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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bosco who wrote (6263)	9/8/1998 2:27:00 PM
From: Paul Berliner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

Tom, Bosco, thread: Firstly, the one index I'd buy calls on in a mega-meteor shower is XAL (airline index) because there supposedly should be a window of opportunity for the inhabitants of the doomed region to do the 'mad jet' and the airlines will hike their fares in anticipation of the mass exodus (heh heh). I can't think of anything to buy puts on, except maybe the market in general. At this level, my fledgling macro-speculative instincts had me holding (as of Fri.) puts on a couple of Pac-rim electronics makers, a couple of S. American banks, a Chilean Utility , a German telecom bohemoth, a poorly-run U.S. property casualty bohemoth that recently acquired bigtime east coast flood exposure through a unsynergetic acquisition (lets me participate in the overall blue chip slide with the bonus of an obvious earnings warnings due to the hurricanes & storms), plus a pile of dirt cheap calls picked up last week on a drug bohemoth and an HK ADR (a little insurance policy in case some overnight market recovery miracle wipes out my unrealized gains). I really am ST in my trading nature, so my positions change weekly and are motivated primarily by what I read. I only use options because of the extra leverage and the minimized risk. I have my eye on a few others too, because I've taken money off the table today. They include: The lone major money center bank that has yet to report russian trading losses. A Portugese financial concern. You really have to do your homework in order to find what ADRs have options. The list is slim. I like to find 1 bank and 1 telecom for each target country. Most telecoms are optionable though, and despite there handsome earnings growth they mainly function as a proxy for the country their in, i.e. Telebras is a fine Co., but as the Bovespa goes, so too does TBR go. Why don't I just buy puts on the foreign market indices like XDT, HKO or LTX? The premiums are outlandish and the most important thing for me in a trade is not overpaying for the option. If anyone wants to get more specific, I'll only discuss it through Private Message. Steve, if your reading: Why don't I have puts on a certain Philippine Telecom Co.? 2 weeks ago the Phil. market tanked 6% one night and that particular ADR opened unchanged on the NYSE (exactly where it closed the previous day). The specialists for ADRs are supposed to do the correct math utilizing the forex rates and the shares per ADR and have the ADR open at the correct price - where it goes from there is solely market demand, but when it didn't open at least 1 point lower that day I was scared away. I tried calling the NYSE to get an explanation from the specialist but got no answer.