John Thomas on Selling USO Short Position

From the desk of   John Thomas The Mad Hedge  Fund Trader Friday, June 03, 2011

I am going to use the huge spike down in oil prices this morning triggered by a disastrous May nonfarm payroll report to take profits on my short position in the oil ETF (USO). Specifically, I am selling my August $37 puts at $1.60, the price I am seeing my screen. The (USO) itself is now trading at $38.90. I initially bought these puts on May 16 for $1.55, when oil was at $100.50. Within days, crude fell to $95.50, boosting the puts to over $2.00, and I should have taken profits there. But I didn’t. Crude then rebounded to $103, knocking the puts back down to $1.00. This morning, crude is back down to $98.25, a dip of $2.50 since I started this trade, and the puts are essentially unchanged, the profit entirely eaten up by time decay. That is the lesson with trading these out of the money options. You have to grab the profits when you can before they go up in smoke. The August options only have 2 ½ months left in them, and time decay is starting to accelerate. For the notional $100,000 portfolio with a 5% weighting, I am booking a profit of $160 (32 X $.05 X 100). This amounts to a 3.2% profit on the position, which adds 3 basis points to your annual return. I’ll be using the next serious rally in oil to reestablish my short, given the dismal economic prospects we are now facing.

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Take a Look at Occidental Petroleum (OXY)

As a follow up to my trade alert for Macro Millionaires to buy the double leveraged oil major ETF (DIG), I thought you’d like to know what my second choice was. There are a lot of belles at the ball, but you can’t dance with all of them. 

While a student at UCLA in the early seventies, I took a World Politics course which required me to pick a country, analyze its economy, and make recommendations for its economic development. I chose Algeria, a country where I had spent the summer of 1968 caravanning among the Bedouins, crawling out of the desert half starved, lice ridden, and half dead.  I concluded that the North African country should immediately nationalize the oil industry, and raise prices from $3/barrel to $10.  I knew that Los Angeles based Occidental Petroleum (OXY) was interested in exploring for oil there, so I sent my paper to the company for review. They called the next day and invited me to their imposing downtown headquarters, then the tallest building in Los Angeles.

I was ushered into the office of Dr. Armand Hammer, one of the great independent oil moguls of the day, a larger than life figure who owned a spectacular impressionist art collection, and who confidently displayed a priceless Fabergé egg on his desk. He said he was impressed with my paper, and then spent two hours grilling me. Why should oil prices go up? Who did I know there? What did I see? What was the state of their infrastructure? Roads? Bridges? Rail lines? Did I see any oil derricks? Did I see any Russians? I told him everything I knew, including the two weeks in an Algiers jail for taking pictures in the wrong places. His parting advice was to never take my eye off the oil industry, as it is the driver of everything else. I have followed that advice ever since. 

When I went back to UCLA I told a CIA friend of mine that I had just spent the afternoon with the eminent doctor (Marsha, call me!). She told me that he had been a close advisor of Vladimir Lenin after the Russian Revolution, had been a double agent for the Soviets ever since, that the F.B.I had known this all along, and was currently funneling illegal campaign donations to President Richard Nixon. Shocked, I kicked myself for going into an interview so ill prepared, and had missed a golden opportunity to ask some great questions. I never made that mistake again. 

Some 40 years later, while trolling the markets for great buying opportunities set up by the BP oil spill, I stumbled across (OXY) once more. (OXY) has a minimal offshore presence, nothing in deep water, and huge operations in the Middle East and South America. It was the first US oil company to go back into Libya when the sanctions were lifted in 2005. (OXY’s) substantial California production is expected to leap to 45% to 200,000 barrels a day over the next four years. Its horizontal multistage fracturing technology will enable it to dominate California shale. The company has raised its dividend for the eighth year in a row, by 15% to 1.60%. Need I say more?   

The clear message that has come out of the BP oil spill is that onshore energy resources are now more valuable than offshore ones. I decided to add it to my model portfolio. Energy is one of a tiny handful of industries I am willing to put my money in these days (technology and commodities are the others), and BP has handed me a rare opportunity to get in as the tightwad that I truly am. 

Oh, and I got an A+ on the paper, and the following year Algeria raised the price of oil to $12.

From the desk of John Thomas

The Mad Hedge Fund Trader

Friday, April 8, 2011

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High Oil Prices Have Fund Managers Moving Into "Risk Off" Mode

Let's ask ourselves "what is the true cost of oil". Economists are furiously downsizing their economic growth forecasts for 2011 in the wake of the oil price spike, both for the US and for the world at large. Since last week, West Texas crude prices have soared $12 from $86 to $98. Each $1 increase in the price of oil jumps gasoline prices by 2.5 cents. Each one cent rise in the cost of gasoline takes $1 billion out of the pockets of consumers.

If oil stays at this price, it removes $30 billion from the pockets of consumers. At $110 a barrel, it short changes them by $60 billion, or 4.1% of GDP. Subtract this out from even the most optimistic GDP forecasts for this year, and you end up with negative numbers. That, my friends, is what they call a recession. If you wonder why hedge fund managers have lurched into an aggressive "RISK OFF" mode, are throwing their babies out with the bathwater, and why the volatility index is spiking to three month highs, this is why.

Posted courtesy of our partner John Thomas, "The Mad Hedge Fund Trader"


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