In a little more than 24 hours, January will have passed without a word from these quarters concerning Sen. Ted Kennedy. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t receive some droll reflection on Massachusetts’ senior senator – aka, the last guy Mary Jo Kopechne was ever to see -- that I would not be thrilled to share with you all. But I have restrained myself, chastened by a little voice in my ear – the voice, actually, of my friend and fellow guru Chris Carolan – repeating something that a famous guru/friend once told him: Don’t mix politics and trading advice. And so I won’t. Nor can geopolitics be safely included in the daily mix, judging from a piece of particularly savage mail I received in response to the “nuke Iran” piece that ran here a couple of weeks ago. Hey, I was just kidding, sort of. I’d intended to say “Nuke Chavez,” but it didn’t come out that way. In any event, that’s no longer an option, since Cindy Sheehan could get hit by the crossfire.

Of course, none of the foregoing should excuse the fact that we were a day late on Exxon Mobil. I’ve just begun to push trades in energy stocks, featuring this little gem in Monday’s Touts:

“XOM’s 50-day moving average has crossed up through the 200-day (see inset), suggesting that buoyant times lie ahead for Exxon Mobil shares. One way to play a move higher in the coming months without risking much would be to buy some April 70 calls (XOMDN) as a kind of calendar-spread starter kit. The idea is to later short an equal number of March 70 calls against them as the stock moves higher. Ideally, XOM will be steaming toward 70 when the March calls expire, leaving us naked-long the Aprils at no cost. (That's if we can short the March calls for as much as we've paid for the Aprils.)

“Accordingly, today only, bid 0.35 for a dozen April 70 calls. Make the bid contingent on the underlying stock trading 61.20 or higher. If it's below that price, lower the bid for the calls to 0.30 with no further contingencies.”

As we now know, the April 70 calls opened well above our bid when the underlying stock gapped up a point-and-a-half on record earnings. The options traded as high as 0.80, but never any lower than 0.55. Oh well. As I noted in an intraday post instructing you to cancel the bid,  what turned out to be a quick doubler in XOM calls will not be the last such opportunity that we see in the stock The energy sector in general looks like a great place to be in 2006, so I’d advise you to stay tuned for some of the cheapest tradable ideas this side of Wall Street.