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sweetandsour
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Post by sweetandsour »

Del wrote: 16 Mar 2023, 05:29
sweetandsour wrote: 15 Mar 2023, 17:27
Del wrote: 15 Mar 2023, 11:41

This chart indicates that Biden closed the spigot on Jan 6, 2023.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_endin ... um_reserve

Nothing has been added to or taken away from Strategic Petroleum Reserve since then.

Biden once said that he would start buying back oil when market price dropped below $80/barrel, but I'm sure he has long since forgotten about it.
The SPR that my grandson works at has been shipping oil somewhere this week. I have no chart, just the word of my grandson, presuming that I heard him correctly. It wasn't long ago I was reading somewhere that the current inventory was the lowest since "whenever", I don't recall the reference.
Another grandson told me yesterday that Biden had signed off on Project Willow for drilling the Alaskan North Slope, which would benefit COP. But today I saw that environmental groups have already filed a lawsuit to prevent that from happening. Again, no reference, but I'm sure it can be easily Googled.
Anyway, regarding energy stocks and ETFs, I think with everything going on, they will whipsaw back up. Or maybe not, who knows?
That's what I was afraid you might tell me.

It could be that they are just consolidating SPR inventories -- several full tanks and many empty ones. It could be that they routinely rotate in fresh oil and sell old oil to refineries, maintaining a flat reserve. It could be that the oil was sold months ago for March delivery, and the charts are book inventory (not physical inventory).

Or it could just be shenanigans.

Easily googled Willow.....
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/politics ... index.html

Biden's Interior Sec is a major progressive greenie, but Biden over-ruled her. CON paid for lease rights to this field, now claiming that Biden cannot legally deny them. Alaskans insist that they have been severely impoverished by the sudden loss of so many jobs under Biden policy. CNN is pressing the gas on their climate alarmism angle.
XLE is falling, but GLD is rising, so I'm breaking even this week. I really wanted to have all in cash by the end of the day today, and powder dry for next week. It's the energy sector that's not cooperating. I'll sell GLD for sure, regardless; I can handle sellers remorse. I'll hold my XLE; I heard this morning that Saudi is in meetings, etc, etc, so we'll see what happens.

Re the SPR, yeah, who knows what the deal is. I hear that the two that are closest to where I live did most of the shipping, and are at lowest levels, while the one down the coast from here shipped less or maybe none during the so-called emergency political mid-term election drawdown.
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Post by Del »

So, basically YTD:

I made $16,300 on condors.
I've lost $13,000 on XLE.
Net profit: $3300.

These last two weeks have been devastating. I didn't expect a sudden collapse of the financial sector. (I figured Biden was done after he poisoned the energy sector, activated Putin, and triggered an inflationary cycle. Now it looks like he was just getting started.)

Next week is the Fed rate announcement. That will be interesting.
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Post by Del »

XLE is paying $0.80/share dividend. Trades ex-dividend 3/20 (Monday). In theory, XLE will drop 0.8 on Monday opening trade.

Payout date is 3/22.

For better or worse, I am sitting on 1000 shares of XLE at the moment.
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Post by sweetandsour »

I'll buy XLE if it gets to 68 after the dividend.

Good luck to us both this week.
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Post by Del »

sweetandsour wrote: 19 Mar 2023, 22:28 I'll buy XLE if it gets to 68 after the dividend.

Good luck to us both this week.
XLE is trading up today, in spite of being ex-dividend. Also in spite of WTI trading a bit lower, too. I suspect the market is looking at activity around Swiss banks and hopeful that the Fed will say something reassuring on Wednesday. I don't know what the bond markets are doing.... I'm not skilled enough to interpret that stuff anyway.

I am positioning myself to benefit from some market exuberance this week with the Fed rate announcement. With some protection, in case I call this wrong.

I'm picking up all of my blocks and looking at how to start rebuilding.

Condors: I have a position on RUT that expires today. (Normally I like to expire on Wednesday, but that's Fed rate day.)

Everything was just absolutely perfect this morning, so I did something that I can very rarely do -- I placed another position around RUT to expire this afternoon. I picked up $1075 in premium.

I will place another condo on Thursday, to expire next Wednesday.

XLE, trading around 77.50: I've got 1000 shares, which will cash me $800 in dividend this week. I have covered calls on 800 shares at strike $80 which will expire on Friday. So I will hold onto these and see what happens. $325 premium for the calls.

I have a stop order at 75. For now, XLE is respecting support just above 75. If it heads down toward 68, I won't follow it all the way. I have a bad habit of following bad investments down the drain, so not this time. Not entirely. I need to make better use of protective stops.

Remember those long calls that I bought months ago when I expected XLE to go up into the high 90's? I've closed those. Lost about $4300. (I should have put some protective stops on them.) I will look at buying more when the trend turns up and world's economic outlook is stronger. Might be after the next Republican is elected and Biden dies or retires (whichever comes first).

A quick snapshot at noon today: I am up $5500 or so, YTD.

This banking collapse has been a bit of a Black Swan, though. In the last two weeks, I've lost 2/3 of my profits. It's not like we didn't have plenty of warning, either. From now on, I'm putting protective stops on all of my positions.
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Post by sweetandsour »

Shoulda kept GLD a bit longer it seems.
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Post by Del »

sweetandsour wrote: 21 Mar 2023, 00:07 Shoulda kept GLD a bit longer it seems.
I rolled the covered calls on XLE up and out this morning. March 31 at 83. Just in case we get a V-shaped recovery.
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Post by sweetandsour »

Entered a limit order to buy a few shares of SPY this morning, just to have some prior to Chm Powell's announcement today, and I see that it filled at 399, just as the price was cruising past. I had it in my mind to do this first thing this morning when the price was at ~392 or thereabouts. I intend to sell it today; where it will go, I do not know.
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Post by sweetandsour »

sweetandsour wrote: 22 Mar 2023, 07:44 Entered a limit order to buy a few shares of SPY this morning, just to have some prior to Chm Powell's announcement today, and I see that it filled at 399, just as the price was cruising past. I had it in my mind to do this first thing this morning when the price was at ~392 or thereabouts. I intend to sell it today; where it will go, I do not know.
I lost ~$1; sold at 398 while SPY was on its way down, back to 392. So, that was my joy ride today.
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Post by Del »

sweetandsour wrote: 22 Mar 2023, 13:17
sweetandsour wrote: 22 Mar 2023, 07:44 Entered a limit order to buy a few shares of SPY this morning, just to have some prior to Chm Powell's announcement today, and I see that it filled at 399, just as the price was cruising past. I had it in my mind to do this first thing this morning when the price was at ~392 or thereabouts. I intend to sell it today; where it will go, I do not know.
I lost ~$1; sold at 398 while SPY was on its way down, back to 392. So, that was my joy ride today.
I contemplated putting a position on SPX futures or RUT futures. But then I realized that I had no clue whether to go long or short. Which is to say, I had no clue. So I didn't spend any more time trying to guess which way the market would move on the rate information.

Market behaved well enough today, considering. There was a sharp sell-off during the last ten minutes of trading, which will probably recover tomorrow morning.

I did a trade this afternoon, after the rate announcement. Basically, I rolled up a leg of my condor on SPX, moving the puts up closer to the current market. I sold the original condor two weeks ago, and the put side was really low. Anyhow, I got $345 for it.

This position expires in two weeks (April 5). Basically, I am telling Mr. Market that I expect a couple of weeks of relatively calm and flat trading. No big drops. Maybe some upward bias, even.
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