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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 QQQ's Again

Back on July 26th I wrote a blog on trading the QQQ's. There is nothing magical about trading them, you just type in QQQ and follow the promps like any other stock. It's options on a basket of stocks. Stocks like Apple and the like. Pick whatever the day you want your series to expire. I like buying a few days time. Sometimes the markets lose their strength around noon on Fridays. It happened today. Here is it's five day chart and you can see the market selling off on Friday afternoon.
So here is the trade I made today.
I was in this position for 2.50 hours. You can see I bought an Aug 8th series so that would have given me until Tuesday. I got in at 11:53 a.m. It was an easy chart to play on the downside. Now I want to point out how this is a trading vehicle many traders recognize. Look at the closing summary of this series of Puts. There is something about it which stands out.
Notice the open interest of 1,771 and the trading volume on the day of 31,765. These are hot potatoes and taking a profit on a Friday afternoon is always a logical thing to do.

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