Bitcoin for Chickens – Part 2

Yesterday, I promised that I would show you three examples of triple-digit annualized gains that we gave you for free last year.

These picks are in addition to the two big winners that I mentioned yesterday, Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT) and Dick’s Sporting Goods (NYSE: DKS), both of which I tipped you off to in November at the same time I recommended them to my Systematic Wealth subscribers.

If you bought them that day and sold them last week at their peak prices, you would have racked up annualized gains well in excess of 100% without using options or margin. Had you leveraged those bets, your returns could have been many times that amount.

By the way, the third stock identified in that article, Walgreens Boots Alliance (NasdaqGS: WBA), would have delivered an annualized gain of “only” 42%. My apologies.

Here are three others that a couple of my colleagues provided as well.

Keep on Truckin’

On November 1, Linda McDonough informed you of the huge profits she recently booked in shippers Old Dominion Freight (NasdaqGS: ODFL) and SAIA (NasdaqGS: SAIA). She also said she still liked them and was looking for strategic entry points for her next set of trades in them.

Heck, all you had to do was buy each of them that day and you would have been fine.

In the ten weeks since then, ODFL is up 17% while SAIA has gained 13%. Compound those profits over the course of a year and you are up more than 100%.

Had you been a subscriber to Linda’s trading service, Profit Catalyst Alert, you would have also enjoyed gains of 51% and 79% in them on that day.

Spreading the Wealth

Last May, our resident options expert, Jim Fink, clued you in to a stock he was tracking for his Velocity Trader service.

He recommended using a “put debit spread” to make some easy money on an expected drop in the share price of Cisco Systems (NasdaqGS: CSCO).

For purposes of this exercise, it’s not important that you understand how that type of option contract works. What is important to know is that the Cisco trade gained 120% in only eight days!

Even the most ardent Bitcoin admirer would love to earn a return like that, and with considerably less risk.

Rigging the Game

Okay, so now we know that generating huge returns is possible without all the risk and hassle of actually owning a cryptocurrency.

That being the case, what is my “Bitcoin for Chickens” recommendation for this year?

As I mentioned in “My 5 Predictions for 2018” article last month, I believe that the price of oil will rise above $70 a barrel this year.

If that happens, then I would expect a select handful of energy companies to upgrade their profit outlook for the year, which should trigger a spike in their share prices.

The biggest beneficiaries may be the off-shore drillers, which have taken a beating over the past couple of years as the price of oil remained persistently low.

Of those, my colleagues at Real World Investing believe that Transocean Ltd. (NYSE: RIG) is poised to bounce back strongly in 2018. RIG is currently priced near $12, so a return to $20 within the next eight months would result in a triple-digit annualized gain.

And if you leverage those profits by utilizing options, you could create a Bitcoin-sized profit by trading in a $12 stock.

To my way of thinking, that’s a much less risky way to go after huge returns than buying into a cryptocurrency.