Sold the rest of those GLD puts

In a post earlier this month ("Buying a lottery ticket to bet against gold") I mentioned buying a few puts on the gold ETF GLD. Those puts I bought were the Jan 10s with a strike price of 108, GCZMD.X. I got them at $0.74. I sold half on 12/11 at $2.92 for a gain of about 390%. Today I sold the rest at $3.20, for a gain of about 430%. I'd send Buffetteer17 a nice bottle of scotch if I knew his address.

Playing with the house's money

In a post last Thursday ("Buying a lottery ticket to bet against gold") I mentioned buying a few puts on the gold ETF GLD. Those puts I bought were the Jan 10s with a strike price of 108, GCZMD.X. I got them at $0.74. Sold half today at $2.92 for a gain of about 390%. Letting the other half ride a little longer.

Update on that bet against gold

In a post last Thursday ("Buying a lottery ticket to bet against gold") I mentioned buying a few puts on the gold ETF GLD. Those puts I bought were the Jan 10s with a strike price of 108, GCZMD.X. I got them at $0.74 and they closed yesterday at $2.65, so they're up about 350% since last Thursday. So far, so good for Buffetteer17's idea. When to sell is another question.

Buying a lottery ticket to bet against gold

I've mentioned the pseudonymous GuruFocus commenter Buffetteer17 before, noting that he is probably the savviest and most numerate of the commenters on that site. There's a lot more chaff than wheat on GuruFocus, but I usually read Buffetteer's posts with interest. He wrote this in a GuruFocus comment thread today:

According to the Sornette bubble detector formula, the gold price bubble is nearing a critical point, meaning there's likely to be a large correction in the next few weeks. I applied the formula to GLD price history going back to March and got several high quality fits, with an R-squared in the range of 92-94%. You can clearly see the faster-than-exponential price rise on a log price plot. The critical dates range from 11/27 to 12/4. I bought a few Dec 09 and Jan 10 put options on GLD as a lottery ticket.

At this point, a commenter mentioned the devaluation of the dollar as the cause of the spike in gold prices. Buffetteer's response:

Gold prices in dollars are going up super-exponentially, way too much to be explained by dollar devaluation. Maybe dollar weakness is an underlying cause, but the gold price is now disconnected from that. We're seeing herding behavior. The motivation seems to be buy gold because other people are buying it and the price is increasing.

As I noted in my own comment on that thread,

I had a related exchange with Aaron Edelheit, after he wrote a post saying people should get out of cash because of dollar weakness. My guess is that when we get the inevitable stock market correction, the dollar will rise as it did last time, and gold will drop. The longer term trends might be different, but that seems like the most likely near term scenario.

I piggybacked on Buffetteer17's idea here and picked up a handful of Jan 10 puts on GLD today.