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Learning To Pick Your Battles

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 workfo...
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Turn Around Situations On A Tuesday

First of all I don't really like playing one week options on stocks on a Tuesday. I would rather wait until Wednesday and look for a mid-week reset in the markets. That said, Walmart's one hour sell off on a Tuesday morning kind of tweaked my interest. Let's follow this together a see what happens.
One observation. Look at the volume of trading in the lowest series of call, the 90 series. They are the ones to stand to gain the most in any mini-short-term uptick. Yet then again, maybe the stock will continue to go lower. Here is it's five day chart as of seventeen minutes earlier.
Now the indexes.
Now a few minutes later at 11:02 a.m.
Now the same three series of Call options starting with the lowest striking priced options and the ones with the lowest trading volume.
A bid of $1.01-$1.08 has now jumped to $1.22 to $1.29. Doing the math on the higher two series offers equally as impressive gains.
Purchasing on contracts sizes of 10 or 20 could eke out small gains. This kind of stuff goes on all the time. The danger of this is of course that this rebound could quickly "Peter out". I would rather do it on a Wednesday to try and catch a mid week turnaround rally. I will show you the end of day closing readouts later. The action at 3:00 p.m..
At this point in time I would get out and just call it a day.
Notice now the sideward trend kicking into the afternoon trading. Short term option traders need not play these choppy sideways markets. Proof of this is shown in these following three readings.
Notice the wide "bid" and "ask" in the 90 series of Calls at the close?. Why is this? Well the option makers are giving themselves protection from what the morning opening bell might bring. Who needs to be part of this indecisiveness? The next two series of options also closed weak.
Who wants to be a daytrader? The DJIA closed down the day 178 points.

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