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McDonalds Again And A Follow Up To Yesterday's Blog..

Some option traders on Friday mornings just want to be in and out in the first hour or so of trading on short term options they feel comfortable trading. In the second half of the day most of the action calms down. Take your winnings and run. McDonalds sold off a little bit yesterday afternoon and firmed up a bit towards the closing. Could this "mostly downtrend" continue? Here is a partial look at the opening bell's action, today a Friday however let us first look at how the stock traded yesterday. Now a look at it's trading pattern at 9:32.22 a.m. Now this, McDonald's jumps up $4.98 and the 317.50 Puts we followed yesterday which are now "out-of-the-money" acted accordingly. During the fist 2.22 minutes of trading they traded down to 34 dollars a contract. Now this. In the first three minutes of trading the stock jumped a bit and started to come off a touch. These Call options where not attacting all that much attention. The bid and ask jumped up ...
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Learning To Pick Your Battles - Walmart One More Time.

In the last week or so I have done four blogs on Walmart and each time I seem to show situations where traders can eke out small profits tracking the 91 or 91 series of Call options. What is the logic in such an approach? Well look at Walmarts one year chart compared to two other charts I have provided.
The difference of coarse is that Walmart's trading pattern has an upwards bias. One other factor comes into play in helping to make Walmart interesting options to play. The one dollar spreads between the "bid" and "ask" unlike the two dollar and fifty cent spreads between the "bids' and "asks" on stocks like Caterpillar and Boeing. This has the effect of making small changes in a stocks price more playable. Walmart also seems to have "less chatter". What do I mean by this? Well its not like Boeing which has scares of doors coming lose on their airplanes or like Caterpillar which is having to constantly adjust the size of their workforce. Does all of this mean Walmart options are for option players who take pride in being risk adverse? Not really. You still have to quick and nimble. Walmart for example jumped on the opening this morning as I am writing this blog and the 91 series of Calls are up 92% in the first ten minutes of trading.
Then look at the 92 Puts between 9:39 a.m. and 9:55 a.m.
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All this action happened in the first hour of trading! Walmart options while easy to play must be handled with respect. As a newbie looking at option trading I would suggest this is a good stock experiment with. Here is the morning chart which better explains how all this action happened.
How did Walmart end the day? Here is it's chart down below. If you caught the morning action you really wouldn't care.
The markets are closed tomorrow (thursday) for a presidential funeral so it's time to look at something else. Dicovering new opportunites is never hard to do.

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