During the course of this year, I have taken a few stabs at Alcoa (symbol AA), but the danged thing moves so slowly that I have just bailed on it. Long-term, and I’m talking years, I think this thing could be vastly lower than it is now. It’s like an oil painting, though, so it doesn’t hold my interest.
A superset of Alcoa, and one that’s more dynamic, can be found in the ETF symbol XME. I am particularly drawn to this because of the marvelous long-term configuration of the XME/GDX ratio. Over decades, this ratio seems to be neatly confined, and although no one is going to mistake this for a perfectly-formed sinewave, I think we can all agree that historically this is very expensive and more prone to go down than up.
The bottom line being that I’ve bought January 2024 XME puts instead of horsing around with Alcoa anymore.
