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A Random Walk In The Park On A Monday Morning. A Caution. Monday Mornings Are Often Not An Option Players Best Friend

Let's start with this. It's now 10:26 a.m. A bet on Caterpillar rebounding by the end of the week. There are no takers. Why have to watch the screen for the next four days in agony waiting for a rebound which if happens is just a "break even trade"? But Wait. I made a mistake. The market is actually now down 668 points. What else can we look at? Interactive Brokers. These kind of stocks always do poorly on days with the threat of margin calls. Yet there is something interesting about the printout I am about to show. It is that these options are "one-month-out" Calls. These longer term options trade differently than short term options. (these options trade in one month intervals). If the stock we are following stops it's freefall the value of the options will nudge up ten, fifteen or twenty percent. A seven dollar option Call might creep back up to $8.00 or $9.00 at which time it could be sold. In contrast with a five day option a slight reversal in ...
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Last Day Options Can Suprise. First Solar

Look at this chart (July 28th ). It's the early morning action on First Solar after an earning report.
Now look at this chart. It's a five day chart of the same thing.
The earnings were good but the stock spiked up and came down again. What was the news to cause it to drop? I looked around and couldn't find anything and the D.J.I. was have a good day. What to do? One day Call options are so dangerous and I was completely out of the loop as to why the stock was trading this way. Why the downward pressure? Here is what I did.
In and out in less that ten minutes for a $90.00 gain. Had I waited until noon and sold out then I would have lost over half my money. Now here is how it closed out the day.
Now a look at it's one day chart.
Why am I showing this? Well look at where the stock was trading at noon. The rules say that if your trading a last day option you have until 3:00 p.m. to get out and not 4:p.m.when the market closes. Who wants to fork out money to try and catch a three hour ride when most traders are off to the beach? Now look at this. This series of Calls closed at $8.10.
Sure it's easy to make calls like this but there was no talk of why the stock sold off after it popped on the opening.I got out at 10:45 a.m. and at noon it was trading lower. It was at that time a stock without direction and one to dangerous to buy back into if your time horizon was only three hours. This entire experience was strange. *** The low of the day in this series of Calls happened at 12:02 p.m. That coincides with when many short term option players call it a day after trading all week.
** Joe Biden was busy all week touting solar and wind power.

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