End Of Ukraine Crisis?

Schloss 16

Glad I did not panic yesterday!  Stock futures are up pretty nicely this morning.  When I wrote about thinking about buying more GTAT (Actually Thinking About Adding To My GTAT), it appears I had about a 30 minute window to execute that strategy yesterday.  The stock opened up down about 40 cents, but ended up closing 70 cents to the positive.  I see today in Vampire Trading Hour, it is looking to move up another 40 cents!

Schloss 16

 Here is the final of the Schloss golden rules that I have been displaying.  Do people like them?  Let me know.  This one is extremely important.  I have never bought on margin.  In fact, as my readers know, I try to keep at least 20% cash for opportunities.  But leverage goes further than margin.  To me it also could mean options.  While I did finally enroll to trade in options, I have yet to do so.  If you do it naked, you stand a real chance of losing 100%, and that does not feel like investing.

Now I do own warrants in BAC and HIG as you know.  And those largely behave like options.  But the difference to me is that they are very long in duration (2019) and that provides an element of safety.  In addition, they are not so highly leveraged (there are Citi warrants that are much higher leveraged).

The final type of leverage that I have used from time to time, but am very nervous about are leveraged ETFs.  My experience with these has not been very successful.  To me they should only be used for very short durations and probably as some type of hedge as opposed to a straight bet on market direction. On Ed's Talking Stock, the main guy Ed used triple levered ETFs all the time.  But that is just too risky for me.