General Electric (GE) and Citigroup (C)

I closed out on my General Electric (GE) position today making a modest gain.

In addition, I had a Citigroup position in which I closed out as well. The past few days of Citi's increasing stock price was largely due to a short squeeze which I profited by more than 100%. I could have held on to it longer but I do not want to be piggish.

Currently, I am sitting in cash looking for a new opportunity.

Here is this week's economic calender for your review on Yahoo! Finance. Happy trading!

Economic Calender weekending 4/10/2009

Here is the economic calender for weekending 4/10/2009 using Yahoo! Finance economic calender.


Highlight: Jobless claims came in lower than expected with the actual number being 654k verses the 660k expected and 674k prior.

Economic Calender weekending 4/3/2009

Here is the economic calender for weekending 4/3/2009 on Yahoo! Finance.

On Friday the most important Employment Report will be coming out where traders are looking for a -8.5% rate of unemployment. This report comes out the first Friday of every month for the previous month.

This Week's Economic Calender

"The market's master is macroeconomics"- a wise trader once said. Given that I would like to share this past week's economic indicator calender provided by Yahoo! Finance.

As we have seen in the numbers that came out this week, Existing Home Sales and New Home Sales have done better than expected which seems that we have some light coming out of the tunnel in terms of stablizing housing. Durable Goods Orders and Durables Ex-Transportation came out better than expected. GDP still negitive, however did better than expected. As Larry Kudlow mentions, we have "mustard seeds".

GE

On tuesday, I bought shares of General Electric (GE). My rational is that GE has recently had its credit rating cut plus divident slashed to .10 cents a share. The current stock price reflects those fundamentals but if we see a turnaround in those fundamentials e.g. return of top credit rating, return of attractive divident, we will see a nice price return of GE. This is a L-O-N-G term play.

BOA Must Disclose Names of Employees who Received Bonuses

A New York judge ordered that BOA must disclose names of employees who received bonuses under the Merrill Lynch, John Thain era.

You can read the Yahoo! Finance story here

The main argument for Attorney General Andrew Cuomo for the disclosure is to create transparency for taxpayers since it was the taxpayers who paid 45 billion dollars in bailout funds to Bank of America (BOA) but Bank of America claims there is a privacy issue concerning these employees.

In my opinion, I fail to see a reason as to why BOA should release the names. To be honest, what does it do for the economy? What does it do for the capital markets? Does it create jobs? I am curious if Andrew Cuomo is going to release how much it cost taxpayers to retrieve these names?

Updated VIX / APPL Trade

So far the VIX (CBOE Volitility Index ETF) and the AAPL (Apple Inc.) trades are working with only 8 days to expiration left on the contracts that I'm selling. Both stocks are ranging within the parameters that I stated in the previous post and are showing extreme price decay which is what I'm looking for.