Recently I had the opportunity to meet with one of the most excitable options traders and educators in Las Vegas…his name is Mark Longo and he’s the founder and main options guy at TheOptionsInsider.com. I was able to spend about 45 minutes just chatting with him about what’s going on in the options world, what’s new with his site, and everything he said about options made perfect sense. Almost as if he actually knew what he was talking about! Come to find out later in the conversation he knew what he was talking about, and he’s an authority on options…egg on my face! TheOptionsInsider.com is a great FREE resource for all things options and with Mark at the helm you won’t be led astray. Please enjoy the article (as I read it twice), comment below, and visit TheOptionsInsider.com today!

=====================================================================

We are seeing a familiar refrain in

Yesterday we got news that the CFTC is paying attention to the ETF industry. I suppose we should be flattered, but I'm much more concerned than titillated.

It's not all that infrequent that regulators raise the specter of "speculators" in the headlines, and it's nearly as surefire a paper-seller as "man bites dog." Very few market participants really call themselves speculators, and the word itself has taken on near-evil connotations. If you'd walked into a cocktail party in May of 2008 and told everyone you were an oil speculator, you would likely have had a martini-bath and an early taxi-ride home.

Today's news was that the CFTC is looking into limits on speculative position limits on all "commodities of finite supply"—really, energy commodities. This is virtual handwriting on the wall—there will be position limits, just as there have been in agricultural commodities. It will be difficult to argue that the

Gold didn’t do a lot in Far East trading on Tuesday. The low of the day occurred at the open in London…and for the next two hours, gold put on a spirited rally [$10+] that ended with the price going vertical about half an hour before the Comex open. However, as is always the case at moments like these, the usual not-for-profit sellers showed up and did their dirty until it was time for them to go for lunch at 12:00 noon in New York. Once ‘da boyz’ were at lunch, gold made a $7 run higher, which ended the second that floor trading was over on the Comex…and electronic trading began.

And by the time that gold trading was over for the day…most of that gain had been made to disappear…and gold finished down about a dollar from Monday’s close.

Author: James West, posted on Seeking Alpha

The prospect of the United States defaulting on its debt is not just likely. It’s inevitable, and imminent.

The regulatory black holes into which sanity and reason disappear on a daily basis are soon to collapse under the mass of their sheer size. The circle jerk going on among G7 governments has to end – the steady advance of gold, even in the face of a managed price, exposes the real value of the U.S. dollar, as opposed to its apparent value expressed in the dollar index.

Is 2009 the year that the United States formally defaults? And with that, will the dollar collapse be rolled back ten for one or more?

There are a lot of reasons to support that theory. To Wall Street economists, such an event is heresy and therefore unthinkable. Yet Wall Street is the very La-la-land that bred the idea of a

Gold got smacked just a bit harder than normal when trading began in the Far East on Friday morning, but had gained all that back by 3:00 a.m. New York time…then promptly lost in all in the next hour. However, shortly after London opened it appeared that a sustainable rally was underway.

But the moment the traders on the Comex started their day, gold got hit for about $13 and never recovered after that.

For silver, it was a different story. Although it, too, was hit at the beginning of Globex trading on Friday morning…it began to rally just before lunch in London…and with the odd pause, continued its winning ways right until the end of Comex trading in New York.

Of

GoldDrivers 2009 – Extraordinary Bullish Outlook for Gold

By: Eric Hommelberg ldSeek.com

It sure has been a brutal year for gold and its shares and many may wonder if the $1030 top clocked in March 2008 marked the top for the gold bull market that started in April 2001. Despite the fact that many analysts want you to believe that gold has failed to act as a

Both gold and silver shot up about an hour or so after the Sydney open, only to be smacked into submission very shortly after Hong Kong opened…and that was basically it for the day in both metals. Every rally attempt in gold that got anywhere near $850 got sold…and silver drifted down to around $10.75 before recovering a bit towards the close.

Volume was paper thin yesterday, so it wasn’t difficult for anyone who wanted to, to bend the metal prices to their will. I expect this trading pattern to continue for the balance of the year as the Western world (such as it is) heads into the holiday season. So, unless something totally unexpected appears out of left field over the next two weeks, I don’t expect most markets (including the precious metals) to be any more exciting than watching paint dry.

Open interest in Friday’s trading was as follows…gold o.i.

Here's how it was reported, for example, in the Wall Street Journal:

Reaction to the Wall Street bailout and frenzied last-minute trading in the oil market sent crude prices soaring by more than $16 a barrel, the biggest one-day jump ever.

The late-day spike, which shoved oil up 16% to $120.92 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, offered an illustration of Wall Street's hard-to-predict moves amid broad market turmoil.

And here's what really happened.

The most striking thing about yesterday's oil prices was the disparity between different futures contracts. The October contract, which expired yesterday, did indeed settle at $120.92, up more than $16. But oil for delivery in November closed at $109.27, an increase of only $6.62, and longer-forward contracts saw an even more modest increase. Unquestionably what was going on was a short squeeze, in which traders who had sold the October contract short were scrambling

Earlier today I found out about a seminar that K & L Gates is presenting at no cost to those who are looking for advice on how to prepare for an SEC examination. Here are the details:

In this program, partners in our Investment Management and SEC Enforcement Groups will provide practical suggestions for hedge fund managers to prepare for an SEC examination. We will address this topic from the standpoint of advisers managing hedge funds, separate accounts, or both, and from the standpoint of an adviser with an affiliated broker/dealer. We will give pointers on preparing for and managing an SEC examination, and we will cover SEC hot button topics, including