(BAC) Archives

There is a method to my madness.

It?s all about Apple (AAPL). A disproportionate share of the market volume has been pouring into Apple shares for the past two weeks. The higher it went, the more people wanted to buy. Just in the past week, the company has tacked on a staggering $75 billion in market capitalization. The action in the call options has been absolutely explosive.

The focus of the US stock market distilled down to not just a single sector, but a single stock. This kind of concentrated price action is a classic indicator of a market top. When Apple rolls over, the rest of the market will follow it down. Apple has pulled this off while virtually every other asset class is showing their own topping formations, including most other stocks, the euro, the yen, copper, gold, silver, and even the ags.

When I started my February 15 webinar at 12:00 noon EST, Apple was going gangbusters, up $15 to $525. By the time I finished, it had plunged $15, suggesting the short term top is in for the sizzling, innovative company. A rumor swept the market that Apple?s weighting in the NASDAQ would be diluted once again, which would be highly negative for the share price.

So am I going to sell short Apple stock? Heavens no! I love Steve Jobs? creation. I still think it will hit my long term target of $1,000 sooner than later. In fact, I just bought a new solid state MacBook Pro with all the specs maxed out and I am picking up my IPhone 4s on Friday.

Instead, I am going to use Apple as the signal for my cross market timing, and then short a stock I hate, Bank of America (BAC). This is one of the top performing stocks of 2012, soaring some 50%, in six weeks. Despite that move, it is still trading at a huge discount to book, meaning that traders think the company is lying through its teeth about the true extent of its loan losses.? Its shares are beating Apple by an almost 2:1 ratio this year, which has jumped only 28%. How perverse is that? The two companies are almost mirror images of each other. Think future versus past, booming versus broke, good versus evil, $525 versus $8.

The best run hedge funds use this type of cross market signaling all the time. I saw it constantly on the trading floor of Morgan Stanley. It is a great way to capture laggards and move into the highest beta names when a market reversal is imminent.

When I am in a selling mood, I want to sell the most expensive stock in the market that has had the most blistering recent gains. That describes (BAC) to a tee, which is nowhere near solving its structural problems and still has a declining real estate market to deal with.

I chose to buy puts on (BAC) instead of the (SPY) because you always get much greater volatility in individual names than an index has a whole. Look at (BAC)?s performance this year. A 7% rise in the (SPY) brought a 50% gain in (BAC). That kind of volatility works on the downside too. A single stock will outperform a basket every time. That?s how you maximize your bang per buck on the put options.

Check Out Bank Of America?s New Logo

Have you ever held a basketball underwater in a swimming pool and let go? It flies to the upside and pops you in the nose. That is exactly what gold is doing now. After the barbarous relic peaked at $1,922 on August 24, it traded like an absolute pig, giving up 20% in a matter of weeks. I managed to coin it with a couple of quick in and out trades in (GLD) puts, some doubling over a weekend. So much for the ?safe asset? theory.

You can thank hedge fund titan, John Paulsen, for the action. John gained international notoriety when he earned a $4 billion bonus after making huge bets against subprime loans going into the housing crash.

Since then, his touch has grown somewhat icy. He started out 2011 with a huge, bullish bet on US banks, a play, I confess, I never really understood. This was back when Bank of America (BAC) was trading at a lofty $14/share. As a hedge, he backed up these gargantuan positions with big holdings in gold, which quickly made him the largest owner of the ETF (GLD).

John?s P&L held up reasonably well during the first part of the year. As the banks faded, gold went from strength to strength, limiting his damage. That all changed on April 29 when global financial markets flipped into ?RISK OFF? mode and gold melted along with everything else. Its hedging capability proved to be nil. By August, John?s losses approached a near death 50%.

Needless to say, his investors failed to see the humor in the situation, and rumors of cataclysmic redemptions started sweeping the street. By implication, this could only mean large scale liquidation of the yellow metal. This was happening when the rest of the hedge fund industry was catching daily margin calls, forcing them to dump even more gold into a downward spiral, their best performing holding for the year. When the sushi hits the fan, you sell what you can, not what you want to. By the time the carnage ended, gold was down $392.

When the crying was over, Paulson had reduced his ownership in the ETF (GLD) from 31.5 million shares to 20.3 million. That?s a haircut of $1.76 billion of the shiny stuff. In the end, Paulson says he only suffered redemptions of 10% of his somewhat reduced funds, much lower than expected.

Gold actually anticipated the new ?RISK ON? trade by a week, bottoming on September 26. Since then it has behaved like a paper asset, tracking the S&P 500 almost tick for tick, adding a quick 19.6%. So, what?s up with gold?

As we approach yearend, the downward pressure of this redemption selling is waning, hence my basketball analogy. New bull arguments have also come to the fore. The contagion in Europe has prompted massive buying of all precious metals by panicky individuals, including silver (SLV), platinum (PPLT), palladium (PALL), and even neglected rhodium, with a collapse of the Euro imminent. And how will the ECB eventually end the crisis? With a continental TARP and quantitative easing, which we here in the US already know is hugely positive for gold prices.

How far will the gold get this time? The gold bugs say we?re going to break the old high and power on through to the inflation adjusted high at $2,300. I?m not so sure. I am not willing to bet the ranch here on an asset class that could plunge $1,000 going into the next recession, which could be just around the corner.

But there may be a trade here in precious metals space for the nimble. My pick has been to buy lagging silver, which offers much more bang per buck if the sector starts to build a head of steam. The white metal will not get hit with IMF gold sales, which are also a rumored part of any European bailout package.

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Use Apple Timing to Short Bank of America Stock

What?s Up With Gold?