Stock Market

Once upon a time, there was a young hare, a hotshot rabbit investor who would always brag to anyone that would listen and that he was the smartest, fastest, best performing investor in the world. He would constantly tease the old tortoise about his slow, solid investment style.

Then, one day, the annoyed tortoise answered back: “There is no denying that you are very aggressive in your investment strategy. You take very high risks and get high returns. But even you can be beaten.”

The young hare squealed with laughter. “Beaten? By whom? Surely not by you. I bet there’s nobody in the world that can win against me, because I’m so good. If you think that you can beat me, why don’t you try?”

Provoked by such bragging, the tortoise accepted the challenge. Each of them put an equal amount of money into a new account and the race was on. The hare yawned sleepily as the meek tortoise trudged slowly off.

As might be expected, the tortoise invested in high quality blue chips, companies with household names.

The hare, as anticipated, invested his money in dotcom stocks and options.

You know the story. The aggressive hare jumped out to a big early lead. In a rising market, the highest risk stocks perform the best. This is called momentum investing. Money flows into the investments that are performing the best.

The hare, having jumped out to such a large early lead, stopped paying attention to the market environment. Basically, he fell asleep. He thought to himself, “I’ll have 40 winks and still remain way ahead of that stupid old turtle.”

The hare awoke from his sleep and gazed around looking for the tortoise, who was nowhere in sight. Unfortunately, while he was sleeping, dreaming about what he would do with his winnings, the market turned against him.

His very high-risk portfolio had taken a terrible beating and was now practically worthless.

The tortoise, a Warren Buffett style investor, had passed the sleeping rabbit long ago. He had been plodding forward, steadily, since the beginning of the contest. The Tortoise never for a moment stopped, but went on with a slow but steady pace straight to the end of the course.

The hare realized that the tortoise was way ahead of him, and away he dashed. He leaped and bounded while gasping for breath, but it was too late. The tortoise had beaten him.

There are two very important lessons to be learned here.

In stock market, option is a contract between the buyer and seller of the stock. This contract contains the agreement about the right of the buyer and the obligation of the seller. The buyer right is that he/she has the right to buy the stock at the price that had been agreed by the seller. The seller obligation is that he/she has to sell the stock to the buyer at the price that had been agreed by the buyer. Option in stock market is just a contract between stock buyer and seller about the transaction stock price within a specified period of time. Option can be used to hedge portfolio or protect position just like how the insurance does to the property. Option can be used to protect your money that has been invested in the stock market. Besides stock protection, by utilizing option, we can carry out arbitrage strategy, which can earn profit no matter the stock price is going up, down or side way. Arbitrage strategy is a risk-free strategy and it can let you earn profit without incur any loss.

Conversion is one of the arbitrage types option trading strategy. This strategy involves buying stock, selling call option and buying put option. These three steps are carried out simultaneously. Call and put option strike price has to be the same and the amount of the money that has been received from selling call option must be enough to buy the put option. So, in this strategy, it seem like you just buy a stock only because the amount money that has received after selling call option is more than enough to buy the put option and usually, it has extra more remaining after selling call option and buying put option. The requirement for this strategy is that the difference between call option bid price and put option ask price has to be less than the difference between current stock ask price and the option strike price. The equation that represents the requirement is as follow:

call option bid price – put option ask price > current stock ask price – option strike price

There are three ways for us to place order for this strategy. We can use collar strategy, covered call strategy by triggering one put option and combo strategy by triggering one stock. All the orders must be placed using limit. After executing this option trading strategy, what we need to do is just left these positions until expiration date. You can close all these three positions one or two days before the expiration date of the option by buying and selling to close or exercising the options.

As an example, we sell CAT company 60 may call option at USD 4.90 and we buy 60 may put option at USD 3.10 and also buy the CAT company stock at USD 61.35. The difference between the call and put option price is 4.90 – 3.10 = 1.80. The difference between the stock price and the option strike price is 61.35 – 60 = 1.35. So, the difference between the call and put option price is more than the difference between the stock price and the option strike price. The net of both differences is our profit that is 1.80 – 1.35 = 0.45. If we buy one contract, our profit is 0.45 x 100 unit = USD 45. However, the commission of the transactions for this strategy is usually USD 90, depending to which broker firm service we are using. So, we need to buy at least three contracts in order that we can earn a profit.

