It was a spectacular week in world markets, particularly since we started the week with such low expectations. Things took a positive turn in Europe as Greece passed the austerity measures avoiding a default and freeing up funds for a financial rescue. Also the people of France breathed a sign of relief as the rape case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared to collapse.
On this side of the pond, we go some clarity on debit card fees sending credit card companies Visa and Mastercard soaring. Other financial stocks followed as well, but to a lesser extent. Good manufacturing data on Friday lit a fire under the stock market. Add to that a string of beautiful summer days and we're in fine shape for a long holiday weekend.
I closed out last week's trade in NFLX closed out for a 20+ point profit in only 9 days. But the trade of the week had to be Amazon.com (AMZN). As you know I've been hanging in on the long side for some time. I smelled a breakout as the stock recovered from a 24-day pullback by making up all those losses in only 8 days. Its usually the other way around where stocks go up slowly, then sell-off quickly. Anyway, I added another 100 shares in each account at about 204.50 and sold the August 210 calls at 8.6. If called, this would represent an 6.8% gain (or a 4% gain if the stock just went sideways) in under 2 months!
Anyway, the end-of-quarter rally continued into the new month on Friday. Amazon decisively broke out to a new all-time high on Friday with a 5 point gain. What's more, the short call only gained $1.30 as the stock came closer to the money.
We also got breakouts to new all-time highs in CACI, CMG, IBM, NEOR, QCOR and YUM. All these breakouts got my equity portfolio out to a new recovery high which is about the last thing I expected at this time last week!
Forex was a bit of a yawn this past week with most systems flat on the week.
Atipaq Full Portfolio took a nice gain on a one-day trade in NZD/USD.
FX-Regression gave back a good part of its recent profits on a string of losing trades. This was not at all unexpected after a recent string of winners.
Finally, my platform problems continues this past week as my laptop continued to blue-screen. By the end of the week, all of my systems were successfully migrated over to a new laptop platform. I learned a few things about how to do Meta-trader platform migration that I will cover in a post, probably tomorrow.
So check back later for that and enjoy your weekend!
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