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"Tony The Tiger" - A Food Stock

The mood of Wall Street is now changing as the reality of tariffs is starting to kick in. Two weeks ago not so much so. Kelloggs had "so-so" earnings come out a few weeks ago and the stock exploded upwards. Note the very last line above mentions the effects of tariffs are not taken into consideration. So many stocks with "so-so" earning reports have jumped in price based on the "lets make America great again" slogan. Deere stock is shooting to the moon as I keep writing about in spite of declining sales in the last quarter. The sentiment seems to be that they are immune to tariffs. On paper they might be. Read this. Americans are struggling to buy gas, eggs and insurance. Total housing starts in the U.S.in 2024 were down 3.9%. Walmart, the recent darling stock in the last four weeks for Call option players woke up this morning with an earnings report which was healthy but with came with some caveats. Here is what happened. Perhaps the U.S. is starting ...
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Cat Puts, No Cat Calls

In a past blog Caterpillar averted a strike and it was noted that the stock jumped to the moon on that news. Caterpillar has a large following and likes good news-made in America stories. Biden avoided his government running out of money late Thursday and on Friday the stock Caterpillar jumped to the moon. It opened higher and kept going up.There is no looking back now at what happened.
My May 29th blog talked about how Caterpillar had slight bounce last Friday morning and the light volume of option trading on it. With the stock going sideways to down all that week playing Call options on it was out of fashion. Things changed on Friday June 2nd. Caterpillar bounced. So here now is a look at how two "out-of-the-money" series of Call options traded on it on Friday.
Look at the open interest numbers going into Friday. Two hundred and ninety one contracts. Nobody saw this jump coming which is so strange. Once again they were very light. Few traders were expecting the news to come when it did. This blog could now go in many directions. Last week both Caterpillar and Boeing struggled on the week and option trading volumes dried up. My attitude was not to trade, to wait for better days. I should have known better, the system is a little bit corrupt. Insiders could gain the most from a late Thursday release of good news. A one day pop in the next days options. That is what happened. On Friday the D.J.I. was up over 700 points. The one day options on Caterpillar were star performers. It was the trade-of-the-year on Caterpillar Calls. It doesn't look like any of the 100,000 or whatever the number of brokers and analysis there are out were clued into this action. So strange. * Also think about this. Caterpillar has something like 109,100 employees. They should learn to be part of this action.

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