Featured

Day Trading One Month Out Options. Learning To Skim The Tiniest Of Moves

This blog is different. It's about skimming small profits on one type of option in particular. It's also my story about how to make the time value of "one-month-out" options your very best friend. What I am about to try to describe to you is a phenomenon of wrongly calculated time values built into option pricings. Wrongly calculated from the perspective that some option prices (their "bids and asks") are over-sensitive to the tiniest of pricing swings. Who am I to make claims like this? What credentials do I bring to the table? I don't want to tell you as I want to keep my identity a secret. Let's just say that I have being trading options for a long time. Over the years I have learned that "nine month" or "one year out" Call options or Put options on stock's in the ten dollar price range are often mispriced. As example, I have followed the stock "Ford" for like forty years and to me it's January Call options a...
Post a Comment

Caterpillar Earning Report Plays

So tomorrow is the big day when Caterpillar releases it's second quarter earnings report. It is expected to be good. Boeing just had a great earnings report yesterday and analyst are expecting Caterpillar to also report decent numbers. Let's look at the five day trading charts on these two companies and this mornings super strong premarket indicators. (It's always good to be selling into strong premarket indicators because history tells us that they never stay strong forever). It's July 29th and Caterpillar's earning report is tomorrow.
Ford also just had their earning reports and good new also on that front.
So far so good? Good news everywhere right? It's only good news if you can capitalize on it. What am I implying? Well I don't want to digress to far off topic however option trading can be an exacerbating experience. I missed the Boeing and Ford trading opportunites despite the fact that I anticipated both of these two companies would do well. Do I beat myself up for not playing them? Not really. Playing the earning report game is never a sure thing. Sometimes the numbers can look good and the stock will drop. So where now do I want to go with this blog? I want to focus on the importance of seizing the moment and capitalizing on this morning's unique sweet spot. First, it's a Thursday morning and Caterpillars earning reports are still one day away. We are looking at the premarkets at 9:17 a.m. and we see Caterpillar's premarket price trading at $213.90 up $2.46. If you purchaed Caterpillar Call on Wednesday at a lower price why wait for the potential earnings report play on Friday to get out? Other computer generated trading platforms looking for short term profits are going to be selling out into any strenght of a Thursday morning the opening markets. Look at the $6.33 number on the Call options in the first few minutes of trading on the July 21st 210 Calls. Look then at how they dipped and rebounded back up at 11:46 a.m. Are you able to see how a second buying opportunity presented itself around 9:30 a.m.? Once again, all of this action was in anticipiation of a good news report on the following day which no one was entirely sure would happen.
** It takes work to get pumped up every morning to play this kind of game but if you follow Ford, Caterpillar and Boeing concurrently you will know that their earning reports come out all near the same time. For a few days in a row you will have to watch the markets with extra attention.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Living on Kraft Dinner?

Image
What does the word disconnect mean? As a verb it means "to sever or interrupt the connection of or between; detach". Option trading - one day options - is a disconnect from the world. What happens to slightly "out-of-the-money" Call options on Costco when the stock shoot up thirty dollars on the day? I will show you what happened on Friday to Costco Calls and the options on a few other stocks I frequently watch. What a disconnect from the real world. But before that a look at how the indexes traded. 1) Costco. It's five day chart and a look at how three of it's option series moved upwards in one day. You may not know how to read these printouts but try to read the highs and lows on these option pricings. One printout shows an "at-the-money" option which means you are buying a contract on the stock, good for one day only at a locked in price equal to (or very close to) what the stock is currently trading at. The other two contracts shown are ...
Read more

The Little Engine That Could

Image
Walmart again. It's all I seem to blog about. Here is it's five day chart. The stock keeps going up and the option series are set up in one dollar spreads. Even a fifty cent move on the stock moves the needle on these Calls. Look at how this series of Calls was trading yesterday at 3:00 p.m.. Now here is this same series of Calls just before noon today. Thirty days of upward action like this punctuated by the off day of decline. Now notice the higher volume of trading in the series of Calls with the higher striking price. These are the ones's with more leverage. At the same time look at the five day chart on Costco. The two stocks sometimes trade in tandem. Humpty dumpty sat on a wall .... a had a great fall. Someday soon a fall might happen but what a great ride it has been.
Read more

A Fireside Chat - One Year Options and Thirty Day Options. Which is Better?

Image
Some say to think small, not big. Trying to play Disney options is thinking big. It is a stock slighty out of favor. If we start with it's a three year chart, we will see it is down by about 50% over that period of time. Now it's one year chart. If the stock can break 110 in early 2024 the sky is the limit. It does have a lot of moving parts so anything could happen. Look at these Calls options one year out. One year in options buys a lot of time.They look reasonable. If the stock ever inched up to the $105.00 price level in the three or four months these options would jump up in price by about 50%. Even more if they had really good news. Yet it's the "what-if" aspect of the equation that castes such a trade in doubt. "What if" stories just don't cut it. There are to many variables in play. Then again, why are we even thinking of long-term Call options after a December's rally? Let's switch gears. If consumers are out spending for X-mas...
Read more