You know things are pretty bad in the economy when even the gas-station owners, particularly the smaller guys, can’t even afford to refill their pumps because the cost of gas is too outrageous.

Not only that, but with three-quarters of consumers buying their fuel with credit cards, the pain at the pump they’re enduring is passed back to the station owners, who in turn are paying bigger fees to the credit card companies. Add the fact that many pumps have caps on how much you can spend in a single transaction, and the station owners’ profits are getting hit twice.

You may even notice an increase of stations offering a discount for those customers who choose to pay cash. In my neighborhood in the Washington, D.C., area, you can always see those stations from a mile away because the lines for those pumps are often bleeding out into the city streets for consumers desperate to save a few bucks.

It also says something when oil conglomerate ExxonMobil (XOM) is even getting out of the filling-station game, as the company recently announced it’s spinning off 2,200 stations. It just goes to show that your local gas stations aren’t printing money, after all, especially when they’re competing to get your business by trying to beat other nearby stations’ prices.

As a consumer, you may be ready to throw up your hands in defeat and surrender to the status quo. But as an options trader, you should be seeing dollar signs — not (just) for Big Oil and commodities traders, but also for yourself.

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WHO’S PROFITING FROM THOSE INCREASING FEES?

If you guessed the credit card companies, you’re 10 steps ahead of your fellow investors. Remember, those guys aren’t making loans like those beleaguered banks that are writing off their bad debts left and right. The credit card guys — mainly MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V) are actually getting paid every single time you use your card.

And in this increasingly cashless society, don’t forget that the newly IPO’d debit card kingpin (Visa) has another way to clean up via debit-card transaction fees on all those on-the-spot and online purchases folks are making when they aren’t putting gas in their cars.

(Check out my FREE Tactical Trader Minute video on trading Visa and MasterCard in 2008 by clicking here.)

A-TISKET A-TASKET, A PROFITABLE TRADING BASKET

Trading names like Visa and MasterCard together is what I like to call a “trading basket.” I frequently recommend basket trades to my Tactical Trader subscribers as a way to overweight specific sectors that are showing broad relative strength.

Sure, there are tons of Exchange-Traded Funds out there that group stocks by sectors, and many even have options available for trading on them, so that you only have to buy one option contract to be able to leverage 20 companies.

While trading ETF options is a great strategy to use when you’re betting on a sector to fly or fail and you’re not sure which individuals stocks to trade, I am more in-favor of finding the top stocks in the hottest sectors and creating baskets of three to five stocks that I think are going to get up and go. Then, as each starts running, we start peeling them off one at a time or, in some instances, all at once when we see all the stocks in the sector blazing up the charts.

In fact, you can check out our latest basket trades by clicking here.

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OUR COAL BASKET TURNED INTO A DIAMOND OF A TRADE

Basket trades are an amazing way to make profits, whether you’re a swing trader going for the quick gains or an options trader looking to leverage those moves for up to 10 times the gains.

Check out how profitable one of our recent baskets was in just four trading days:

We recently initiated a coal basket trade in Consol Energy (CNX), Joy Global (JOYG), Arch Coal (ACI) and Peabody Energy (BTU) that benefited from a quick pop in the sector thanks to a huge run-up in the price of crude oil futures.

But because crude was looking to retreat, we headed for the hills … but not before banking profits of 80%, 54%, 65% and 61%, respectively, on call options on each of those smoking-hot stocks.

Join us on our next basket trade.

BUILDING A BOUNTIFUL BASKET

It’s not easy to make money in a market that’s as erratic as this one. But even though the Dow Industrials (DJI) have dipped below 12,000, you’ve got to remember that it only contains 30 stocks. Sure, they’re huge corporations that have thousands of employees in dozens of countries around the world.

But even though the Dow 30 act as a barometer for the greater market, there are thousands of stocks out there that are in their own stealth bull markets … and those are the names that catch my eye.

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We’ve been banking winners on three out of every four trades in my Tactical Trader service, and here are a few of our success tips:

* Finding those companies that are reporting blowout earnings and guiding higher for the coming quarters and even for the year ahead.

* Picking first-tier names that not only are breaking out to new highs but also those that have no overhead resistance to keep them from pushing higher.

* Uncovering those companies that are positioned in the “catbird seat” — setting themselves apart from their competitors in both sales, innovation and market reach.

* Buying in-the-money calls with plenty of time left before expiration so that we can take advantage of time premium and give ourselves time to ride out any rough patches on the road to profitability.

These are the types of positions you should be adding to your trading account anyway, and buying options on three to five of them in a particular sector not only increases your leverage because they’re options, but you have a real opportunity to make three to five times the profits as each stock starts to take off.

And even if a stock or two decides not to join their brethren on any significant sector run-up, you’ve done yourself a favor by being in several strong names. And by buying options with several weeks or even months before expiration, it alleviates the pressure somewhat because you have time on your side to let the laggards catch up. If they don’t, then you can turn around and sell them with most of their remaining value and initiate a new basket trade.

Or, you can do it the easy way and join me at Tactical Trader, where I regularly provide basket trading opportunities in addition to weekly options trades. Hurry — click here to get in on the next trade today!