Good old GTAT. I bought $10k worth of that for a swing when I saw it had gone from $20ish down to $10ish. I don't remember the details, but I sold out either the same day or a day or two later for essentially no gain or loss. It was less than a week later that it dropped 90% overnight. I was stupid to buy it and lucky I didn't still own it.

If you're into dividend payers, Exxon is at a 52 week low, Chevron is close. Walgreens is near a 2 year low, with 44 years of dividend increases and buys back shares each quarter. Plus they have the potential go-private buyout hanging over them.

They aren't the elegant high flyers, but a portfolio needs a few quality dividend payers to keep it grounded.

Look up the holdings in Vanguard's Dividend Growth fund (VDIGX)

Guy at work said his buddy just made $50k in a week on TSLA, so he's going to give it a try. Never traded a share in his life. Bought one out of the money call.

Also seeing videos popping up claiming how you can pay for your student loans day trading from your phone during class. History repeats.

Buy high and sell higher

I wouldn't touch TSLA short or long. I was short a few shares the day Musk made his illegal tweet about going private. Cost me about a grand in minutes. Haven't traded it since.

You misread that. I was short TSLA at around $350. Musk lied and said the company was going private at $420 a share. The shares skyrocketed and were halted for a time. They reopened at something like $380-390. When the truth came out, the shares went back down and I would have ended up with a hefty profit, but taking his tweet at value I covered my short at a loss rather than waiting to see it jump to $420. How he didn't get punished by the SEC for that is beyond me.

Technically yes, but it was a slap on the wrist. He had to give up a symbolic title. He was told he had to have future tweets pre-approved (which he never has and continues to violate), and he got a token fine. He's made billions in paper gains from his tweets. It's the equivalent of insider trading in my book and should be treated the same.

That sounds right except 300 shares, not 3k. Kind of a small trade compared to most of Trekkie's posts. That's more in my range

(3.20 - 0.27) * 300 = $879 profit.

Makes sense. I'm doing the same to help with the bleeding in my MO, XOM, WBA, and KHC. Hoping the dividends plus option premiums counter the loss in share price.

Those leveraged ETFs are dangerous if you get them wrong. I played around with them 6-8 years ago and lost my shirt. Multiple times I lost $25k overnight. Still have a capital loss carryover of about $100k on my yearly taxes from them. On a positive note, I can make gains for several years to come without paying taxes on them because they'll just lower that loss carryover.

They're short term trading vehicles. Over the long term all of them will go to 0. Go back to 2012 and SQQQ was over 6000. A lot of them are based on the options market and they lose money each month when they roll the options from one month to another. That and something that goes up 10% in a day, then down 10% in a day will end up lower in the long run. (100 + 10% = 110 - 10% = 99)

Yah they're great for fast moving markets when you're on the right side of the trade. Like today.

Unfortunately WBA and XOM are my two largest positions. I'm way overweight on WBA (1500 shares and short another 15 $50 Jan 21 puts) at around 15% of my portfolio. At least it pays a good dividend, does a buyback, is an aristocrat, and has buyout chatter from last year. I've missed most of the run-up in stocks for the last decade, but I'm about 75% cash and bonds that I can use to go shopping. Also selling puts on things I'd like to own a bit cheaper like AVGO and DIS.

Other than swing trades and a few dividend payers I've been mostly cash and bond funds for years. Bond funds have done quite well, but nothing compared to stocks. I've been wanting to start building up some index fund exposure, so I sold 4 SPY puts, a couple expiring tomorrow and a couple in two weeks. At the current price of 307, looks like I'll get assigned all 4 at around 314 cost basis. I'm fine with that as an initial purchase. If/when the market drops 10-15% more, I'll pick up 4 more. I'd like to end up around 1200-1500 shares of SPY and 30-40% cash/bonds for a balanced portfolio.

That Exxon drop is painful. I have 600 averaged somewhere in the upper 50s. I don't like that they seem to be paying the dividend by increasing debt. That's a poor long-term strategy. If oil doesn't go up significantly, they'll have to cut the dividend or sell assets.

They're up now, and about 3-4% higher than Friday's low. They can move fast. We'll see where they are at the open tomorrow.

They should have used a middle-out algorithm.

Hertz stock is down over 50% in two weeks, so I'm going to say business is not well.

Italy just quarantined the entire country. They don't do that for the flu.

