CAT Puts

A few years back the markets crashed when Russia invaded Ukraine. The front pages of newspapers around the world at that time showed people trying to escape cities which were heavily shelled. Our heart's sank. How could such atrocities be happening? Why were schools and hospitals targeted? War is evil. Guess what? With Trump acting as a new dictator the world once again has gone awry. It's scary that one old man with so much power can abuse the system. What does all of this mean for option traders? It means time to sit on the sidelines. Yes you can jump in playing rebounds and catch some nice short term directional moves. You are basically trading against computers. Why not just sit it out and chill? Everything is amuck. Why be trying to make hero trades? Ironically enough some traders are being drawn into this action. Look at this chart. While its difficult to see because of a "pop-up" on the screen "Netflix rebounded over ten dollars a share after reboundin...

One of the things I elluded to in my last blog is that weekends often act a reset buttons for the market. Sentiment can change. So Boeing jumped on Monday morning and the 175 Calls that expire this Friday went up. Here they are. They hit a high of $5.00. Sometimes it takes thirty or sixty minutes on Monday morning before this sentiment changes. That was the case this morning. Then the market turned south and the DJIA closed dowm 649 points. Let's now watch what this same series of the Puts did. Can you see how options can be valuable trading vehicles in volatile markets? Caterpillar had the same story, a bounce on a Monday morning and an afternoon sell off. The Calls on Caterpillar that closed on Friday at $1.97 bounced as high as $8.40 on Monday morning. Now look at what this same series of the Caterpillar Puts did on the afternoon. What is there to learn from this? Well first don't be angry at yourself for not catching this action. Look at the low volume of Put option...

Friday afternoon options are near impossible to trade (or are they) and Boing sometimes jumps $5.00 on Monday mornings when other stocks like Deere and Caterpillar are trading flat. It needs the weekends to unwind and reset. Did it survive the weekend without any disasters? It's a big company with many moving parts. Now it's Friday's chart going into the 1:00 p.m. period. Anything can happen. Here is what the indexes are doing. It's another day of reporters calling out Trump on his lies. Now look at these two series of Call options. They will expiring in a few hours. Both are "out-of-the money". Might they move up in the next couple of hours? Here they are again about fifteen minutes later still walking a fine line. If the stock doesn't go up in the next two hours you lose. Is this the kind of game you want to find yourself in? Probably not, there are afterall safer situations to be considering. Remember with options expiring on this Friday you have ...

It's one of those cloud based companies. I will tell you what they do, it's all kind of complicated. Even after you read this you will still not really understand what they do. The stock is volatile and I have it on a watch list with other stocks like First Solar, Costco, Netflix, Moderna, Deere and Tesla. These are all stocks I watch with a passive interest and usually take more of an interest in them around the earning report seasons. Of all of the stocks on this list Snowflake is the one I am least connected to. What insights can I bring to the table about what is happening with this company or the industry it is in? None really. Ask me about Tesla and that's an entirely different and facinating story. Some of my best option trades of my life have come from playing options on Tesla. Now back to Snowflake. It had an earnings reports come out before the bell opened this morning. Here is it's one day trading chart the day before which was somewhat unremarkable. Inside...

There was not to much of a suprise but maybe a floor price has been reached. The stock is now down considerably and vehicle orders are now expected to tick up. A new more affordable EV is being launched this year that will cost less. Investors were nervous going into this report and the stock as of late has being in a precipitous slide downwards. It's going to take a day or two to process this fresh news. The EV industry is taking it on the chin as of late. Part of the good news is that Lucid is not using the word "burn rates" They also seem to have access to more cash going forward if needed. Both Lucid and Rivian are now appearing to be more fiscally responsible. Yet we now have to wait another full quarter to confirm such a suspicion. Shown above is it's five day chart and below is it's one year chart. In previous blogs I have talked about three, four and five dollar stock's and options on them. They can sometimes suprise. Is this one of those moments wh...