4/14 Day/swingtrades

Despite the opening weakness, today's action looked choppy as there are still quite a few dip buyers left from the recent runup. For the past few weeks, any bad news has been bought. Today, GS killed their surprise earnings with an offering priced @ $123 and last month's retail numbers didn't looked too good. So, we may be in for some near-term weakness. If so, it shouldn't surprise anyone as we've had a pretty good runup the past few weeks and need a decent pause/consolidation to digest the gains.

GS - This was definitely on my radar from the opening bell. If you pull up the 5-min chart, GS had a very hard time getting past the 20ma. I actually took 3 trades on GS today but only two are shown on the charts. I entered the first trade on the break of support and opening range low around $121.00. I went with the Apr 125 puts with an initial target of $118 (support established prior to breaking out last Friday) and a second target of $115 to fill last week's gap. I took partial profits @ 119.00 and closed the position when the 1st target was hit @ $118...netting $2.00 on the puts. For the second trade (red candle at 2pm EST), I was actually up $1 on the puts but had cable problems and ended up getting stopped out flat before I could readjust the stop to lock in the profit. Finally, GS broke down again in the last 30 minutes. I picked up the Apr 120 Puts and closed the position when the gap was closed @ $115.20...netting $1.20 on the puts.


C - I used the open strength to close out the rest of this position @ $4.40. With the GS weakness at the open, I figured it was just time before the rest of the financials got dragged down. I don't like to view trades in % gains as I'm more focused on dollar for dollar movements but $0.25 to $1.40 is pretty good...especially if position-sized correctly.

FAZ - Like I said, there were quite a few dip buyers out there today. I first entered FAZ as it broke the opening range high, around $10.10. I tightened the stop to $10.40 which was triggered awhile later. I also got stopped out flat around 2PM EST as I picked up FAZ shares along with the GS puts above. Finally, I re-entered at the close as volume picked up and the financials weakened into the close. This is a speculative ONH (ala Stewie) play as overnight holds in FAZ have NOT been rewarded the past few weeks. However, FAZ is finally trading above the moving averages on most timeframes and the Calls should give me some downside cushion if the setup fails tomorrow.