This is what I called free money around the corner

I have lost track how many times I have talked down Euro in the past 2 years. I have repeatedly said Euro for me  is a dead fiat currency and it won't survive in its current format within 5 years. I have even said shorting Euro is the easiest money you can make as it is free money lying around the corner and the only thing you need to do is go there to pick it up (see here). I certainly put money where my mouth is. In a July 2011 blog, I talked about a methodology how to be more efficiently short Euro by selling EUO put options. Here is the status of this position I'm holding:

EUO Jan 19 '13 $17 Put                  0.05    -50   $2.10   $10,196.57   96.62%   -$250.00

I sold 50 contracts of EUO Jan 2013 put options for $2.10 in May last year, i.e. the target total profit is $10,500.00 by Jan 2013. But my account has shown that I have already almost reached the target; if I close the position today, my profit would be $10,196. This is over 4 months ahead of the schedule! Why? Because the Euro has declined so much in the past half a year or so. That's what I called free money with shorting Euro.

Of course, I know Euro won't disappear overnight and ECB and all the countries involved will try their best to prolong its life. There is still a chance that Euro will bounce back. I hope it will as this will give me another good opportunity to pick up more free money.         

Investors’ 10 most common mistakes

This is a good read about what common mistakes we may often make in investment. Hope you can learn something from it. I did.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/07/investors-10-most-common-mistakes/

KCG jumped over 60% today

Did you get in with KCG early today? If you did, you should be happy as it jumped over 60% today when people learned that KCG has opened its book for suitors and there are indeed some potential hunters expressing their interest and doing their due diligence. As I said last night, I think there is a good chance that KCG may be bought up or get merged. Apparently I'm not alone out there to think about that. Congratulations if you can make a profit over 50% in one day!

A high risk high return speculation with KCG

KCG, the symbol for Knight Capital Group Inc, is one of the largest firms that buys and sells stocks to provide liquidity to the markets. But a technology breakdown  yesterday at this major trading firm roiled the prices of 140 stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange, undermining fragile investor confidence in the stability of U.S. stock markets. Today, KCG reported that it lost over $400 millions due to this glitch. The stock lost over 62% today and another 17% after hours as I'm writing now. It is trading around $2.15 per share. See the chart below:

This is not a small company but one of the major trading companies. When it drops

like that and lost 2/3 of its values, I'm thinking some value guys out there must be very interested in it and I think there is a good chance that KCG may be bought by others. If so, this may happen very soon. If you are willing to risk your capital (i.e. 100% loss) to make this speculation, the potential return could also be huge, maybe double or even more. This is something I'm considering to do, if a merger deal does not come in tonight.

Bad news is good news & it is good for precious metals

We were just back from a very intensive vacation trip in Australia and New Zealand, 10 connection flights within 14 days between visiting sites. Very interesting but also tiring.  Luckily, trip was very well organized with no any major problems. However, I must say that both Australia and New Zealand are very underdeveloped in terms of the Internet system. Virtually impossible to get easy and free access to Internet unless you pay a deal for it. Even my business BlackBerry had frequent interruptions during the period. So I basically could not really get good online review of the market news and developments.

It appears the market was up and down quite significantly in the past 2 weeks but did not drop as severely as I had expected. Actually the economic news was very bad: GDP was only 1.5% last quarter & much short of expectation, the US consumer sentiments were very negative & were cutting back expenses greatly, new house sales were down, and 46 million Americans (over 15% of the US population) were on food stamps...... But the market just responded positively to the bad news. You know what? This is so-called "Bad news is good news" phenomenon! Because the market is expecting that the Fed will inevitably come back with another round of money printing to stimulate the economy due to the very back overall economic condition, i.e. QE3 will come one way or the other. Of course, we also need to give some credits to the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, since his statement  on Thursday that ECB  "is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro" has given the market a strong conviction that more money printing worldwide is coming.

This will be very good for gold and silver & eventually the mining stocks. I think I'm ready to put more money into this sector to catch up with this strong upward trend. For the general stocks though, I'm still not fully convincing that it will simply go up from here. I will wait a bit to see if the uptrend is firmly established, since from the bottom of my heart I still think there is a chance to see a sharp decline of the market before it launches a full-blown rally towards the year end.

Get ready for a severe market plunge

I will be away for traveling in Australia for the next 2+ weeks till almost the end of this month. Given constant changes of locations and the time difference, I'm not sure I will have time to really sit down to observe, think and write in this period. So you may not hear from me for a few weeks. But I don't think you will miss too much.

The main theme for the next few weeks for the overall market I think will be a severe correction. S&P500 significantly below 1300 is very likely in my mind and close to low 1200s is not impossible. So if you are thinking to add more money to any long positions, I will suggest you exercise patience and wait. Better opportunities will be coming soon. Last week's job data was terrible as well as other major economic data around the world. I bet Bernanke is waiting for the market to call for his salvage by announcing another round of printing money, i.e. QE3. Without an end of world kind of sentiment in the market, he is in a very difficult position and may be blamed for manipulating the market and the election if he does QE3 now. But he knows there is no way he can avoid QE3. So my gut feeling is that the market will plunge dearly to allow Bernanke to move ahead with QE3. From the technical charting perspective, it is also arguing strongly for a severe drop.

Personally I want to be prepared for this, especially while I'm away and cannot attend to my portfolio in a timely fashion. So I have taken profits from short-term long oil positions and have added quite a bit short positions with SDS and TZA, which will benefit from the market plunge. I also think gold and silver may experience some severe decline as well in the near term, to prepare them for some significant bouncing up towards the year end, especially if QE3 is indeed in place. Similarly I have also added some short positions for gold and silver such as GLL & ZSL. In other words, I'm very much biased towards a severe overall market plunge impacting virtually on all assets in the next few weeks.

There is no way out for Euro

Poor Markel and Germans. At the last minute of the Eurozone summit meeting, the poor Markel finally yielded to Italy and Spain to agree to use the EU bailout funds to save their severely indebted banks by allowing them to borrow more money to avoid their immediate bankruptcy. Basically the poor Germans are going to use their credit to allow for endless money printing to save the Euro! So Euro has been saved for now again. But believe me, the worse crises will come back again to hit them and the world with shorter and shorter intervals. There is no way out for Euro with such kind of mentality that no one wants to fundamentally solve the problem, i.e. to reduce their debts. Rather, what they are doing is simply adding more and more debts to their already unmanageable debt load. They can still kick the can down the road, but eventually the reality will kick in and the Euro will collaspe badly! But as you know, I'm actually betting the in the near term, Euro may bounce back a bit. If it ever jumps back over $1.30 or higher, I will seriously consider to add more short positions against Euro. That will be another bunches of free money for you to pick up.

The market short-term direction seems to go as I predicted. Friday S&P jumped back to over 1350. I'm afraid it will hit its strong resistance around 1370-90 soon. I have used leveraged ETFs to bet for this short-term uptrend in the past few weeks and I'm taking some quick profits off the table but still keep some in case it will continue to go a bit higher. More importantly I'm starting to add leveraged ETFs (SDS) to bet for a more severe plunge for the market. As I said, I think likely the market will go down significantly first before advancing more upside. Similarly I'm also betting for a fight back for oil and I'm using the leveraged ETF (UCO) to bet for this short term bouncing. Oil jumped 8% on Friday and I'm doing fine with UCO. I probably will get out soon as I think more downside for oil is likely to come before all this is over.