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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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Last Day Options Can Suprise. First Solar

Look at this chart (July 28th ). It's the early morning action on First Solar after an earning report.
Now look at this chart. It's a five day chart of the same thing.
The earnings were good but the stock spiked up and came down again. What was the news to cause it to drop? I looked around and couldn't find anything and the D.J.I. was have a good day. What to do? One day Call options are so dangerous and I was completely out of the loop as to why the stock was trading this way. Why the downward pressure? Here is what I did.
In and out in less that ten minutes for a $90.00 gain. Had I waited until noon and sold out then I would have lost over half my money. Now here is how it closed out the day.
Now a look at it's one day chart.
Why am I showing this? Well look at where the stock was trading at noon. The rules say that if your trading a last day option you have until 3:00 p.m. to get out and not 4:p.m.when the market closes. Who wants to fork out money to try and catch a three hour ride when most traders are off to the beach? Now look at this. This series of Calls closed at $8.10.
Sure it's easy to make calls like this but there was no talk of why the stock sold off after it popped on the opening.I got out at 10:45 a.m. and at noon it was trading lower. It was at that time a stock without direction and one to dangerous to buy back into if your time horizon was only three hours. This entire experience was strange. *** The low of the day in this series of Calls happened at 12:02 p.m. That coincides with when many short term option players call it a day after trading all week.
** Joe Biden was busy all week touting solar and wind power.

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