So, how actually this strategy works? When we buy put option, we actually protect the stock that we have bought. The purpose of selling call option is to generate money to buy put option. Seem like after selling call option and buying put option, it has extra money in the account. But, actually, we still need an amount of deposit to execute this strategy. So, after executing this strategy, if the stock price drops, we have put option protecting our stock. If the stock price really has dropped on the expiration date, we can sell or exercise the put option to recover all the loss from buying stock. If the stock price has gone up on the expiration date, we just leave both call and put option expire worthless. However, because we sell call option at 60 strike price, the buyer of the 60 may call option will come to us and ask for a stock at USD 60, even though current stock price is higher than this price. Because we sell call option at 60 strike price, we have the obligation to sell the stock to this buyer at USD 60. If we do not own any stock, we have to buy stock from the market at higher price and then sell it to the 60 may option buyer. This will cause us lost money. However, don’t worry, because we own stock, so what we need to do is that we just sell the stock at USD 60 to the 60 call option buyer. Even though the current stock price is higher, we do not lose anything from this strategy. Moreover, we still earn a small amount of profit. Why this can happen is due to the discrepancy of the stock and option price. This is because stock and option price are affected by their own supply and demand. That means the stock may have more demand but its option may have less demand.

The advantage of this option and stock trading strategy is that it is totally risk free. No matter how the stock price changes, the profit is fixed. It won’t go away. The second advantage of this strategy is that it can be multiplied by buying more contracts. If we accidentally see a penny on the road side, that all we have if we pick it up and keep it. But in stock market, when we see this discrepancy, we can multiply this small amount by buying more unit of stock. However, there are actually got a lot of disadvantages in this strategy. The first disadvantage is that the profit is very little, usually 10 to 50 cent per unit option. The second disadvantage is that only high-price stocks have this opportunity. The third disadvantage is that the commission to execute this strategy is high, usually is USD 90 for the whole transaction. However, this disadvantage can be overcome by using the broker firm that charges less commission. The fourth disadvantage is that huge capital is needed to execute this strategy. This is because a few contracts of high-price stock have to be bought in this strategy.

The bulls and bears of the stock market are both tempting and scary to the investors. Speculators are enchanted by the stock market’s potential to help them in making quick money with a big M. While those who tread with care and caution, often shy away for fear of losing. However, the stock market is not all about speculative gains or black Tuesdays. It is a place where committed companies look for raising money to fund their activities. Serious investors can actually create wealth not only for themselves, but also for the companies and the nation. A wise way to invest in the stock market is to empower your self with information. You have to know and learn about the company you invest in, from past records and future plans.

Irrespective of what the Wall Street Gurus predict or what the economic indicators like Dow Jones Average say, a simple and foolproof way of knowing that a company is doing well is to keep a track of how much dividend income does it pay to its share holders every year. If the dividend rates have been rising steadily every year, you know you have a safe bet. To benefit from the future prospects of such companies, it is a good idea to rollback the returns into the company. Which means, instead of adding the dividends to your savings, you can invest them in the shares of the same company. That way, you can ensure that the dividends you receive are always higher than what you got last, with a larger number of shares getting added to your investment portfolio every time.

With this kind of an assured investment plan in place, investors with a gambling streak begin to think beyond making a quick gain. While those who were afraid to take risks get wiser.

Let us find out why companies that give ever-increasing cash dividend income are a good choice for investment:

Your Share Holding Goes Up And So does Your Dividend Income.
Your income begins to escalate with your owning more shares every year and the dividend income rising correspondingly.

Your Dividend Income Increases Even If Stock Prices don’t.
You are no more at the mercy of the market. Irrespective of what your shares are worth, you keep earning additional cash dividends. In fact, even if the market price dips, you are still at an advantage, as that allows you to reinvest to purchase more shares.

You are not hit by Inflation.
With the dividend income rising every year, you offset the effects of a rising inflation. This particularly provides relief to people who have retired and depend on a regular cash inflow to help them meet their expenses. At this stage one need not rollback the investment into further shares, instead, the cash dividend can be used as a kind of regular pension money.

Start Young
The ingenuity behind this investment strategy is that it protects you from the fluctuations that generally occur in the market. A lower stock market rate only means you buy more to increase your dividends more. It is advisable to start this strategy early in life while you are still working, so that your wealth builds up gradually and constantly over the years. And you are assured of a regular income, as you grow older.

Remember, the success of this proven investment plan depends significantly on the track record of the company you invest in. It should be one that declares a higher dividend at the end of each financial period. A simple way to find that out would be to calculate the dividend yield. You can do that by dividing the annual dividend per share by the price per share. Of course, no investment can be totally free of risks, neither is this one. Keep an eye on the dividend yield, and if that dips, it’s a signal for you to opt out of the investment.