XOM will be fine. They're trading at half what they were trading at in 2016 when oil went to like $26/barrel. They have 32 billion in cap-ex they could cut if needed. If anything, having a bunch of their competitors go out of business and reducing world output will be a huge positive. It may take a few years to play out, but with a 7-8% dividend you're getting paid to wait for it.

Broadcom pays 5% and is something like 30% off its high
3M pays 4% and is 40% off its high
UPS pays 4.5% and is 40% off its high
XOM pays 8% and is 50% off its high
MO pays 8%
LEG pays 4.7% and is 40% off its high

All are dividend aristocrats except maybe UPS.

They won't be cutting. Judging by their history they'll raise next quarter. Just keep collecting those 7-8% yearly checks, reinvest them if that's your thing, and you'll be happy years from now. As always, know your risk. They're about 1% of my portfolio and currently my only energy play. I do think Chevron has the better balance sheet though.

FYI I don't recommended anything, I comment on stocks I think are potentially undervalued. I'm an income investor. I mostly buy dividend aristocrats trading at discounts to their historical yield. If those purchases get to be too much of a premium to their historical yield I'll sell and purchase something that's undervalued. Sometimes I sell puts on things I wouldn't mind owning cheaper (ie I sold XOM puts at $57 and got assigned, today I sold more XOM puts at $41). I'll also sell covered calls to generate income on positions I wouldn't mind getting out of at slightly higher levels. I have zero interest in the flavor of the week stock (such as SPCE that you mentioned a couple weeks back).

How much was it down so far this week before today? 14% or so? Multiple 2000 point down days in a week. That sure feels bloody. VIX almost hit 80. It's pretty rare to hit 40.

Not everybody. I'm 6 figures into the red. I was in cash and bonds, so missed all the gains.

Probably announcing he's infected. Or stock markets will close for a couple weeks.

The fed is doing several rounds of QE buying treasuries all day long today. In the good old days those would lead to gains.

I *was* in cash and bonds waiting for a pullback. I started buying in at S&P 3200, then more at 3000, then more at 2800, then more at 2600. The losses are adding up.

No, I don't do short term plays. it was a "If I'm ever going to retire on what I've accumulated, I'm going to have to get in stocks since bond funds are going to be paying 1% play". I'm trying to put together a portfolio that pays $50k in dividends a year plus hopefully also grows in principal over time. It's about half S&P index and half dividend aristocrats. I'm not done average down yet. Hopefully it stays down for a while. I can put $1-2k a week into it.

If the housing market drops and your house goes down in value 20% do you sell it because it's a loss? You still own your house the same way you own x% of a company you have shares in.

Weekend wall street is pretty much useless, but they went from -1000 Dow to about flat. Futures open in 40 minutes, that's when you'll know more.

Futures are limit down. Most they can drop in one session.

When they took these measures in 2008 it didn't magically make the market return to previous highs overnight. It took like 9 months to bottom and it was still fragile for a couple years after that. The flash crash was over a year after the market bottomed. If you're a trader, maybe you can get out and try to time the market. If you're investing for retirement, do your weekly/monthly cost averaging that you would do any other time.

Not at all. They'll be doing QE every day or so. They buy billions of dollars in treasuries, and that money they spend has a way of finding itself into the stock market. They did it for years after the financial crisis.

This is what they announced last week. I think what they said today is on top of this.

coupon schedule (resized).jpg

Their final bullet will be outright stock purchases. I don’t think they have the authority to do that yet, but they’d get it as a last resort. Some countries like Japan already do it.

Doesn't the government end up making huge profits from the bailouts? It's not like it's free money they never get back. They made billions in the long run after the financial crisis.

Why not go all-in on panic and say 5000? The experts expect a couple soft quarters, then the return to earnings growth and an estimate of $175 in earnings for the S&P in 2021. Then the question is what multiple to apply to that? They said if there's a panic premium like in 2009 that makes the multiple 12, that gives you 2100 S&P. Return to 18.5 multiple that we were at a month ago and that gets you back to 3200+.

They got down to 101 earlier. I kind of wanted to buy BA 3 months ago, before the virus. Not interested now.

I sold a SPY $220 put expiring Friday. If the market drops another 12 percent this week, you can blame me.

I'd be ok if it executed. It would get me another 100 shares at $216 basis. I mentioned a few weeks ago I'm trying to accumulate about 1000-1500 SPY shares. I've bought 600 so far, so the more I can average in lower the better. Once I'm done accumulating, I'm going to sell calls against them above my average price. Keep collecting premiums until the market recovers.

