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I assume Soros is talking his book. I wonder how big his short position is?

My view exactly. The government will produce as much fiat money (i.e., government debt) as it needs to in order to prop up prices.

I still see the same tired arguments (you can't eat gold, or run your car with it) as if you could do those things with green pieces of paper. The same people telling me that gold is in a bubble are the ones who told us the economy was just fine 3 years ago. Gold is volatile and I expect to...

If you own an option you can exercise it at any time, even if it's OTM. Of course, there's no rational reason to do so. (You wouldn't want to buy an asset above its market price, or sell it below its market price.) But you can indeed sell an option without exercising it, and plenty of option...

GE is a solid company?! The only reason it's not bankrupt is because the government bailed it out with cheap money. I don't want to own any shares when it goes off life support.

No, that assumes you hold the option until expiration. Suppose a stock is at $30, you buy an OTM call at $31 for $0.80, and it has a delta of 0.30 and a theta of -0.01. The next day the stock pops up to 30.50. Your call is now worth 0.80 + 0.15 - 0.01 = 0.94. You can sell it immediately for...

As everyone else has pointed out, your second example is bullish -- you're betting that EWZ won't go below $65. In theory, if they are priced correctly, you should be able to lose money equally well by buying debit spreads or selling credit spreads. A credit spread that pays you $32 but can...

My horror stories are for stocks. My short bear call spread on SPX and my short bear call spread on IYT are doing just fine. :cool:

I actually have a large (for me) position in physical gold and silver (and a bit of platinum) that I bought years ago. My plan is to sell it when I see fiscal responsibility return to my government. (That means never. :mad: ) I use gold to store a significant fraction of my wealth. But I...

And another 500 TV ads per day make it obvious that now is the time to SELL YOUR GOLD 4 CA$H! Seriously, I expect that gold will get back to $950 or so. Then it will go back up to $1300 a year later.

For options I like Interactive Brokers. The execution is no worse than any other broker I've tried and for retail traders the commissions can't be beat. On IB I can do some types of option trades that wouldn't even be feasible with other brokers because of their high commissions. IB charges...

The Treasury can issue as many bonds as it wants at low interest and the Fed will just snap them up, paying with printed money. The U.S. government spends the money it gets from the proceeds of the bonds. Therefore, so long as the Fed never sells the bonds it buys this is exactly equivalent...

Every congressman except Ron Paul believes we can deficit spend our way out of this recession. It worked so wonderfully well for the Japanese, after all.

Well, this web site is for traders, not investors. So the first thing you need to know about investing is the difference between that and trading. Nobody invests in forex or stock options, but many people trade those assets. Investors look for strong balance sheets, ample cash flow, and...

I've made millions in hindsight, myself. Just this year in fact. Unfortunately, in foresight I'm more likely to lose thousands.

Certainly the best answer to this question.

As a follow up to my claim about leveraged ETFs being a terrible long term hold, let's look at two cases, one theoretical and one real. Suppose we have an ETF with this price action: 100 -> 105 -> 100 -> 95 -> 100 -> 105 -> 100 -> 95 -> 100 -> ... That it, it oscillates forever in a...

Did I get that right -- someone bought both $5 and $7.50 calls, not 5/7.5 call spreads? It's like he could make up his mind - ITM or OTM calls?

In an IRA you have to have cash to fully cover 100% of the cost of buying the stocks at the strike price when you sell puts. Basically you can't do anything in an IRA that could potentially cause you to owe more cash than you have in your account. For example, in my IRA I can't sell naked...

Well, I regularly sell call or put spreads, but I have a strict stop loss policy. Also, since they're spreads, the worst case loss may be large but it's finite and known ahead of time. I generally do this on indices, not individual stocks. Major stock indices are less likely to have huge one...