CAT Puts

Issues with the debt ceiling was a cloud on the markets all last week except for a Friday morning bounce. First, here is Caterpillar on the week and I want to point out a couple of things. First the light trading in Caterpillar Calls going into Friday. Here is Fridays trading on the 210 series of Calls. Here now is the five day chart leading up to this. Note also that we were going into a three day weekend. Only 396 option contracts traded on this series on Friday and the open interest number was quiet light. Am I afraid to trade in option series with reduced volumes like this? No, however on Fridays some series of options on stocks like Telsa can have 300,000 contracts trade in one day on one series! Look at how Caterpillar was trading in the $214 price range at the start of the week. Short term Call option players all got blown away. That's one of the reasons the volume was low in the lower 210 series of Calls. Back on Monday and Tuesday they were well "in-the-money" ...

Deere bounced on Friday on earning reports. On Thursday the stock closed at $372.27 and the 370 Calls which expired the next day closed at $875.00 That's kind of rich, right? Now here is what happened. Now the 370 Call option series. Remember that the 370 Calls closed at $875.00 the previous day. Look at how they jumped to just over $22.00 on the opening bell. Over a double on your money. Profit takers then came in to drive the price down as this was expected news. Some traders play options like this. Others do spreads, where they will sell an "out-of-the money" Call and an "out-of-the-money" Put that expire in one day on Deere at the same time and hope they both expire worthless. More about that knd of trading at a later date.

Netflix had news. On the release of this information the stock jumped and here is where it gets really crazy with "out-of-the-money" Call options that expire in two days. Call it insane. What I am about to show are random samplings of this action. For years now articles have being written on the Netflix business model and what bothered market pundents was how they were losing money on customers giving away their access codes to other users. Other questions. Do upticks like this trigger automated tracking systems set off alarms that catch jumps like this within seconds of these meteoric liftoffs? Do C.E.O's tell their son-in-laws of this impeding action. Did the fellow driving the Porche 911 in front of you buy it with the profits made from acting on insider news? Can you buy Disney or Roku tomorrow and catch similiar gains? In two recent blogs this week I talked about Boeing Calls jumped in price on Biden news about how he was handling one days news on the debt crisis ...

Let's start with Monday May 15th. Here are the two hundred series of Calls that expire on Friday. In the first five minutes of trading 133 contracts sold. Now here is how it closed the day. One thing I noticed is that after the first five minutes of trading no other trades were made in this series of Calls. Strange but not crazy strange. Purchasing Call options on a Monday hoping that they will go up in value by the end of the week is usually not a very clever strategy. I have mentioned that repeatly throughout my blogging. Do you notice the volume of trading was very light? Now Tuesday, day two. The markets dropped. Boeing went up and the markets went down. That can happen. Boeing has a backlong of orders and can't build planes quickly enough. The volume of open contracts went up by 652 contracts, yet 1,865 contracts traded on the day. Some traders where in and out. Having a stock go up on a down day is a bullish sign. Now Wednesday. Boeing jumped up. Did you notice the op...

When you are the second richest person walking on the globe you can play with the system. It is said that Musk is worth about 180 billion dollars. From April to December of 2022 he was forced to sell some $23 billion in Tesla shares to keep Twitter afloat, one of the reasons the stock tumbled more than 50% during that period. Last Friday was a bit of a scam. When your rich you can play funny games. What happened? First Solar jumped $53.09 in one day. The Musk empire was in on this action. Solar City got a five billion dollar boost in market capital on the release of the news of its $80 million dollar deal to buy a European firm with cutting-edge technology. Why did this happen on a Friday? That's when options that expire that day can jump the most in price on good news. The boys in the back office doing the deal could have their friends load up on Call options. Look at how some of the Call options on First Solar jumped in just one day. Look at this. Look at how small the open i...

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...

It happened. Telsa jumped on a Friday which is something remenicent of what it would do back in 2020. Here is an extreme example of how an "out-of-the-money" Call option jumped from obscurity to being worth lots of money at one point during the trading session on Friday.. There was a little bit of chatter about how Telsa raised some of their prices modestly this week and then the D.J.I. jumped over 500 points on Friday. So here now is where this blog gets a touch tangential. On the close on Thursday this Call option was eight dollars and eighty cents "out-of-the-money" and closed at $.10 or ten dollars a contract. Who would be stupid enough to be spending money on this type of a contract which would expire the next day with the probabities of a payoff being so negligibly small? Or are they? Sometimes when I see people driving new shiny Mustang convertables I wonder if they got them by purchasing Ford Calls on a Thursday with one day to go for $2,000 and selling the...