Any decent platform will let you trade in the pre and post market as well. So you could get it at the current price ($138.xx) if you use one of those brokers.

Both of these. When everything is dropping and you’re over leveraged, you sell what you can, not what you want to.

I checked all the silver sites earlier thinking of buying some. All are sold out with months of delays. Silver rounds and bars are selling on eBay with huge premiums. Demand is off the charts from the physical stackers.

All the sites I checked won't even let you order now.

I think it was Monday morning when it crashed like $3. I went to maybe buy some and started shopping around. There was plenty still in stock then, but while I was shopping the price went back up $1/ounce. Now it's back down where it was, but sold out everywhere. On Monday the sites were saying 2-4 weeks delay in delivery. Now some are saying 16-18 weeks delivery and all the products say "notify me" when back in stock instead of letting you order.

Silvertowne has a few rounds in stock, but they are about $3/ounce over spot in bulk:

https://www.silvertowne.com/c-601-buffalo-replica-1-ounce-silver-rounds.aspx

I researched this a bit a couple years ago, but I can't remember who is the cheapest seller. SD Bullion is selling one ounce bars for less than $1 over spot if you buy 1500 of them, but they are sold out.

The problem I have with buying any, the reason I never have bought any in bulk, is usually these places charge you $2-3 dollars over spot price to buy, then if you go to sell back to them they buy them under spot. So you're already in the hole a few dollars an ounce from the second you buy them. Right now it looks like you could sell them on Ebay for about $8 or so over spot, but you have to pay selling fees and ship them to your buyer and that eats up a lot of the profit. Your best bet is probably just to buy SLV and avoid all the slippage and hassle of messing with the physical product. But owning real silver is cool to me.

I dodged a bullet with Vanguard's High Yield Corp Fund. I've been buying it since 2010 in my and my wife's Roth IRA, buying a little each year and always reinvesting the monthly dividends. It had crept up to about 20% of our IRAs from all that. It was a pretty consistent 5.75-6.00 a share paying around 4.5%-5.0% dividend the whole decade. Figuring the energy market was going to crash high yield bonds, I sold out both accounts two weeks ago at 5.93-5.95. Today it's 5.05.

Likewise. I've been telling co-workers I wanted to retire at the end of this year (at 43). I still have a couple side jobs I'd keep doing. Told them last week to forget I mentioned it.

I’m losing track of the number of coworkers I’ve had that have died in their 40s-60s. Literally worked until they died. About a month ago our CEO had a headache and went to the doctor. He was told he has aggressive brain cancer and won’t live a year. I don’t want that to be me.

Thanks. A few weeks before that, the office manager of my old job (that most of us at the current job used to work at) dropped dead of a heart attack. Super active healthy guy. Ran marathons regularly. He looked 50, but I think he was about 66.

It could be. We all have an expiration date. My point was that if my expiration date is at 60, I'd rather live a frugal lifestyle and retire at 45 than spend a lot and work until I die.

Speaking of houses and land, my first house was a disaster I bought right out of college and lost a fortune on. My second I bought at 25 and paid off by 30. Moved shortly after, bought another house that was $150k more than the last and paid that one off in 5 years. Now I'm looking to downsize next time I move. My current house is only about 3000 sqft, but there's two rooms I've never used and it's too much trouble keeping it clean and too expensive paying to heat and cool rooms I don't even use (not to mention the extra in insurance and taxes). I do want land though. I'm looking at a 4.5 acre lot in a gated community about 1/4 mile from the golf course clubhouse back in my old neighborhood. It's under $30k. 7 acre lot on the same street is $35k.

Iranians are using Ethanol. It's not going well.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/alcohol-poisoning-kills-100-iranians-seeking-virus-protection

Fed is doing 75 Billion in QE today and 75 Billion tomorrow. 75 Billion in one day is more than they did in one month at the height of QE. Here is today's schedule:

9:40 – 10:00 am: Treasury Coupons 7 to 20 year sector, for around $6 billion

10:30 – 10:50 am: Treasury Coupons 4.5 to 7 year sector, for around $11 billion

11:20 – 11:40 am: Treasury Coupons 2.25 to 4.5 year sector, for around $17 billion

12:10 – 12:30 pm: Treasury Coupons 0 to 2.25 year sector, for around $25 billion

1:00 – 1:20 pm: Treasury Coupons 20 to 30 year sector, for around $9 billion

1:50 – 2:10 pm: TIPS 1 to 7.5 year sector (Thursday)/TIPS 7.5 to 30 year sector (Friday), for around $7 billion

I'm moving away from individual stocks and going more ETFs, but the stocks I still have are mostly aristocrats. They've increased their dividend 25+ (some 50+) years in a row. Some of them are now yielding 7-10%. They'll do anything to keep their aristocrat status, so if you want to gamble you could be setting yourself up for life buying those now.

