AAPL - low risk setup coming

Ignore the bailout for now. One of three things will happen.
1) No bailout - market crashes (will not happen!)
2) Partial bailout - market does whatever, then continues it's downtrend
3) Total bailout - market briefly rallies...then continues it's downtrend. A bailout is not good news. It's better news than no bailout but it's not good news.

BACK TO APPLE
AAPL is about to present a low-risk setup. I would favor the downside but if it happens to find support at 114, consider going long for a quick trade and use 114 as your stop (or a trailing stop) for a low-risk trade.
If the overall market shows weakness, enter a buy stop order on some puts on AAPL below 114 with a stop above 114 after entry.

Goldman

For the record, I remain bearish on Goldman; however, these levels (155) have presented great buying opportunities lately. Either way, it presents a low risk setup - place a stop below 152.59.



Get rich on that - tomorrow I'll present a way to play the recent run up in the US dollar using credit spreads with a decent risk/reward.

OptionSpot

That didn't last long

Well, not to be outdone, the bears had a huge technical day of their own -taking out substantial support levels across the board. The most annoying thing about this was it's unpredictability. Everybody knew that the unemployment rate wouldn't be more than 5.1% (more less 5.5%), especially given the fairly positive initial jobs report on Thursday (hence the rally). So naturally, those who bought based on Thursday's data, now had every reason in the world to sell. Combine that with panic, trend-traders, short-covering, perma-bears, etc. and you've got yourself one hell of a sell off.

I myself got stopped out of several positions today but thanks to my genius-like, low-risk placement of contingent stop orders, today was mildly annoying at best.

I don't advise blindly rushing out and buying everything with the words UltraShort in the title, even though at this point things certainly look to be heading lower over the next several weeks. That would be impulsive and silly. What I do continue to recommend is finding some short candidates and placing contingent buy orders (on puts or put spreads). By candidates, I mean find something that is getting ready to break support or is up against some sort of trendline - even if that means being patient enough for said candidate to bounce back to said trendline. Then (after your order fills) place another contingent stop order directly on the other side of that trendline and you have created a low-risk trade instead of an impulsive buy order with no real plan. Check back Sunday/Monday and I will have done all of this work for you.

OIL

There is plenty of discussion about whether oil has made an intermediate-term top or if it is just pulling back in the short run. First of all, nobody knows, but if you have an irresistible urge to participate in this move (one way or another), I recommend doing so by using a low-risk strategy. Here's an example with USO:

United States Oil Fund (USO) - No pullback to this trendline is guaranteed of course, but if it happens, it will present a good low-risk entry point. If it never pulls back to this level then I would not consider entry to be low-risk and I would look elsewhere. It is low-risk in that you would place a stop just below the trendline. This way, if you are wrong about your outlook on USO, you vastly limit your losses.

Ultra Oil and Gas ProShares (DIG) - when you're really confident on the long side.

UltraShort Oil and Gas ProShares (DUG) - and on the short side.