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McDonalds Again And A Follow Up To Yesterday's Blog..

Option traders on Friday mornings just want to be in and out in the first hour or so of trading on short term options. In the second half of the day most of the action calms down. McDonalds sold off a little bit yesterday afternoon and firmed up a bit towards the closing. Could this "mostly downward trend" continue? Here is a partial look at some of the opening bell's activity. Today is a Friday however let us first look at how the stock traded yesterday. Now a look at it's trading pattern at 9:32.22 a.m. The McDonald stock jumped up $4.98 and the 317.50 Puts we followed all day yesterday which are now "out-of-the-money" acted accordingly. They shrunk in value. During the fist 2.22 minutes of trading they traded down to 34 dollars a contract. Now this. In the first three minutes of trading the stock jumped a bit and then started to come off a touch. These Call options where not attacting all that much attention. The bid and ask jumped up on no volume. ...
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500 Point Daily Moves

Trying to understand option trading on a Wednesday when 500 point daily swings in the market are the near norm is a challenge. Look at these five stocks and their five day charts. A lot is going to happen in the next two days and the gamble is if the markets go flat or go up just a little bit or if they go flat or go down you're going to lose. Looking at it that way it's best just to stay away. Look at the low Call volume on Boeing, Deere, Snowflake, Caterpiller and Ford. Next to nothing really. Why? Well traders don't get a second chance playing short term Call options if the markets suddenly start to go against them. It's like flipping a coin. Well it's worse than that. Your playing against computer generated logarithms which will eat you alive. That's why many option traders take holidays or reset days when the markets get this crazy. Option trading is all about taking resets. Pausing and then looking for things more comfortable to watch like the coming of earning reports.
Note, a reasonable amount of volume but not a speculatively high crazy volume.
Deere Call option trding is always pretty light.
Barron's recently reviewed the company and gave it high marks for being on top of their gameplan.
Very light trading here.
(The electric auto stocks are hot this week with Ford leading the way announcing $10,000 price increases on it's electric trucks which is something they can do after reporting recent earnings of three billion dollars or some number like that. All of this activity is late morning trading on Wednesday. Let's now jump ahead to the closing bell of Thursday August 11th, the next day. It will be interesting to see how many of these stocks continue in their breakout trends. Will buying into this upward momentum be rewarding? Here are all five stocks.
After a stock has had a one day spike upwards it's difficult to keep the momentum going.
Here we have a double with daytraders cashing out on the spike yesterday.
Notice the Calls trading up on very light volume? Finally there is Ford and Call options on Ford always attract attention.
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Lets see what happens tomorrow and add to it a closing statement. Here is what happened with comments to follow.
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Now Caterpillar.
Then Ford. Because of it's lower price, the price swings on a percentage basis can be quite large.
It was a strong week. Final comments to follow. 1) Boeing went from $6.17 to $5.00 2) Deere went from $5.55 to $17.29 3) Snowflake went from $13.70 to $8.40 4) Caterpillar went from $5.90 to $11.43 and Ford went from .51 to $1.15. In big picture, one set of options tripled, two sets of options doubled and Boeing and Snowflake slightly disappointed. This was a strong week with a Friday rally which was the iceing on the cake.

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