I worked at Leggett & Platt for 10 years. They are one of those 7% yielding aristocrats. That is their single most important metric. They led every internal quarterly earnings release mentioning it. During the financial crisis, they made corporate departments fire around 10% of employees to keep the earnings going. I'll never forget when our bosses came around to everybody's office and went through their office supplies taking any excess to ration to other employees. If we had more than a couple of pens, they took the rest. Same with paperclips, post-its, etc.

It's a weird world where the Dow fluctuating in a 1200 point range in a day is settling down.

It's quad witching day. Hold on to your hats. These are typically the days each year with the most trading volume.

"Quadruple witching refers to a date on which stock index futures, stock index options, stock options, and single stock futures expire simultaneously. While stock options contracts and index options expire on the third Friday of every month, all four asset classes expire simultaneously on the third Friday of March, June, September, and December."

With this out of the way, markets should be much less volatile starting Monday. The outstanding options are playing a big part in the huge swings up and down each day.

Depends what you're buying. Vanguard is great for low cost ETFs, mutual funds, free stock trades, etc. If you plan to trade in the premarket or aftermarket, or want to daytrade, you'll want something built for that.

FED just threw unlimited money at everything.

And premarket just went green....at least temporarily.

Once the bailout package is passed, on top of these Fed moves, I think it's safe to put your retirement money back to work. You can't predict these things, which is why investing a consistent amount of money at consistent intervals is best for long term investments.

Yep. The market always turns before the economy.

You really can't time it. I have 4 IRAs that were around 50% cash/bonds until a couple weeks ago. I've been limping in a bit at a time with bigger buys each time we have a Dow down 1000+ day. Yesterday was my biggest buy yet.

Unfortunately I also have a brokerage account and I went all-in on that one a couple weeks back. That's the one that's hurting, but I only need about half the drop to come back to get back in the black. Much better than going all-in at all time highs I guess.

I'm more cautious with the IRAs because there are such small limits on yearly contributions to them.

Maybe not since yesterday, but I think it changed yesterday. The Fed came out and said they would buy everything, including things they didn't buy in the financial crisis, in unlimited amounts.

That's playing with fire. Those 3x leveraged ETFs are all guaranteed to go to 0 on a long enough timeline.

I used Scottrade about 20 years ago. Then used E-trade. Then used Ameritrade (they have Think or Swim included). I don't daytrade anymore, so I just use Vanguard so I can consolidate all my accounts in one place.

I think everywhere has free stock trades now. Pretty sure options still cost a little. Vanguard options are $1 per contract.

That's one definition of a bull market. I've also heard some commentators on CNBC say you don't get out of a bear market until you go above the old highs.

Are you still predicting this for tomorrow?

My guess is 29k, but it won't be this year.

I think investingdad has the best approach in this thread. Go read some of his posts. Sounds like a boglehead. I wish I'd followed that strategy.

What if it doesn't? What if Monday was the low? Will you get back in at some point? Typically there would be a retest of Monday's low in a few months, but you never know.

Go do some reading on the boglehead forums. These guys will keep you on your long term strategy and talk you out of making mistakes you'll regret.

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=1&sid=5af8a85261a4634f406add48667b2161

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investment_philosophy

I skimmed a couple pages of it and they seem a bit more civil

I don't go there often, don't even have an account there, but they're a calming influence during market turmoils. Lots of folks with multi-million dollar retirement accounts post there.

I think their standard answer is your entire portfolio should be in some combination of total stock market, total bond market, and total international market. For most people (myself included), that's probably the best bet, but it sure is boring.

When I had a 401k, there were a couple funds that were essentially money market funds. Close to the same as cash. Check Fidelity for one of those.

I'm guessing these are weekly options (the "W") expiring 3/27/20. The 100 is one contract (100 shares). I don't do spreads and other more complex strategies, just buying and selling puts and calls.

