Oil and Gold futures continue to pay off ... Impeachment drags equities; Navigation Trading Automation

Oil continued to slide this past week after the excitement of a couple of weeks ago, reaching back down to its previous range, currently $56 or so per barrel.

Gold futures are also volatile, currently around $1500:

These both pay well, for example if you sold:

• /CL sell 2 60 calls and 1 50 put, both expiring November 15, you get about $3000 credit (on Tastyworks)
• /GC 1545 call and 1440 put, both expiring October 28, you get another $1191 credit

Best practice is to close each of these when you get 50% of the credit, so that's about $2100 or so within 20-25 days ... while tying up only $3500 or so in buying power.

Not bad ...

Equities dragged a bit (SPX down to 2961 on Friday) due to this guy:

Enough said about this ... although the most recent impeachment we had did not bother the stock market one bit (possibly due to its happening in the midst of the dot-com boom) ..

As for navigation trading ... 

I watched the trades go by this week and it still seems clear that the trader in charge is a Tastytrade aficionado ... which is a Good Thing!

I'm making progress on automating these trades and can do this for you (as well as a bit more oil and gold trading for extra revenue!) anytime you are ready.

Let me know ... details here ...

Oil market calms down; ready to automate Navigation Trading ...

The oil market calmed down quickly after last week's spike:

And otherwise the market stayed pretty calm except for a down move late Friday ... Chinese officials cancelled a visit to U.S. farm country:

A trade update on the small account I'm trading: It's now up 15% or so since its trough about a month ago ... still much too far down overall, but moving in the right direction.

But the big news is on Navigation Trading and the new service I'm rolling out to automate these trades. I made a breakthrough earlier today on a key piece of the automation software and I should have this ready within a month or six weeks.

But don't wait! I can set you up with an account matched to my master account at Interactive Brokers and do the trades for you "by hand" until the automation piece is fully tested and ready.

Details here ... more next week!

A challenge for the "short oil" strategy; more on Navigation Trading

There was a Yemeni strike on the Saudi oil infrastructure this past week:

You might expect this to cause a spike in the price of oil, and in fact you'd be right:

But it looks like it peaked very briefly at $64 or so but is back down as I write this (Sunday 8:27 pm PDT) to $59.61. The Saudi oil industry isn't the key to the global supply it once was, and though this strike hit a key piece of infrastructure ... there's still plenty of oil washing around in the world supply.

Amory Lovins said that his vision of the long-term price of oil would be that it would be "low and irrelevant." I think he's still right on this point ...

More on Navigation Trading: "keeping the dream alive"

Once again, I'm working on automating access to this guy's trades ..  As you can see, he hasn't posted a losing month since he started keeping records in June 2017. 

How does he do it? For one thing, he doesn't count a trade as a loss until he's given up on "adjusting/rolling" it. For example, He closed out an Intel (INTC) trade last month (August 2019) that he started in late July or early August and "adjusted/rolled" several times before squeaking through to show a $26 profit.

Intel's challenge to neutral trading strategies this summer

This is OK as long as you understand that you won't be able to look at your account at the end of every month and see exactly the performance he's posting. If you have 2 or 3 of these trades going that he's in the middle of adjusting/rolling then you will be down possibly a few thousand dollars from what he posts ... but you should make up those by the end of the next month.

For further exploration of this idea, watch Tastytrade ... they call it "keeping the dream alive" ... There's also a book by an advocate of this approach:

Questions?

A quieter week than I thought ... and a new service offering I can provide

I thought that we'd have more volatility this past week, what with the latest round of tariffs kicking in September 1, but no:

So the equity positions I had on just quietly made a little money this week.

But the big news is that I've become aware of another trader who has published a terrific track record the last 2+ years ... trades that I can automate and bring to you as a service.

I am still interested in bringing my trading ideas to those interested, but I don't have a track record of performance to show yet. So this automation service for the other trader's trades is what I can do for now.

Full details of the offer are at my website. I expect demand for this service to be strong and I suggest you contact me ASAP if you find this of interest.

A somewhat quieter week (but don't get used to it) ; one tweak to the plan but otherwise ...

As weird as it's been lately, at least it's not eighty years ago:

Not that it's not plenty weird enough:

As for the trading plan I described here last week:

• Oil continues to go nowhere up
• Equity markets calmed down ... I made a profit on the neutral equity trades I have on last week
• Gold stopped going up, for the moment

So as for gold, I'd switch from being long (buying gold futures and selling calls against it) to being neutral (selling both calls and puts simultaneously and assuming it will stay in a range) ...

Example trades I'd put on when the futures markets reopen Monday (Labor Day):

• Short the 59.5 /CL (oil futures) calls expiring October 17
• Short the 1470 /GC puts and the 1575 /GC calls, expiring September 25

Once again: I will trade for you for 5 years without asking for any fees if you will fund an account with between $150,000 and $200,000 to retire on ...

I may not have this offer available forever, so please contact me soon if interested!