CAT Puts

My last blog was about Harley Davidson and what I didn't bring into the conservation was their spin off business which is building electric motorcycles. To be honest these bikes are not getting rave reviews. Two complaints are their crippling range and the possible issue of them being more dangerous to drive because they are so quiet. There is also competion from abroad. Last quarter they built only 63 of them and that experience is part of the company expecting to incur a loss of over $115 million this year. If you do the math each bike built cost them over $200,00.00. A $115 million dollar loss vs a profit of $1.3 billion for Harley Davidison. That loss makes a small dent in the overall big picture and in the process of getting going they used other people's money. Nursing this project to life from a business point of view has merit. Covid didn't help anything. LiveWire has to go slow until the product itself evolves to a level they feel proud to put their name on. Inves...

First, I am not a big fan of playing options on stocks in the thirty and forty dollar range. It's not like speculating in Boeing or Caterpillar Calls and Puts with these stocks swinging up or down two or three dollars nearly everyday. Harley Davidson is a thirty five dollar stock. Look at how it is trading so poorly on the good earnings news back at the end of April. Now here is some of this news. All the good news was wiped out by the forecasting of a bit of a slowdown in the second half of this year. Investors who bought in early this year when the stock was trading over fifteen dollars higher who correctly anticipcated this surge of earnings must now feel so frustrated. Where are their rewards? Now look below and see where the January 37 Calls are trading at. If the stock gets above forty you would be in luck. That would buy you their next two earnings reports. By then management might see their business in a more favourable light. Yet the chart looks ugly and there doesn...

Very few option contracts trade on Toyota. I have wondered why and offer one potential explanation. It's listed on multiple exchanges around the world and "option makers" in North America are basically just following the action. If the markets open stronger in North America that means Toyota traded stronger overnight on markets overseas. Secondly, the Calls and Puts trade in incriments of five dollars.There are for example 135 Calls, 140 Calls, 145 Calls. Having a five dollar spread wipes out the incentive try to daytrade option series which are soon to expire. If the stock moves from 142 to 143 the "bids and asks" on a 140 series of Calls might hardly change. It's not like trading the stock like Boeing where you can get in and out with option series set up in increments of $2.50 . Here is it's one month charts. The company now has a new C.E.O who is getting criticized for not moving to go electric quickly enough. J6KhPh0s8HMgUnhmv/s600/Screenshot%20202...

They should be up right? Supply issues are getting better and their electric trucks are coming. Ford released their earning report yesterday after the close and they were good. A 20% increase is a decent increase. The stock should rally on that news, right? But wait. Remember in a blog a few days ago how Caterpillar tanked on the morning after a great earnings release? To refresh your memory here is what that chart looked like. . The Ford stock trades in an interesting price range. Price swings of fifty cents on a twelve dollar stock can send option prices into a tisy. So here is what happened. Remember earnings came out after the closing bell yesterday on May 2nd. The stock surged Monday morning up to $12.25 and that was the time to be selling out of the Calls bought on the previous Friday. Now let me digress for a moment. G.M. had an earnings release on April 25th and their profit were up substantially. This helps support the thesis that the automobile industry is on a month to mo...