Tuesday, November 17, 2009

A Single Shiny Spot...

....In my portfolio:



With precious metals soaring, palladium miner SWC is trying to break out of its recent range.

Last year I made nice coin in this stock; however this year has been a different story. I'm up on my most recent purchase (3.31 basis?) but lost a bunch buying palladium futures at $390 or so. They tanked right after I got long, all the way to nearly $170 before rising steadily back to around $370 today. Unfortunately, I dumped mine at $226 or so and went with an ill-advised short S&P 500 position in my futures account this summer. Oh well.

The bull argument for palladium is simple - with gold making historic highs, palladium remains relatively cheap, still some 35% off its 2008 high of $579.

Whatever. I'm all but burned out from trying to apply rational analysis to financial securities. I was drawn initially to the economic nature of stock markets, but have concluded that they are nothing but pure casinos - at least now anyways.

I think I have some Jan 15 SWC calls buried in my account. Hey, I still have two months left....one just never knows.

Though anywhere near $15.00 a share and I turn those puppies into synthetic puts in a heartbeat.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The best bull argument for Pd is that it will one day be easily substitutable for Pt in catalytic converters. The bear argument is that in a global depression, Pd will be crushed by deflation.

We are in a bear market created by the biggest bubble in world history. The government is betting everything that they can stop the bust from happening. You can throw rational analysis right out the proverbial window for the next quarter century.

JReality said...

Hopefully your loss from trying to short this crazy market isn't in the 6 figure range like mine!

I'll be taking capital loss carryovers until I'm dead unless I have a good year next year!

CaptiousNut said...

Mine is a sizable loss - to put it mildly.