CAT Puts

Let's begin with a look at Monday's action on the 15 series of Calls. At the low point today they were priced in the eighteen to twenty dollars (per contract) range. If you are going to purchase short term Call options on stocks in the $15.00 price range you should be buying them in multiples of let's say 20 or 30 at one time. Yet wait, once bought in there are no guarantees that the path you are about to embark apon will be clear sailing. Let's just watch them for a few days this to see what happens. You are hoping the stock will pop twenty five or fifty cents. It helps if you are following what is happening in the automobile industry. Look at how this stock was trading at a half dollar more a share only a few days ago. Will it rebound? Going into the second day of this watch does it look like it could jump up again? Day two. Little change right? Yet that's not entirely true. Look at the opportunity presented to get out on a mid day bounce. The Call options bounc...

Trading Apple Calls and Puts can be a full time, do nothing else adventure. Massive volumes trade on these options. Large swings follow the "at money" Call and Put options which means that if this stock is trading at 133.50, the minute to minute action will be the options with the 133.00 and 134.00 striking prices. It's Friday morning thirty minutes into the day. Apple closed the previous day at 133.41. The 134 Apple Puts which expire today closed the previous day at .90. So what happened next? Apple came off in price on the opening which was a continuation of it's previous day's trend. Then, about ten minutes into the market the opening strenght of the market became apparent, a 200 point opening rally. Look at the value of the 134 Puts. They dropped to a low of .61 as Apple started to rebound slightly. Then another reversal as Apple decided to move down again. The Puts jumped back up again to over 1.00. To recap, a two hundred point rise in the D.J.I. on the ope...

In my last blog I almost made it sound to easy to play Apple Calls and Puts. Let me set the stage with yesterdays and todays action. First. here is how the market was up this Thursday and here is what I did. This chart shows Apple's Wednesday and Thursdays trading movement. I bought Puts on Apple on Wednesday at 3:13 p.m. which was June 21st only to watch Apple jump upwards in price on Thursday morning. Biden made the news saying saying "We've struck a deal" refering to infrastruture spending and everything surged upwards. Obviously I was misinformed on current events. My Puts expire on Friday (tomorrow) which means all my money in this position is at risk. Then also I was running around all day doing other things and missed a selling opportunity to get out at a slight profit. Look at how this series of Puts traded today. What did I learn from this experience? Well I should have paid closer attention to Bidens working schedule for the day. That's something you ...

Last week we talked about "Apple" being a nice stock to trade options on and one of the reasons given was it's one dollar spreads on it's option. Most other stocks in that price range have options on them which have wider striking prices. A 120 Call, a 122.50 Call and a 125 Call for example. That's what you are most likely to see. That being said, the underlying price swings with these "other stocks" needs more of a noticeable and extended directional move to be able to play them successfully. Weekend articles mentioned "Apple" doing well in a rising interest rate environment because of it's abilities to make money on borrowed money forming low cost debt. I wouldn't read too much into that. Today with the D.J.I up 90 points going into the closing trading hour of the day look at how well the 13 series of Call options that expire this week are trading. Up slow and steady all afternoon. Notice also one again how the volume of daily tradin...

I wanted to call this website "CatCalls" but "Go Daddy" wanted a couple of thousand for that name. Instead I went with "CatPuts" for about twenty dollars. My license plate says "Catputs". Why am I now mentioning this? Well I missed the greatest "Caterpillar" sell off in price so far this year that all happened in the last five trading days. I bought into Calls instead at about lunch time last Monday. My logic and timing were off. I went against my principles of not purchasing "Call" options on a Monday mornings. Here is it's one week chart, it's one year chart and the Deere and Company five day chart. "Caterpillar" dropped twenty dollars in one week or 9.5%. Each day it dropped. I like playing the Calls and Puts on Caterpillar because as I have mentioned before it is not a stock prone to directional moves based on chit chat. So on Monday and Tuesday I scoured the internet with no luck looking for news on ...

This blog may seem to be lacking in content. It is only to say that one should not purchase "last week" - "Call" options on Monday mornings. Typically Monday morning aren't good entry points and case in point is what happened to "Caterpillar" yesterday, a Monday as it dropped over four dollars a share. One of "Caterpillars" characteristics, which in some ways is a good thing and in some ways not so good is that it often moves upwards or downwards in price on "no news". Yesterday was on of those days. The difficult part is, if you trade the options on this stock on a regular basis like I do you sometimes have the urge to want to jump in a play the upside whenever you see it sell off in price. This itch to "get back in" is most prevalent at the end of the first thirty minutes of trading on a Monday morning. This time "Caterpillar" seemed to be taking a hit and if you were able to buy in and catch a reversal you w...