Trade Alert – Volatility buyback and a tranche of bubble puts

One of our shorts, $IBM, is down pretty big today after an ugly earnings report last night. One of our longs, $INTC, is down fractionally and there was nothing earth-shattering in last night’s report there.

Another short of ours, Goldman Sachs is down pretty big today too after a sloppy earnings report that showed less welfare and insider trading income than was expected.

On a similar note, the goobermint went and settled some near-meaningless debt ceiling crisis of its own manufacturing and $GS will continue to get their hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare and assistance and other hand outs this year and next.

Wake me up when Representative Ted Cruz attacks that program instead of whatever he was pretending to attack during this debt ceiling “crisis”. Did you know that Ted’s wife is an insider crony at that Goldman Sachs joint, the single great welfare bank in the history of the planet? No, you didn’t know that Ted and his wife and his family are literally in Goldman’s pocket? Look it up.

The VIX has absolutely crashed since we sold the last of our VIX call options last week. I think it’s time to buy some back to re-hedge the portfolio with here. I’m using November 13s and December 13-15s. If you can’t find Vix at your broker you can look at the VXX, but it’s not quite the same thing, just FYI. And if you don’t know what any of this means, don’t worry — just keep steady betty and be ready to scale into some more stocks as the pitches come.

And I just added a second tranche of the PCLN puts, which we’ve had some big wins and smaller losses in lately. Using December $950s or so.