That's not quite right. Limit up or limit down is the max they can trade in that direction, but they don't pause (the futures market. The cash market pauses during normal trading hours), they can reverse at any time. One night last week, I think Sunday night (and Monday morning) they hit limit down within minutes of opening. Then they spent several hours recovering 1-3% of their losses, then going back down to limit down over and over.

They're a day trading vehicle meant to never be held overnight. Most of them rebalance daily, many are based on stock futures so they have time decay as well.

Imagine you start at 100 and the index goes down 5%, at 3x leverage now you're down to 85. The next day it goes up 5%. Now that just gets you back to 97.75. Repeat that enough times and you always end at zero.

Futures don't open for another 4.5 hours. Weekend Wall Street is the closest you can get to an idea of what's going on when the futures are closed, but they're not a good barometer (they have the DOW down about 200 points at the moment)

Futures are barely down, just over a percent. They opened down almost 3% and have slowly climbed since.

Looks like it's opening up about 1% today. Maybe all the doomsayers predicting limit down and 50% more losses are wrong.

I'm not foolish enough to predict the market on a day to day basis. That's just flipping a coin. It will likely be higher in a year than it is today. It will definitely be higher in 5 years than it is today, and higher still again in 10 years, etc. It has to be. 401Ks depend on it. IRAs depend on it. Pensions depend on it. Entire states and countries budgets depend on it. To prevent anarchy and societal breakdown, the market must rise over time, and governments will print unlimited money to make that happen.

I wish it was that way and that savers could win. With inflation, they force you to participate in the markets or get left behind watching your buying power evaporate. I guess you can buy hard goods like pinball machines that will appreciate, but keeping your money in cash just won't work.

I agree with you. I think short term predictions on individual stocks, or even sectors is fine. I'm just seeing too many people on various sites rooting for the whole market to go to zero or for capitalism itself to be replaced. For myself, I welcome the chance to buy more at lower levels, but I'm compassionate and I'm thinking about the folks nearing retirement or recently retired who are watching their dreams be shattered.

When I see people above saying 9-11k on the DOW, I see trolling. I don't want to see the pain that would cause millions of people. That's beyond stock market losses. That's real world poverty and job losses.

Exactly. None of us want that.

Don't fight the Fed? Who knows, the day is young, it might end down.

There's massive fund rebalancing going on until the end of the month. Funds are selling bonds and buying stocks to keep their allocation where they want it.

I'm a small fish compared to some of you guys, but I sold 6 SPY $300 covered calls expiring in a month. I'm betting the S&P doesn't rally 400 points in a month from here. If it does, my shares get called away, otherwise I get a bit over $1k in premiums.

I've been that guy....

Apparently it's 99 cents already at a few stations around the country. I filled up Saturday for 1.69 here.

That sounds right. I was in college then and remember it getting to about 80 cents here. It was really close to $1 in 2002, but I don't remember if it went below.

Me and Uncle Warren are riding together with some Kraft Heinz. It's been a bumpy ride.

Bought these back today. Wasn't planning to, but had a 70% gain in one day (and the S&P only declined 42 points). That VIX drop must be bleeding out the premiums fast. I'll sell some more on the next bounce.

Also sold a 4/17 280 AVGO Covered Call and a 4/24 280 AVGO Covered Call this morning and then bought them back about an hour later for over 50% profit. I'm not big on daytrading or playing with options, but I can see the lure of big gains with them.

I've never been in a Costco. As far as I know, no member of my extended family has ever been in a Costco. Looking at their store locator, it looks like the closest one to SW Missouri is over 2 hours away. However I've gone to Walmart once a week almost every week for the last 25 years. I grew up within an hour of Walmart's corporate office. Walmart is just part of the culture of my generation in this part of the country.

Hard to say. Oils surge is helping sentiment quite a bit, but yesterday was an up day and consecutive up days have been hard to come by. The market is barely negative on the week. I don't see it down much, but not up much either. I think the week ends fairly flat, so possibly up slightly today? Oil is up like 40% in two days. Without that I'd vote down for sure.

Well played Thing, you're really on the ball.

DOW futures are up about 450 so far, at levels higher than anything they reached on Friday. It'd be nice to see another run over 22k this week.

15 minutes later and they're up 700 points now. Market is liking lower COVID new cases in many countries today.

One day of data is a bit soon to party, but yes it seems new cases are lower almost everywhere. Deaths won't peak for another 1-2 weeks though.