Collar Strategy Can Protect Your Stocks

Wednesday, 10. March 2010


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Hoping and praying that the stocks that you just bought will go up is not the best strategy to use, however it is the one very often used by the average Joe stock trader who is using simple trading indicators. The only salvation they have is that in bull markets most stocks will go up.

Statistics show that in a bull market about 75% of the stocks will follow the general trend and go up, and in a bear market 75% will also go down. Trading with the trend is the best way to trade as 9 out of 12 stocks will follow the trend and give you the best chance of making gains on your stock purchases.

But what if you own some nice stocks and don’t want to sell when the market is clearly going down, or about to go down?. There are a few tactics that you can consider, both of which involve the use of options, CALL options and PUT options. There is the well known strategy called Covered Calls, and the much lesser known one called the Married Put.

If you are going to trade options it is important that before you start trading you get the best option trading education that you can. You should also practice stock trading until you are comfortable with the process. This is a very important point that must be taken seriously, if you don’t understand the terminology and theory then you should not be trading options. If Put option, Call option, Married Put and Covered Call are new to you then don’t trade until you have studied sufficiently.

Selling calls against your stock in 100 share increments is the basis of the covered call strategy and it can provide about a 2-7% buffer against the loss in stock price. However a bigger drop in the stock price will not be compensated for using the covered call strategy, in general.

Stocks in a bear market, and even in a bull market, can drop quickly on news or earnings releases, as much as 15 to 45% within a month. Using covered calls to protect your stocks will only provide limited protection of less than 7% at best and so will not save you if the stock takes a 40% tumble.

The better solution to providing downside stock protection is the option strategy called the Married Put. As the name suggests the PUT that you buy is used to provide protection when the stock goes down because Put options increase in value when the stock decreases in value. The term married is used because the option that is selected has to be very compatible with the stock, in other words a good match, if the strategy is to work.

The selection of the best Put option is not straight forward and involves several criteria which are listed below:

1. The strike price of the option

2. The current share price

3. Choice of options, in or out of the money

4. Put expiration time

Even though the married Put protection only has a short life span if offers much more protection than the covered call. It can provide as much as 95% loss recovery in the event of a significant drop in the stock price.

The downside of the good protection is that you have buy the Put which is a cash debit whereas the covered call is a credit. But there are ways of off-setting this expense and there is much more to this strategy when executed correctly. The Married Put can be made to just about pay for itself and used to generate very good gains if the market, or stock to be specific, moves a lot.

The general idea of the Collar Trade is to combine the covered call and married Put strategy into one, this is what is called the Collar Trade. In effect you put a collar around the stock, sell a call and buy a PUT. If you do this correctly most of the cost of the Put can be offset by the credit from the covered call so you can protect your stock at almost no cost. Yes this is a great strategy which the general public is unfortunately ignorant of, and most brokers don’t understand.

The strategy that I have outlined above is unknown to the average stock market trader but is one of the best trading systems you could have.

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Emini Day Trading for a Living

Thursday, 25. February 2010

Learn to daytrade the eminis using David Marsh’s The Tick Trader®, to earn 1 point  day trading the S&P 500 and Dow E mini Futures Markets.

Marsh’s company, E-mini Trading Strategies offers a  30 Day Double-Your-Money-Back-Guarantee which states The Tick Trader Method will achieve a minimum of 1 point a day.

If you are or haven been interested in day trading and the possibility of trading for a living, take the time to research this course. David Marsh makes himself availabe to speak with potential students, so ask as many questions as you like.

Visit his website and read everything especially his daily blog in which he recaps every single trading day. It will also give you insight into the type of person that he is.

His emini trading strategies are not difficult to learn.Day trading is not for everybody and you must have the discipline to follow the rules. The eminis can be traded from home or anywhere that you have a computer and high speed internet connection.

If you have a basic understanding of the futures market and trading, you can begin trading this method in less than a single day.

You should have a basic understanding of charts, technical indicators, and order placement. You should have a decent knowledge of the markets before taking the course.

If you do not he does offer a Beginner’s Course.

The system’s goal is to make a one point profit each day. A daily income is the goal.This is a consistent and conservative approach to earn daily income.

The system trades the same way each and every day, and it is usually done for the day early in the morning. The rest of the time is yours to do as you please.

Most people work 40 or more hours at a job or business and have very little time for themselves and family. It simply does not have to be that way

It is possible to spend 30 to 90 minutes a day trading the e-mini markets to earn your living. Day trading is a wonderful way of life.

This trainingcourse offers you the opportunity.

Top Suggestions To Learn Day Trading

Friday, 12. February 2010

Anybody who wants to learn day trading wishes to follow certain guidelines. I won’t say rules because a lot of people don’t like the word, but principles. A number of them are quite well known and a few of them are less so, but they are all vital to the successful day trader. The Forex Rebellion defines them as the four major guidelines trading.

1. The Buck Stops With You

Whether you are looking round for a day trading programme or developing your own, remember that whatever you do is your responsibility. Ask for recommendation and help by all means, but don’t believe everything you hear. People are different and their trading styles can alter very, so never follow advice blindly.

Equally, you can buy in a system but do not neglect to test it. Whether or not the guy who designed it asserts that it’ll double your money in 2 months for certain sure, you must test, because there are three possible Problems with that. One, he might be lying. Two, perhaps it used to work great but it doesn’t work any more. Three, perhaps it works for him but for some unusual reason to do with your spread or whatever, it doesn’t work for you. Your cash is your responsibility and yours alone, so put the system to work on a demo account until you are sure.

