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How To Avoid Time Value Traps With Last Week Options.

This blog is not going to be an exhausting study of this topic. I just want to show you a few charts found in recent blogs and comment on which ones seem to skirt the issue of "time-value-concerns' and which ones don't. 1) Avoid Thursday at the close Call options. In this case Thursday is the second last day of the above chart. If you guess the wrong direction on the close it's going to be game over on Friday when the options expire. Thursday at the close on options that expire the next day are the biggest time value traps you can buy into. If the stock moves in the wrong direction it's game over. 2) Ford on a Monday going into Tuesday. On this chart April 13th is a Monday and Tuesday is the 14th. Can you see Ford closing strong on the close of the 13th? It would make sense to get in on the stong closing because these Calls would still have four trading days to recover if Tuesdays opening was not all that spectacular. 3) This time it's Caterpillar and it...
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An Introduction

My name is Peter and about 45 years ago I did a short gig as a “Merrill Lynch” in Canada. I still live in Canada. Prior to my gig at "Merril" which lasted about two years I worked for another then well known Canadian brokerage firm that had a fancy office on the 55th floor of a downtown Toronto office building. They occupied the entire floor. In essence they were a "boiler room" operation (which dated back to the 1930's) which focused on penny mining stocks. My were major players in that space. My style of trading not fit in well. I was to busy watching and trading Exxon options and also watching the back office skim money off my more profitable trades. Stroke off one fill price and ink in another. Well they didn't skim it off at the Toronto back office that I know of however they did at another office in another town I asked to be transferred to. The lady on the desks accepting the trades would run off to the managers office before reporting to me the final ticket price. Things were different back then. I now work in an unrelated profession and oddly enough still have the designation of being a broker. I still have a passion for option trading. I like Fridays for trading "one-day" options. Six of my favourite stocks to now trade options on are Caterpillar, Ford, Exxon, Deere, Tesla and Boeing. I also watch and speculate other stocks in the five and ten dollar range that have options on them. There are times when I will take a week off from watching the market, knowing full well that I will be not be handicapped when I return to the action. In fact I return with fresh eyes. I read Barron's on the weekend. I need to be on a routine to play options and I don't trade with other people's money. Donald Trump has in some ways helped to make option trading easier. He says things which make the markets move. Let me now share with you what I am watching in the option markets. Some blogs are better than others. Some blogs get deleted with time. Tesla is the stock I have the most luck trading. I don't see that changing. Cheers.

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