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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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Biogen - A Tough Cookie to Play

Drug stocks are difficult to play. One year ago to this date Biogen was trading at $292.20. Today its at $193.61. That's down almost $100.00 on the year.
Now look at it's three year chart.
Back on May 11th 2022 the stock dipped down to $191.07. So the question now is will that now be a support level? That could be something to watch. How do you play options on a stock which has dropped for a year or more? You can't really. The system, for lack of better words has a built in defense mechanism. Let me try to explain it this way. Yes I think a rebound might be imminent for technical reasons however there are barriers to entry. Look for example at how expensive the one month out Calls are.
A May Call contract (one month out) slightly above the current asking price is $8.00 a contract. When was the last time this stock ever went up $8.00 in one month? Well there was one $10.71 bounce between March 6th 2024 and March 12th 2024 so in theory anything could happen. Yet having said that, it's still a crazy price to pay and a risk much to high to take. Now let's look at these Call options that will expire in three days.
Note only 15 contracts traded on the day and an open interest of only 9 contracts. What's more, the spread between the bid and ask is high making it more difficult to trade. What this tells us is that traders don't see any value in trying to navigate in these waters during periods like this. It will be interesting to look back at this blog in one months time to see how this situation played itself out.* Here we are now in July, some three months out. So what happened?
The stock did find a support level. It's still to difficult to play. What is missing is that there are no spikes of upward volume coming into it. Without that happening this stock could dip further.

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