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Costco Drops On A Friday Opening And McDonald's Goes Up

Here is what happened. Costco goes down on the opening. Charts like this is not pretty. McDonald's goes up. Confused? Why the interest in McDonald's? It's just junk food. If the market rolls over might this stock lose some of it's steam? Now look at these Puts? The volume of trading in them is next to nothing. Without knowing why it's going up makes the purchase of Puts too much of a gamble. Now lets look at these same Puts at 2:24 p.m. They got wiped out. What's Costco doing? Here is where things get interesting. The markets are still strong. Costco is down $74.24 around 2:23 p.m.! It's having a bad day but the stock now seems to be stabilizing. Now this. A look at it's Calls. Remember for retail option traders you're deadline to get out of these "last-day-to-expiring" options is 3:00 p.m. That's only 42 minutes away from the time of this printout.That doesn't give these options much life. Now consider this, after such a se...
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Boeing and Caterpillar

These blogs are starting to get repetitive. Blogs about Boeing and Caterpillar rising after Monday's meltdown. The DJIA was up today over 500 points and here is how these two companies did.
Look at the extremely light volume in both of these two Call option series. What does this tell us? Two things. It tells us about the sophistication level of today's traders. Getting in on a Thursday looking for a one day bounce is not a smart way to trade. Secondly, these are both "in-the-money" postions and the best percentage kicks happen with near-to-the-money options. Let me show you the swings on the 195.00 and 197.50 Caterpillar Calls today. Both were up over 200%.
In both of these series the volume of trading exceeded the open interest levels. Out-of-the money postions in near term expiring Calls is where the action is on days that enjoy 500 point rallies.

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