. According to Bloomberg Business, a principal at one Calgary real estate office called the situation “a bloodbath” and said “we’re at the highest point of fear and uncertainty now.”

Casey readers know the time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.....

But it looks like Calgary’s property crisis is just getting started. Bloomberg Business reports that the city has five new office towers in the works. These projects will add about 3.8 million square feet to Calgary’s office market over the next three years. More office space will only put more pressure on rents and occupancy rates. Real estate developers likely planned these projects because they thought Canada’s oil boom would last. It’s that same thinking that made oil companies invest billions of dollars in projects that can’t make money when oil trades for less than $100/barrel.

Doug Casey saw this coming.....

In September, Doug went to Alberta to assess the damage first-hand. E.B. Tucker, editor of The Casey Report, joined Doug on the trip. Doug and E.B. spoke with the locals. They even tried to buy a Ferrari. They shared their experience in the October issue of The Casey Report.

E.B. went on record saying Canada was in for “a major wakeup call.” He still thinks that’s the case. In fact, he thinks the situation is going to get a lot worse.
When we were in Alberta, we heard over and over again "It'll come right back...it always does." It's not coming back. I expect the situation to get worse. And I see the Canadian dollar going much lower.
When that happens, E.B. thinks Canada’s central bank might do something it’s never done before:
Vacancy rates are rising in Canada’s heartland cities. Jobs in Alberta are disappearing. Unemployment is climbing. And there’s still a global oversupply in oil. None of this bodes well for Canada’s economy. Canada’s economy is in a midair stall. The locals certainly didn’t grasp this when we visited Alberta last month. That's usually the case when things are going from bad to a lot worse. If you’re a central banker in Canada looking at the data, there’s only one decision: print.

E.B. says Canada’s central bank will launch its own quantitative easing (QE) program.....

QE is when a central bank creates money and pumps it into the financial system. It’s basically another term for money printing. Since 2008, the Fed has used QE to inject $3.5 trillion into the U.S. financial system. If the Fed’s experience with QE is any indication, money printing wouldn’t help Canada’s “real” economy much. But it would inflate asset prices. That, in turn, would only make Canada’s economy even more fragile. E.B. is confident the situation in Canada will get worse. And he can’t wait to go back to Canada to collect on bets he made during his last visit:
Doug and I made a lot of side bets with business owners during our visit. One of them promised to sell us a Ferrari if things got worse...that's how sure he was that we were wrong. Looks like we'll be headed back to collect on that one.

You can read all about Doug and E.B.’s visit to Alberta by signing up for a risk free trial of The Casey Report. You’ll even discover how to make money off the oil industry, despite the collapse in the price of oil. Click here to learn more.

The article The “Bloodbath” in Canada Is Far From Over was originally published at caseyresearch.com.


Get our latest FREE eBook "Understanding Options"....Just Click Here!

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Jared Dillian is Pulling Out All the Stops

By Jared Dillian


When I was a teenager, I had a different sort of part-time job. I was a church organist. Actually, it was the best job ever because I was something of a piano prodigy as a child. Around age 12, my parents and I had to make a conscious decision about whether I was going to pursue a career in music. I decided not to, which has greatly reduced the amount of Ramen noodles I have eaten over the years.At age  13, I decided I wanted to play the organ. I took lessons from the organist in the big Catholic church downtown. What an incredible instrument!

Playing the organ is a lot harder than it looks. In case you hadn’t noticed, there is a whole keyboard at your feet—yes, you play with both your hands and your feet. And since you can’t possibly learn all the hymns, you have to be really good at sight-reading three lines of music at once. It takes a great deal of coordination. Plus, you have two or more “manuals” (keyboards) and dozens of stops, which activate the different sounds in the organ. This is where the phrase “pulling out all the stops” comes from.

So I got a job as the organist at the Unitarian church down the street. For the first and only time of my life, I was a member of a union—the American Guild of Organists. I received my union-protected minimum wage of $50 per service, which is a great deal of money if you’re 16 years old in 1990. $50 a week definitely put gas in my car. And there was a girl in the congregation that I dated a couple of times.

I felt sorry for my poor schlep classmates who were bagging groceries for $4/hour. They had to work 12 hours to make what I made in one. I felt pretty smug.  The high point was when I transcribed the theme from “A Clockwork Orange” and played it as the prelude for one of the church services. You can see where the subversive streak comes from.

I Got Skills

So why did I make more than 12 times what my high school classmates made? Because my skills were worth 12 times as much. Bagging groceries is kind of the definition of unskilled labor. Literally anyone can bag groceries. The supply of labor that has those skills is limitless.

Church organists are in slightly higher demand. But not by much! I think a church organist these days—if you are hired by the church to play every week, plus run all the choir and music programs, probably pays about $35,000 to $50,000 a year, depending on the church. So not a lot!

It’s a decent living if you like playing the organ, but you also have to deal with church politics. The wages of an organist not only depend on the supply of labor but the demand for labor as well. And church construction has gone way down in recent years. Not to mention the fact that the latest fad in religious services is “contemporary music.”


