I had played GS with twin backspreads, calls and puts, both for small credits. The puts are likely out of play after this rally, while the call side got me long extra "paper" over 125. So I sold a little stock into the rally the last few days, and then sold some strangles to offset the fact I was now long pumped volatiltiy into earnings.
verbotenstylen
· 8 months ago
Couldn't agree more, and you've gotta feel like everyone (except CNBC puppetry) sees through the whole "record earnings" thing. You can't have it both ways...not even Goldman.
Adam
· 8 months ago
And they got to sell their stock, so I guess everyone's happy. I think people signed on (grudgingly) to throw all this money at all the banks for survival, not record profits. You would hope there's no chance they throw any of them another penny.
James
· 8 months ago
The whole country is becoming a story out of the Onion. Talk about trying to prop failed policies of the past.
Adam
· 8 months ago
well, that bailout of Bonuses was successful at one place at least.
jkw
· 8 months ago
It depends on what their goals are. If the banks want to raise the maximum amount of money through stock sales, they need to get their prices up. If the insiders want to dump their worthless shares without losing everything, they need to get their prices up. If they merely wanted to stop the market from crashing, they would not need these kind of profit reports. If they wanted to convince people that the bailouts were working and necessary, they would want to show mild losses or profits. The long run effect of huge profits will be less willingness in the future to give the banks favorable terms in bailouts. But if the important people sell their bank shares now, they don't care what happens to the banks later.
Adam
· 8 months ago
Precisely, I think that is exactly what's going on here. I guess there's no way to know, but I almost think GS would be higher if you had worse numbers, just in that people would believe it. Then again, the stock priced at 123, so pretty tough to argue they didn't get exactly what they wanted out of this.
anon#2
· 8 months ago
I think the game here is the buying of time.
In Fall of '08 - that bail out was designed to buy time, not to fix any underlying problems with the market / system.
The AIG slush fund caper buys another 3 -4 months or so.
So, barring anymore tricks with rabbits and hats - we have to wait until the July earnings for the banks to see where things stand.
Adam
· 8 months ago
y, but they'll be rabbits in the hat then too. I think the bigger issue is they're really putting all the cards on the table now in that if there's any need for more money, who would possibly vote for it? Not that they can't figure out a way to do it without headlines, but still has to be a potential issue.
All Comments
In Fall of '08 - that bail out was designed to buy time, not to fix any underlying problems with the market / system.
The AIG slush fund caper buys another 3 -4 months or so.
So, barring anymore tricks with rabbits and hats - we have to wait until the July earnings for the banks to see where things stand.