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

Some option traders on Friday mornings just want to be in and out in the first hour or so of trading on short term options they feel comfortable trading. In the second half of the day most of the action calms down. Take your winnings and run. McDonalds sold off a little bit yesterday afternoon and firmed up a bit towards the closing. Could this "mostly downtrend" continue? Here is a partial look at the opening bell's action, today 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. Now this, McDonald's jumps up $4.98 and the 317.50 Puts we followed yesterday which are now "out-of-the-money" acted accordingly. 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 started to come off a touch. These Call options where not attacting all that much attention. The bid and ask jumped up ...
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Snowflake Call Options

Snowflake is a company valued at 1.22 billion. It's a California based company, a cloud data provider. A Silicon Valley high tech story. What I know is that "Barron's" recently did an extensive article on this company and I know the stock trades in an erratic manner. Here is it's chart this morning just after an earnings report release.
So what you might say. I understand. It's a situation outside the realm of most option traders. They are expensive options to purchase. Look for example at this readout from exactly one month ago. It shows the stock down on the day to $131.55 and the 131.00 Call options series on them which had three weeks to go before expiring. Many option traders are not willing to pay the premiums incurred with buying that much time. Notice the then current price of $740.00 per contract. Who wants to pay that much for just one contract? Not very many traders. In hindsight, these options ended up tripling in price!
All of this brings us to a look at the Call options on Snowflake on Monday and Tuesday this week knowing an earning report was coming out this morning. Look at these two screen shots. The first screen shots show a five day chart on Monday. It's not pretty.
Now here is a screen shot of the 150 Calls at two different times during the day.
Not many contracts are being traded. If we look at a slightly higher striking price, the 155 Calls we will notice its the same thing.
Think about what your getting for your money? In the case of the 155 series of Calls the stock would have to go up eleven dollars by the end of the week just to break even! Now what? Let's look at the Snowflake chart yesterday, one day prior to the earnings report. A once ugly chart now showing some signs of a comeback.
Here now is the earning report news.They knocked things out of the park.
Here are the 150 Calls after this one day surge.
$45.00 up from around $10.00 two days ago. This type of trading is not for the faint of heart. Snowflake is not a stock I understand well enough to play options on.

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