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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...
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Caterpillar Calls. A Classic Trading Situation.

Early indications were that the markets were set to rally on Tuesday March 29th. Most of the stocks that is except for Caterpillar. I scurried around looking for news as to why Caterpillar was trading lower in the premarkets but couldn't find anything. Caterpillar, in spite of it's size often seems to trade in a bubble. It's movements up and down seem so random. Institutional shareholders move huge blocks of stock in very selective ways. Within only a few minutes of trading the markets were up strongly but Caterpillar was going in the opposite direction. When you look at it's opening chart below one would have to ask themselves if there would be any support at the $219.00 dollar price level. It's the falling knife syndrome. If you're looking for a reversal when do you buy in? With the markets so strong one would think it's only a matter of time before the stock stops falling.
Well look at the volume of trading on the 220 Caterpillar Call series (that expire this Friday) one minute into the trading session.
Now look where the stock traded down to at 10:00 a.m.
How did the Call options trade on it? Well first notice on the upper printout at 9:31 a.m.. At that time only two option contracts had traded on it. This tells us is that the interest in premarket trading was very low or next to nothing. That's somewhat suprising. In the absence of bad news, no one is really interested in trying to estimate how bad this news could be. Now let us look at how the stock continued to drop, showing the 220 Calls at 9:58 a.m. and then also earlier at 9:31 a.m.. Imagine the stock being down like $4.58 when then D.J.I was up over 300 points. But wait. Stocks do sometimes turn around. Look at the one day chart below on Catipillar showing how it ended up trading on the day and look at how the 217.50 and 220 Call series ended up closing ot the day.
Good money was made by option traders who timed their trading wisely.It wasn't a short term trade. It was four or five hour trade. We also note that Caterpillar continued to jump upwards the following morning.
I call it "A Classic Trading Situation" because Catipillar is known to trade upwards and downwards on no real news. All of this action never ends.

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