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A Jumpy Week For Caterpillar - A Week With Earning Reports

Here is Thursday's trading on the day on Caterpillar. Here is how the $417.50 calls that expire tomorrow closed the day. Something happened this week. Caterpillar had a quarterly earning report come out on Tuesday. It's stock trading action survived this news unscathed. Here is it's five day chart as of the end of Thursday. Maybe the 420.00 or the 422.50 series Calls are better to look at? Here they are. But wait. Deere got clobbered today on the release of a quarterly earning's report. Why didn't Caterpillar sell off in price in sympathy? It shoud have. Deere sold off $34.70. For this reason alone I would be more inclined to purshase the Puts. Here is the series I would consider. To be continued.
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The Trade of the Year

It's not that complicated however it kind of slipped under the radar. It was a big name company we all know called Lowes. The payoff was wild. What are we looking at? Options that closed on Thursday at ten cents a contract and opened at one cent the folling morning, a Friday which then then hit an interday high of one dollar and fifty cents. A one thousand dollar investment would have went as high as $150,000.00. Folks, all of this is legal and anyone can play it. You could have made it all by lunchtime.
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What happened? Well we are talking about the 200 series on Calls that expired yesterday on Friday July 23th. At the start of the trding session they were over $3.00 "out-of-the money. Very few traders saw value in them. Yet Lowes did close strong on Thursday the day before it. Then it wobbled a touch on the Friday opening and resumed it's upward charge. The price of lumber is dropping and many people are waiting to purchase lumber at these new lowering prices. The kicker is that four dollar moves on stocks in the two hundred dollar price range in one day happen more often than you think. This was the trade of the year! **Buying options on a stock two dollars out-of-the-money on the last day of the life of a series of Calls or Puts is difficult to . I looked the Lowes 200 Put series at 1:53 p.m. and wondered if going in the opposite way offered an opportunity but opted not to play it. Here is what I saw. They ended up expiring worthless.
In my opinion, Friday morning Call options which expire that day (meaning in the ten minutes or so of trading) sometimes offer interesting trading opportunities as you are catching the fresh winds of morning exuberance.

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