EOD blanked

No buys. No sales. Nothing but lots of happiness followed by frustration, followed by curiousity and sleepiness and boredom and eventually confusion. The movement today in the start of the day was down just like it should have been. The rise afterward was ridiculous. The S&P talking heads say “things will get better” and the market rebounds?

I’m pretty sure that there is something incredibly troublesome about the stock market when non-positive news is enough to boost the DJI over 300 points. BIDU finished lower, GOOG higher, JCP lower, and because I was curious about some stocks, I took screen shots for sharing.

First let me show you something with the BIDU option chain for March. It’s really bad. The favored side are the calls.. checking the max pain, it’s probably around $260 price level. I can’t verify that because I haven’t been keeping track of daily ranges.

GOOG Apr08 $400 puts were pretty active today. Maybe someone knows something that I don’t. Maybe they just are taking an outside bet on something. At one point today GOOG was down over $10 which put my puts into profit, but that didn’t last long. Since there’s still time left before options expiration in March, there’s still time left for April’s expirations, I’ll be holding these puts a little longer.

The banks are almost guaranteed to drop in value right now. Checking the charts, you couldn’t go wrong shorting or buying ITM puts on a bank or other financial insititution. This is sort of amazing or a wicked bet though. Look at the BSC put volume and open interest greatly outweigh the call volume. I was thinking of putting a couple dollars into the Mar08 $25 puts, only because the volume was pretty damn amazing today.

Alright, that’s all for today. Today’s ending:

End of day positions:

End of day balance: