CAT Puts

 It played the same game as Carvana also did on a Monday. Look at these three charts. 1) It's up on the opening and the Puts at this point (they are "out-of-the-money") are trading at $3.25. Now the chart changes. That's the same thing it did yesterday. Yesterday it topped out around 11:00 a.m. and today it topped out around 11:30 a.m.. Now this. It starts to rebound. So how do you think the Puts did on that downturn. We here is a look just after the fact. You can see how high they went. They went to $4.82. If you look at the chart more carefully you will see that at around 11:30 a.m. they actually traded down to $2.60. It's not much of a trade but the point is this stock on day one and day two of the week is tradable. I would argue that this "tradability" diminishes towards the last two days of the trading week. At the end of  day (a Tuesday),  Carvana was only up on the day $2.89. At the end of the day the Puts were basically unchanged from where they ...

 Carvana had a good week last week. It was up $22.86. I talked about this American used car dealer franchise  in two of my last blogs last week. It's a Monday. Let's look at it's Puts on it which will expire this Friday. What's the point? The point is to illustrate the power of Puts options over a short period of time. Before we do that let me show you how one of it's competitors is trading on the day. "Avis Budget", as you can see from the chart below is on fire. Now let's talk about Caravana. It's now  12:17 p.m.. It's down $4.82. on the day. Is it to late now to buy Puts on it?  Why would you want to? Look at how it is selling off. Had you bought Puts on it forty minutes earlier you now could be selling out at a wonderful profit. Check out it's current  chart below. Do you think that it's on the verge of finding a support level?  It's an ugly looking chart. When you see charts like this what do you think? The last time I did a bl...

 Here is the number. Call in to listen to their just released quarterly report. You won't have to talk to anyone. It is 800-839-1247. In about five days this link will disappear. Please listen to it. I listened to all of it once and to the first half of it two times. What I learned is that their retail car sales on the quarter compared to the same quarter a year were up 6%. They purchased 336.000 vehicles from the public, up 7% and 48.000 from dealers up 38%. Their average retail sale price was $26,100, down $400.00 per vehicle from last year. They doubled their share buy back program. AI technologies are now helping them operate more efficiently. Everything seems positive. But wait, we are talking about  the used car business and what could happen if consumer confidence suddenly starts to wain? Look at it's three year chart. It now sees to be hitting a rough patch.  Now a one month chart.  All of this talk about tariffs and what level of tariffs will be imposed on n...

 I have four stocks to report on. This blog is a follow up to the action I talked about in a June 15th blog. We now have just finished a four day trading week. Here are the highlights of what happened in no particular order.. 1) CarMax.  Here is how one series of it's Call options on it closed on Thursday of last week. Why are we looking at this? Well it shows what the 65 series of Call options were trading at, one week before their earnings report came out.  Would that be a clever time to get into these options in anticipation of good news? The quarterly earnings report were coming out on the morning of Friday June 18th before the markets opened. If you want you can now call a toil free number to listen in on their earnings report. They will keep that line open and free to listen to for a week or so until up to the end of June. The number to call is posted in the past blog. I called in an listened to it. Two of the things mentioned in it were their average vehicle sale p...

 Caterpillar and Deere at 11:00 a.m. on a Friday morning. I will try and make this simple. 1) Caterpillar. Shown are both the Calls and Puts which expire at 3:00 p.m. today. Caterpillar jumped up in early trading and basically sold off to where it started the day. The problem now for option traders is the wide spread between the bid and ask. Sure you can try to get a fill on the buy side by splitting the difference however when it comes to selling you will be forced to accept a selling price closer to the bid than to the ask. That's a major concern. 2) Deere. The same thing. Look at the wide spreads between the "bid and asks". Once again, getting into or out of these contracts at a fair prices would be difficult to do with the spreads this far apart at this time of the day. This reality helps to keep option traders away.  Now compare this to the relatively tight bids and asks found on one day options on  the stock Walmart. As you can see, Walmart options are so much more ...