However, the fact that church organists make more money than grocery baggers does reflect the level of skill the occupation requires. Before I became a church organist, I had been playing either the piano or organ for six years. Six years of practicing 30 minutes to an hour a day, every day.

Nobody practices bagging groceries for 30 minutes a day, every day.

I don’t particularly like manual labor (though I have done it on occasion). That’s why I do my best to acquire skills that are rare and marketable so I don’t have to do things like chip paint. In this country (and others), we have this unhealthy obsession with manual labor. Politicians talk about “working Americans” all the time. We say things like “putting in a hard day’s work.” The most popular car is the Ford F-150. Who wants to put in a hard day’s work? Not me! Instead, I will put in a hard day’s thinking.

Hate and Discontent

A lot of people spend too much time thinking about what other people make. It’s unproductive. Everyone thinks Wall Street guys are overpaid, for example. Okay, so let’s take your average ETF option trader at a bank. Say he makes $500,000 a year (which might even be generous these days). Let’s examine one trade of many that he is confronted with on a daily basis. A sales trader stands up and yells to him, “20,000 XLE Jan 75 calls, how?”

What’s happening here is that a client is asking for a two-sided market on the January 75 call options in XLE, which is the Energy Select Sector SPDR ETF, 20,000 times, which means options on 2,000,000 shares, or about $140,000,000. It’s a big trade, definitely, but there are bigger ones. So let’s think of all the things the option trader needs to know. He needs to know what an option is, starting from scratch.

He needs to know what XLE is, that it’s an energy ETF, and he should have a good idea of what stocks are in the portfolio. He might have a cursory knowledge about factors affecting supply and demand for crude oil. In order to come up with a price for these options, he has to have an idea of what implied volatility should be and what realized volatility might be going forward.

This requires a knowledge of an option pricing model like Black-Scholes and many, many years of college mathematics, including probability theory and differential equations. He needs to know how he is going to hedge this option. Will he hedge the delta all in the stock? Will he hedge with other options? How will he dynamically hedge the trade until maturity? Will he lay off some of the risk in other strikes? Will he buy single stock options on some of the names in the index, like XOM, CVX, or COP, to effect a dispersion trade?

This means he has to know what a dispersion trade is. More math. He also needs to understand liquidity. What will be his execution impact by trying to sell 800,000 shares of XLE? This affects how wide he makes his market. And best of all, he needs to think about all of these things in a split-second, without hesitation. If he is off by even a penny—he loses money on the trade. I would characterize that as “skilled labor.” And we haven’t even talked about the emotional fortitude it takes to take that kind of risk. $500,000 a year seems low.

CEOs

People get the most upset about executive pay. Here you have some dillweed CEO who is the direct beneficiary of the agency problem. If company XYZ does well, he gets paid millions. If it does poorly, he gets fired and loses nothing, personally. We say that he has no skin in the game.

Well, do you have what it takes to run one of the 500 largest companies in the world?

Pretend we’re talking about McDonald’s. Many people think McDonald’s is doing a terrible job. There’s a lot of evidence that they are. They’re losing market share to Chipotle and lots of other “fast casual” restaurants.

But running a company is hard enough. You have 50,000 odd restaurants, you have to manage supply and distribution for this massive network, you have to do all the managerial science behind what is on the menu and how much it costs, you have to directly negotiate, and I mean meet with leaders of foreign governments, you need to go on CNBC from time to time and not be a mutant, and above all, you need to lead inspirationally.

Not many people can do all that. I can’t. Maybe I’m smart enough, but I don’t have the emotional maturity or even the desire for that kind of responsibility. Everyone wants to be the boss, but nobody really wants to be the boss. If you think you are underpaid—maybe you are. The labor market is not perfectly efficient. Anomalies can persist.

Take a look at people who you think are overpaid. What are they doing that you aren’t? Maybe you just aren’t willing to do those things (like kiss lots of ass). The responsibility is yours and yours alone. And that, my friends, is something nobody wants to hear.
Jared Dillian
Jared Dillian

If you enjoyed Jared's article, you can sign up for The 10th Man, a free weekly letter, at mauldineconomics.com

The article The 10th Man: Pulling Out All the Stops was originally published at mauldineconomics.com.


Get our latest FREE eBook "Understanding Options"....Just Click Here!

Thursday, November 5, 2015

The Pros Use Them....Why Don't You?

Greeks 101 ebook, options trading, options strategies,
If you have been following our trading partner John Carter of Simpler Options than you have probably heard of one of his in house instructors Bruce Marshall.

Bruce has become an amazing educator in his own right and he has now put together his own free eBook "Greeks 101". And of course he has allowed us to make it available to you today free of charge.

Find it HERE

In this free options trading eBook you will learn:
  *  The basics on Theta, Delta, Vega and Gamma
  *  Learn how to quickly tell the probability of your options being "In the Money" by looking at the Greeks
  *  What options you want and the ones you should stay away from
  *  How using the Greeks can give you an edge over the average retail trader.
......and much more

Get Bruce's eBook and we'll see you in the markets putting it to use,
Stock Market Club

Get Bruce's FREE eBook "Greeks 101"....Just Click Here!