Category: Stock Option Trading News

We recently analyzed Jim Cramer’s bullish stock tips and determined his bullish track record is pretty dismal. In fairness, we also analyzed Jim Cramer’s bearish stock tips and found his results were slightly positive. A sample of Jim Cramer’s bearish or short selling results are shown:

We’ve all wondered what might happen if we could turn the clock back and do something differently. Perhaps a friendship or romance would have been saved or enhanced. Maybe the result of a sporting event could have been changed. Possibly an investment might have paid off handsomely for you.

Notice in these examples…the Bull Put Credit Spreads and Bull Call Debit Spreads are using the same strike prices; as are the Bear Call Credit Spreads and Bear Put Debit Spreads. This is because these combinations are “parity trades”.

In a couple of recent articles, Analyzing the Analysts – Buy, Hold Or Sell and Buy Stock Recommendations from Top Analysts we focused on examining groups of analysts, their performance record and their stock investing research recommendations. In this article we focus on “star analysts” and we’ll define a “star analyst” as one with an accurate past history of projecting earnings estimates.

In a previous article entitled “Analyzing the Analysts – Buy, Hold Or Sell“, we analyzed the performance of the stock market research analysts. In this article we list recent buy recommendations of the analysts we consider to be the top performers based on our previous analysis. Additionally, we have created a special search list in order for our customers to search for potential option income opportunities using this list.

The terminology used by stock market research analysts is anything but uniform, many of the analysts use the conventional terms “buy”, “hold” and “sell” for making their stock market research recommendations, which makes sense, as that’s what investors do, buy, hold and sell for their personal stock portfolio.

Are all you’re eggs in one basket, your home mortgage for example. For a lot of investors, their largest investment and sometimes their only investment is their home. They quietly make the mortgage payment each month and over the years the value of their home has generally appreciated, sometimes rather nicely, and their home now represents a sizable chunk of their net worth.

Historically, the month of January has shown abnormally high stock returns for stocks with small capitalizations. The effect is so large in fact that the return of a security in January may be the largest portion of its annual return. Several reasons have been hypothesized for The January Effect, but the most popular reason for The January Effect is tax reduction tax-loss selling.

Generally, stock options issued to employees are either Nonqualified Stock Options (NSO) or Incentive Stock Options (ISO). Employees receiving NSOs or ISOs could possibly realize a tax reduction with stock insurance through buying put options.

If you haven’t heard yet, we have upgraded our BrokerLink technology with optionsXpress. Now, PowerOptions users can easily and conveniently trade any stock option investment strategy they find with just a few clicks.