DJ; RE:" your LEAPS... "
BGEN - Biogen was an excellent pick, professor (^_^)
FWIW, my biggest winners this year were the financial BigBoys that I bought down during the crash, and sold up during the rally. Returns were amplified by selling covered CALLs on the underlying stocks.
It would be interesting to see what a conservative, far-CALL (since there are no LEAPS) strategy consisting of sector index options would have done YTD (Berney?) eg.,
SPX.X -vs- SPY -vs- GE
MSH.X -vs- NDX.X -vs- DELL+MSFT+INTC+CSCO -vs- IBM
RLX.X -vs- WMT
DRG.X -vs- MRK
NF.X -vs- AXP
BKX.X -vs- CMB or CCI
IUX.X -vs- AIG
XBD.X -vs- MWD or MER
As Berney's BigBoy table shows, DIA - Diamonds had a lower risk / higher reward than any subset thereof -- unless one was fortunate enough to pick MRK + WMT + MO + IBM this year. BTW, SPYders almost always beats out DIAmonds, w.r.t. risk and reward.
Interesting is the little MDY - S&P-400 MIDCAP baby spyder. It out-performed SPY, DIA and all the WEBS during the recent raging bull rally. However, it lags behind SPY/WEBS y.t.d., and tends to fall faster; A damn useful tool in a bull rally, though... +31.5% since 10-OCT, 0.5% APR yield.
I routinely monitor the performance of the EuroWEBS -vs- the national telephone stox, eg.,
EWG - Germany -vs- DT - Deutsche Telekom
EWQ - France -vs- FTE - France Telecom
EWU - England -vs- BTY - British Telecom
EWL - Switzerland -vs- SCM - SwissCom
EWP - Spain -vs- TEF - Telefonos d'Espana
EWI - Italy -vs- TI - Telecom Italia
EWD - Sweden -vs- ERICY - Ericsson
...and for the most part, ( but not always ;-) I've found that the EuroTelStox were less volatile (they went down during the crash, but then folks bought them as defensive holdings), and that the EuroTelStox outperform their respective EuroWEB (w.r.t. kapital gains plus APR yields). In addition, the EuroTelStox have PUTs/CALLs and sometimes, LEAPS available, whereas one must go to country-specific index options, rather than WEBs, which have no options, to leverage foreign stock market index positions.
I would consider something like an 80:20 = EuroWEB:TelStockLEAP worth taking a look at... or more (classic) conservative, take the 7.5% APR dividend yield of EWL - Switzerland and buy that dollar amount of SCM - SwissCom far-CALLs, for example.
Cannot tell you how happy I have been with UND - Unum Corp 8.5% MIDS as a cash-management tool and short-term bond substitute. It doesn't grow, true - but it doesn't decay either; it just churns out 8.5% APR (12.1% APR taxable equiv in an IRA) every month.
-Steve |
