Picks: My Stock Gambles

The Korea situation will possibly give an opportunity to buy stocks. NK is still saber rattling, which is a bit of a surprise, as they surely do not really want war. They could kill a lot of people, but never win a war. The Chinese don't want the war either, but possibly are encouraging the saber rattling, as they ultimately want the US out of Asia. Are the NKs crazy enough to push the envelope a little more and do something like shell more islands, or make another sneaky, deniable torpedo attack during these upcoming war games? If so, stocks will swoon and my bet would be that they will rapidly recover as it becomes clear there won't be war.

I am also watching Iran. If tensions increase, oil will go up on a speculative basis. I like the hedge of owning energy stocks [there is at least one ETF] and have put quite a bit in that already to hedge against the chance that Israel will actually make a surprise attack on Iran. Some kind of shooting war is actually more likely in that region IMHO than in Korea. Yes, "IMHO" not "IMO", take all this with a grain of salt, and for sure be advised this is gambling.

Quote: odiousgambit

The Korea situation will possibly give an opportunity to buy stocks. NK is still saber rattling, which is a bit of a surprise, as they surely do not really want war. They could kill a lot of people, but never win a war. The Chinese don't want the war either, but possibly are encouraging the saber rattling, as they ultimately want the US out of Asia. Are the NKs crazy enough to push the envelope a little more and do something like shell more islands, or make another sneaky, deniable torpedo attack during these upcoming war games? If so, stocks will swoon nd my bet would be that they will rapidly recover as it becomes clear there won't be war.

Until the 1970s SK and NK were fairly equal in GDP so at the time unification was impossible. Now SK is somehting like 40xs NK GDP and the gap is growing. Yet we have not pushed to collapse the NK regime. The time has come to pull China aside and get them to agree to let it collapse. Then if they don't agree collapse it anyways. The other problem seems to be SK who would rather the time-to-time threat of hot-war than get the "bill" for reunification like West Germany did. Rubbish, they need to be told.

IMHO NK is more dangerous because they have so little to lose. Iran is dangerous, but they are a large country (will be larger than Russia in 50 years) and they know if they touch Israel there won't be an Iran the day after since Israel has some nukes stashed in subs somewhere. NK has seen we didn't have the guts to drop a bomb on Bejing in the 1950s when we could have done it w/o retaliation so why would we do it now when there will be?

I bought warrants in a gold mining company last Friday and they went down quite a bit on Monday but now that gold is up by so much it looks like I'll have a return of over 30% in less than week when the market opens tomorrow. Makes me wish I had bought them yesterday or this morning, I would have made a killing. I often buy warrants on Friday since many people want to close their position before the week end and it lets me buy them at a decent discount.