Trading Block: Earnings Highlights for the Week

• Tuesday - GE, Sony, BP, FB, ebay, Pfizer, Coca-Cola
• Wednesday - GM
• Thursday - Apple, Starbucks, Weight Watchers, Spotify, Cigna, Dow/DuPont
• Friday - ExxonMobil, Cboe, Alibaba, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway
• Equities: Growth in US corporate earnings expectations remains strong.

Odd Block: More puts in Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA) and "Line in the sand" puts in Yelp Inc (YELP)

Mail Block: Options question of the week

Volatility is all over the place these days. Some say it's too cheap, others say it's too expensive. Either way they want to trade it. What's your weapon of choice when trading the wacky world of volatility?

• VIX options/futures
• VXX options/ shares
• TVIX shares
• SPX / $SPY options

Listener questions and comments:

• Question from Mark Davis: Hello, I have written in previously and got some great feedback on my question, so hoping you can help me out again.I am still playing (paper trading) with options while in my real account I purchase shares outright. After having quite a few good years, with the increase in volatility lately I have taken some pretty rough hits, so far for the YTD I lost about 16% of my portfolio. I should also mention I currently only deal with Index funds (S&P, International, & Small cap). I go in and out of these stocks based on various parameters that may have me holding a certain stock for less than a month to a little more than a month. Is your stock replacement strategy a good use for this or maybe not since time horizon is generally not long.

Example. Tomorrow I may buy 100 Shares of SPY @ 25 each, likely selling the shares in about 20 days. I am trying to figure a way to get the same (or close to same) movement as if I owned the shares outright while limiting the downside of at least setting a li e in the sand. I am having trouble wrapping my head around the right strategy or if what I want to do is even possible. So in the example above my portfolio had I bought outright and the stock is at 30 in 20 days I'm at $500 but what do I do to get close to this using Options. On the flip side if SPY was at 20, I am thinking there is a way that I would can protect myself from losing some of that $500.

Another thing I'm not sure of when doing this should I only be buying enough Contracts that I could afford it were I to exercise the options, i.e. if I have $200 in my account and the underlying is $1/share would I only want to buy 2 calls even though I would ideally have enough money to buy more contracts? Thanks for your feedback.

Around the Block/This Week in the Markets

• Nov 2 - Unemployment, International Trade, Factory Orders