CAT Puts

The stock opened down and jumped at 9:31 a.m. Look at this chart. In our last blog I followed the trading pattern of it's Calls all day. Had you placed a premarket, "at-market" ticket on the 12 series of Calls your guarented fill on the opening would have reflected the drop in the stocks price in the first few seconds of the opening. Somewhere between 9:30:00 a.m. and 9:30:59 a.m. the 12 series of Calls dropped in price to $.57. Then in the first five minutes of trading they rebounded to a high on the day of $.76. "At-market", "premarket" tickets in this instance would have guaranteed that you would be part of this action. The flip side of this logic is that there were no guarentees that the stock was going to go up. The use of "at-market" tickets on stocks in this price range with four days of trading life left in them should be included in your bag of tricks. Scarier is the use of this type of order on "last-day-to-expiring" opti...

Ford one week options. It's kind of random. Throwing money into one week Call options on a stock that was down last week. Here is how the 12 series of Calls are priced going into Monday's opening market. . If the stock has a good day these options could go to $.90. It's not much of a trade however if you're using a discount broker to do your trading it could be a good "in-and-out" situation. It could also be a real drag if the stock starts to tank lower. Now look at this recent five day chart on Ford. I used it in one of my previous blogs. Ford is known to jump on good news. Now this question? Does the simplicity of my thinking scare you? I also follow Nio but I don't like the way it trades. Here it is going into todays opening. Nio like other EV companies are battling it out for market share. I don't trust the narratives of what they are up to. Five day out options (options that expire this Friday) in a way give you a one day free ride, meaning the...

Let's start with this. Caterpillar has an earnings report coming out on April 30th. You should listen to it. It's not going to be difficult to find. Now look at these how these two series of options closed out the week. The Calls are just "in-the-money" and the Puts are just slightly "out-of-the-money".The cost to play the upside with one week options almost equals what it costs to play the downside. That's kind of strange as usually the Calls cost more to purchase than the Puts. Both are super expensive however Caterpillar as of late can jump $15.00 or $20.00 dollars in one day. When I say super expensive what do I mean? 2,690 means $2,690 Americian per contract. That is not chump change. You would have to have a very strong conviction it was going to move one way or another before you would want to jump in. Yet there is bigger problem. The current price of the stock is in a nose bleeding territory. Look at it's one year chart. Is it really doing ...

First the chart. On paper it looks like this chart could rebound. Here is one series of it's "in-the-money" Calls. Here are three reasons why this situation is to dangerous to play. 1) There is an Avis Budget Group Inc. implosion happening today. A really big one. Read my previous blog. That's not directly related to this company but it makes the sector a bad space to be in. 2) The "bid-and-ask" spread is to far apart which helps to give the market makers some extra insurance. That plus the volume of trading is very light which also seems to give the house an advantage. Look at Walmart. The spread is about the same but you can split the middle without affecting the "bids-and-asks" and the volumes are so much better. I like trading in that kind of space better. 3) Hertz is not the kind of company which comes out with daily or weekly updates. Contrast this to the stock Ford which seems to have good and bad news coming out every other day. With Fo...

I blogged about this one the day before. Here is todays action at 11:a.m.. The stock took a massive hit. Is the short squeeze unwinding? Let's move onto Thursday morning. That's a drop of over 400 dollars in two trading sessions. Now a look at these two series of Puts at 11:00 A.M. on Thursday morning. Look at the volume of trading in the second series shown. ... So many questions can now be asked? Is this a "catching a falling knife syndrome? Is this stock going back down to the $100.00 like it was trading at last month? Might it now catch a slight rebound? If you just made in the last two days like $50,000 playing the Puts starting with $5,000 would you now risk like $5,000 again and throw it back into tomorrow's expiring $255.00 Calls? Thousands of traders are now glued to their chairs watching this unprecedented action. Might you buy next week's out 255 Call series? To help better put this into perspective here is it's one year chart. Thursdays at n...