CAT Puts

Last Sunday I started this blog and never posted it. Here is how it started. The next few weeks will not be normal times for Exxon options. Trading them for the last couple of months has being a walk in the park with crude oil prices stuck in a sideways moving price range. All that is suddenly going to change. Now on Tuesday afternoon I am showing you this five day chart and what one series of this week's Friday expiring options are trading at. The 152.50 series of Calls that expire this Friday. Now this at 3:13 p.m.. Let me point something out. Exxon spiked on both Monday and Tuesday morning. It seems to do that with the world waking up to new problems. In the opening minute or two of each trading session a feeling of panic is in the air. Will this happen again tomorrow morning? In my most recent blogs I have being emphasizing the new need for option traders to adjust their trading horizions to interday moves only and to avoid to trying to create overnight holdings. Let's wh...

Same stores sales are up 6.8% in Q4 2025. With inflation and rising labour and food costs, 6.8% is not really very much. Then the rumours about 2,000 or so more outlets opening up this year are the same projections that we heard over the last few years. What they always forget to tell us is the number of their restaurants shutting down. Why might some be shutting down? Well maybe a new highway going is diverting some of the road traffic off in a different direction or a neighbouring high school is closing down. Four years ago they lost some restaurants in Russia. Now look at this. Next this. McDonald's trading on the close back on Thursday. It had a good day. There is new talk about a bigger and better "Big Arch" meal with a bigger burger with a better tangy and creamy sauce. Now this. Today's one day chart. It's Monday. Now it's one day of Call option trading. Look at the volume of trading on these Call options. Over 6,000 contracts. The open interest ...

We are witnessing huge intraday price movements on stocks like Caterpillar, Deere and to a lesser degree Tesla in the last two weeks. Tesla sales are off in Europe as BYD continues to drop off boatloads of new vehicles into countries never before receptive to their offerings. Tesla now has competition. Caterpillar and Deere now have to worry about tariffs. "Market rotations" are now the new theme as investors worry about where to park their money. Caterpillars and Deeres recent meteorological rises are under attact. Silver stocks continue to rise and Bitcoin holders are not sleeping well at night. The price of gold has gone up and is not showing signs of coming off. People are now wondering if they should be lightning up on the weight of their jewerly boxes. Investors holding baskets of stocks now wonder why. Might they wake up one morning to find everything down 20%. Eight hundred point market drops in one day are now shrugged off as being nothing to worry about and they he...

Kind of a dumb topic however it's real life unfolding as we speak. How is a little marijuana company named Canopy Growth doing and what might change in the companies near term future? Here is a chart of it's stock price. I don't need to ask Ai what the challenges are for a company like this going forward. Here are two or three big ones. A company can't keep going on operating if it keeps losing money. Others in the same industry may be feeling the same pressures. If it also has an overeseas operation which was meant to bring in money and it is not. That's another concern. What are they learning from the experience? Are new opportunities opening up? Once again it's a learning curve for everyone, including even people like watching it from the sidelines. I don't follow it all that closely but it's fair to say they are in challenging times. Now this, a look at it's one dollar Call options that expire in January 2027. That's a long time away. Why w...

Option traders already know this. The market sometimes pops on the opening after a large one day drop. Yesterday, a Monday it closed down over 800 points. The problem sometimes is that if you put in a ticket in the premarkets to get in on the opening, a "buy at market" ticket you risk getting filled at a ridiculously high price if the price of the stock opens with a gap to the upside. Let's look at how one series of Home Depot Call options traded on the opening. Today is a Tuesday. The low of the day on these Call options happened on the opening with a price of $6.46. The chart doesn't show this low priced sale happening. Let me try and explain how this happened. Look at this. Here is where it can get complicated. The chart above shows a spike at 9:00 a.m. Yet the markets don't open until 9:30 a.m. You can't trade options in the premarkets. If you submit a "buy-at-market" or "sell-at-market" ticket it sits on the books and gets an opening...