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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 ...

Cat Puts on Earning Reports

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Third quarter profits were released .................... Now a look at a statement made after the release of their second quarter earning report three months ago. So if you were anticipating a price swing on the release of their earning's report could this be a profitable adventure? Suprisingly, yes and no. It depends on how you reacts to the stocks quick and precipitous decline. It also takes a bit of luck. Look at how the "near-to-the-money" Call options and Put options traded just after the release of this news. First the Calls. They lost 82% of the value at this particular time. The open interest number is just over 800 which is actually a small number when you consider Tesla options often trade 100,000 option contracts in multiple series everyday. Notice how these Calls, the 390 series actually traded down to $.14 or only fourteen dollars a contract before rebounding back up again to $1.42 in a short period of time. That was a nice rebound. Yet then again who wo...

Something Is Happening With Deere Calls.

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You don't see this very often. I follow Deere options. First it's five day chart. Now a look at the 410 Puts which expire at the end of the week. There is nothing strange about this. A few traders got in to play the downside. Now the 410 Calls and what do you see? 819 contracts traded in the first ninety minutes of trading on this series of Calls that expire at the end of the week. A number of contracts this large tells us something. Or does it? Let's investigate further. Let's look at the volume of trading in the Deere Calls one striking price higher. Why aren't more traders jumping into these ones if someone likes the 410 series so much? In the same sort of way why aren't traders jumping into next weeks Call options given the apparent spike in these Calls? Now a check with "Yahoo" at noon to make sure these reported numbers are correct. Yes,the volume of Call options traded is now 855 contracts. More typical numbers would be 10 or 20. Somethi...

Vinfast

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I see this companies electric vehicles on the road and I have to admit they offer a fantastic ten year warranty. Are they reckless in making such a offer when they have no track history? Might not high servicing costs come back to bite them further down the road? Look at how the stock jumped this week on this good news. While high production increases are only one part of a companies story they are encouraging to their shareholders. Visit there website and learn about their dealership network. The waiting game begins to hear about their next earning's report. Now look at these three charts. Back on Sept. 6th I wrote a blog on "Nio", a chinese electric car company. Here is it's chart that I showed in that blog. It shows Nio jumping 25% in one week. Now let's look at it's three month chart. Recently I did some blogs on trading options in the five dollar range. The scary part is we have seen how other stocks in this space are down. Look at these four. None...

G.M. and Tesla. Both Surprised. So Did Ford.

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G.M. is pumping out vehicles and people seem to be buying them! Against that backdrop is that they are losing market share in China. Falling interest rates should help car sales. Does that mean that the Ford stock will also jump? They report October 28th. Look at it's 30 day chart and year to date chart. They have a history of earning suprises with some being not so good. Here is how the 11 series of Calls traded on Ford on Friday Oct.26th on next weeks 11 series of Call options. As these prices the stock would have to jump 40 cents on the week to make these Calls think about coming to life.Here is what happened. Now there is Tesla which reported their earnings after the markets closed on Wednesday Oct 23th. Here is how it traded on that day just prior to earnings report. The open interest numbers were quite low as sometimes we see like 150,000 contracts trade in one one series in one day. So the 212.50 series of Calls closed at $9.28. Now look at this chart and the closing ...