Wheee, being bullish is fun!

We’re still not great at it as we shorted a few toppy-looking calls yesterday (WFMI, QLD, SPY and POT) but that was a normal offset to bullish plays on SO, ERX, VZ, RIMM, BMY, EMC, AAPL, TXN and T.  Of course, we’re also playing our bullish Watch List, which still has plenty of laggards that we’re picking up.  SRS was irresistable as they fell below $9.50 again but clearly we tipped bullish and all those bullish plays from last week should start bearing some fruit as well.  The best thing about being a bull is – the markets went up for no reason on low volume and we were happy about it – Imagine that! 

Of course we are still skeptical becasue the economy still sucks but it is fun to get a little more bullish while it lasts.  Even our too bearish $100KP enjoyed yesterday’s action, finishing the day $101,364.  That won’t last if we keep going higher and I’ll be looking for some bullish plays to officially add there if we hold our levels today (we didn’t yesterday).   

AAPL is going to be a huge winner for us this morning.  We’ve been selling Jan $165 and $170 puts for weeks as our key way to play earnings (collecting between $5 and $7) and yesterday, in Member Chat, I suggested selling the $185 puts for $7  as well as the April $180/200 bull call spread, also at $7.  It was my position that you would be better off putting $2,000 into either of those plays than you would be spending $18,750 to buy 100 shares of the stock ahead of earnings.  It will be interesting to see which position fares better today. 

In other earnings fun, we are strategically taking well-hedged earnings plays.  ZION was a ratio backspread, buying 4 Apr $21 calls for $2.10 and selling 6 Dec $19 calls for $1.55 in a bearish play on their earnings.  Looking good so far.  BSX was also played for a miss, selling an even amount of Nov $10s against the Feb $11s, both at .65 and we went bullish on TXN, buying 6 Jan $25s for .82 and selling just 4 Nov $24s for .70 as we expected good but not great earnings there.  We’ll see how those do today but they’re all looking like winners in pre-market.  The nice thing about plays like this is the are fairly low-risk and not capital intensive and you can…
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