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We bought 800 shares yesterday pennies off the intraday low, but because this was a Pick of the Day that may have attracted the interest of relatively inexperienced traders, I am not entirely comfortable about having gotten aboard in the final hour of the session.  We'll play the hand we were dealt nonetheless, sticking to a 3.49 stop-loss and a 3.77 offer for half of what we  acquired.  The stock looked to be basing after we boarded, but there is no predicting whether the fragile low at 3.51 will survive a change of mood come morning.  There was news Tuesday night concerning a stock-purchase deal with Abu Dhabi apparently gone bad, but it's hard to guess how this will effect Citi at the bell, since the bullish implications of the deal had been ignored to begin with. _______ UPDATE (2:04 p.m. EST):  Citi has spent the morning boring bulls and bears alike half to death. We stuck to our discipline nonetheless, exiting on a stop-loss at 3.49 for a $4o trading loss.

We hold 12 December 6 calls for 0.15, having gotten sandbagged when we bought into a mini-cascade of selling on the opening bell. Our goal is to short a dozen December 7 calls against them for 0.06 or better, but let's be crazy-greedy for now and offer them for 0.10, good-till-canceled. If you think Goldman Sachs eventually will move higher, there is little reason to worry about this inexpensively bullish position. ______ UPDATE:  Having achieved a perverse sort of perfection in the timing of our purchase of some call options, it's now time to write them off.  We'll book a $180 trading loss and hold them as a lottery ticket on -- let's see if I can choke this phrase out without getting nauseous -- a possible "Santa rally" into year's end. 

Citi's very capable handlers are oozing the stock up to a 5.04 Hidden Pivot midpoint whose conquest would clear a path to at least 5.97.  The niggardly, risk-averse trader in me wants to try and buy a dozen December 6-December 7 calls spreads for 0.09.  We'll attempt to leg it on, but with the precaution of a "contingency" order, as follows:  Buy twelve December 6 calls (CLX)  for 0.17, provided the stock is trading 4.96 or higher, but bid 0.15 for them otherwise.  _______ UPDATE (10:10 a.m.):  We bought a dozen December 6 calls for 0.15.  Ahead of the opening, I would have suggested lowering the bid on the supposedly bad earnings news, but I wrongly expected the calls to open on their lows.  Instead, the market makers sold them to us for 0.15, then offered them down to 0.13 a split-second later. Brokers have been barred for conduct less sleazy than that.  In any event, the earnings news had Citi booking a $101M profit after reducing losses on toxic assets. This is of course a load of crap -- Citi's toxic assets, and those held by other big banks, would sink the banks if the paper were marked to market -- but the relative truth of the earnings spin should not have caused the stock to sell off as badly as it did. Assuming the selloff was engineered to knock Citi down for the benefit of its sleazy handlers, we should see the stock recover sufficiently over the next couple of weeks to allow us to spread off the calls, shorting December 7s, as originally planned.