2. Be Calm

The most important enemy of any trader is their own feelings and this is especially true for the individual that wants to learn day trading. If you are the sort of person who makes bad choices under stress, you might want to think again about choosing day trading as your system. This is a fast moving world where seconds can count in thousands of bucks, so you must keep a particularly cool head.

Now just about everyone likes to think they seem to be a calm sort of person who would react way below pressure, so even if you are convinced you are going to be the planet’s number one ice cold trader, test yourself as well as your system in that demo account. If you curve off the system even once or start changing your position size, closing out early, waiting too long etc in demo mode, sorry but you aren’t prepared for real life trading when things will be much more hairy. Keep working on it.

3. Track Everything

Even though you have got to work fast when you’re using day trading systems , it is worth making the effort to scribble everything down. This is a skill you can train yourself of while in demo. You’ll be dazzled how much it helps you to understand why things went wrong or right when they did. This can enable to to tweak a marginal system into a profitable one and make all the difference to your bottom line. A simple spreadsheet recording your position, the signal(s) and the opening and closing costs is sufficient during trading. Afterward you may need to add a comment.  

4. If You Doubt, Stay Away

This is a widely known trading and investment rule. Don’t take a chance on something that nearly fits your system but not really. It may work once but over the long term this may lead to disaster. There is probably a reason why the system is set up for the signals that it has and if the market does not fit, do not force it.

Equally if you’re sick or under stress about another area of your life, it can be better to keep away from the market, particularly while you’re still a relative beginner. There will be other and better opportunities to learn day trading when you are feeling in top condition.

Moving Average Secrets

Wednesday, 10. February 2010

One of the most popular technical analysis indicators is the simple moving average also known as SMA, if you learn how to use these correctly they can be a very useful tool to help you to make good trading decisions.

The 50 simple moving average, or 50 SMA, is simply the sum of the last 50 values for each period, divided by 50, this is a moving window, as time moves on so does the average. Notice that I used the term period because this indicator works on any time period in exactly the same way.

It can be used on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, 30 minutes, 15 minute and on whatever time period you want to monitor and trade. Although the SMA is the most commonly used there is also the exponential moving average or EMA. This is a weighted version of the formula using the mathematical exponent function to give more weight to the more recent values, this has the effect of making it a slightly faster average that many traders prefer.

The truth is that it probably does not matter if you used the SMA or the EMA, what does matter however is that you use one or the other and then be very consistent with it. Do not switch between them, it is more important that you learn to trust your chosen indicator then a slight difference in its value.

The simple moving average is primarily used to determine what the current trend of the stock is, depending on the value used it could be a short term, medium term or long term trend. An important point to note is that moving averages are really only useful when the stock is trending, if the moving average is flat, i.e. horizontal on your chart it can become very choppy, this is a good time to not trade.

The general rule is that if the current price is above the SMA the trend is up, if below the trend is down. This is very important to understand because it forms the basics of trend trading and trading with the trend.

For the short term trend many traders like using a 5-8 SMA or EMA, here is a trading secret, never trade again the direction of the short term tend, actually this is really just common sense when you think about it.

Moving averages often act as support or resistance, many traders use the 15, 21 or 30 SMA for this purpose.

There are a number of other very important moving averages that you need to know about, these are the 50, 100 and 200 SMA, and this mainly applies to the daily and weekly charts. A lot of big players in the markets, the mutual funds, investment banks etc use the 50 and 200 SMA as support and resistance, if they decide to buy or sell based on these you need to follow suite, the 100 to a lesser extent. These are very useful averages to watch if you trade EFT’s like an Oil ETF.

A useful tip is that when a stock breaks through one moving average it will often move all the way to the next, for example, if a stock breaks the 30 SMA it may move to the 50 before finding some support or resistance.

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How To Trade Options Correctly

Sunday, 7. February 2010

There is a lot of hype surrounding options trading, and for good reason, it’s a good way make a lot of cash fast, or can be used to grow your capital consistently month after month.

There’s also a lot of hype about how complicated it is and why you need to spend thousands of dollars on options trading education before you get started. Needless to say this last statement usually comes from trading seminar companies trying to sell your their trading course on options.

Lets cover a few of the basics about options and set you straight about a few important points. Firstly yes it is true that you can make a lot of cash trading options, but of course you can also lose just as fast.

When trading stocks your leverage is 1:1, if you go on margin you can get get 1:2 leverage, but thats about it. With options it is not as straight forward to calculate the leverage but generally speaking you can get between 1:5 and 1:10 when you buy an option on a stock, or ETF.

So with 1:10 leverage, when the stock increases by 5% your option can increase by approx 50%, and this can happen in just a few days, this is why swing trading strategies using options on stocks is so popular.

However the downside is that a big loss can also happen, if the stock drops by 5% your option can also drop by 50%, at which point you may want to close the trade and save some of your option value, it really depends on what your stop loss and risk.

What I’ve just described is called directional option trading where you are betting on the getting the direction of the stock movement correct, this is highly speculative. Options can also be used in option strategies which are much more non-directional, such as covered call trades, credit spreads and Iron Condors. In these trades there is much less dependance on getting the stock direction correct, but it still matters.

So should you learn to trade options?, in my opinion you should not do directional option trades until you become an expert stock trader 1st. This is because you really need to be very precise with your entry and exit strategy and trading plan, and be very good at technical analysis.

Whereas if you want to do non-directional option trades you don’t need to be such an experianced stock trader to be successful, but of course it does not hurt either.

Learning how to trade options is a very useful skill you have, but don’t rush into it and blow out your account. Make sure that you get a good options trading education before you start, and also make sure that you have a very solid stock trading education as well, such one from Top Dog Trading Review.