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

Yes Boeing's Earnings Report Was Good and The Stock Jumped Up. With Caterpillar Earnings Report Coming Out on Monday Morning Will It Do The Same?

Let's begin with a five day chart on Boeing which includes todays action showing how the stock reacted to the the release of it's fourth quarter profit report. Note that the stock dropped on the day prior to this release of this of this news.

So today's (January 31ST) ten dollar and sixty cent jump in the stock's price was justified because their earnings were up. To profit on this new release meant you had to get into Call options on the day before this earnings report came out. Are you able to see the element of fear or panic that drove the stock down $5.00 on that day? That was the time to be buying in. But wait. We can't always say that a five dollar a share drop in a stock's price on the day prior to it's earning's report release is going to happen. Yet this time it did. So option players this time were handed a gift if they were bullish on the stock. The short term "near-to-the-money" and in-the-money" Call options doubled in a day on the release of this good news. Now Caterpillar has it's fourth quarter earning's report coming out February 5th before the opening bell. That day is a Monday. Will Caterpillar's stock drop tomorrow on Friday which is the trading day before their earning report comes out? Here is how it traded today, a Thursday.
It's now Friday at the close. No it didn't drop. Look at how Caterpillar jumped upwards again as did it's Call options. This once again is the trading day before it's earnings report comes out on Monday morning.
The stock, once again went crazy up. Remember Boeing dropped five dollars on the day prior to it's earning report. Not Caterpillar. Good news is expected. Where you one of the lucky ones who got in yesterday (Thursday) and bought the Caterpillar Calls which expired today? They more than doubled in one day. So now what? Now we have climbed a wall of euphoria. Let's now stop for a second and ask the question of why would one want to take a gamble on Caterpillar's earning being good. Often times it crashes on good earning reports because the analyst expected more. Let me show you how some of the option pros are playing this. What we are looking at now is a series of Call option a few weeks out (Feb. 26th).
What do you notice? This was Friday's action with the earning release coming out Monday morning. An open interest of only 138 contracts and a daily volume of 1,566 contracts traded. Stop and let that sink in! The pros got in Friday morning and glued themselves to their screens and watched the upward momentum unfold.They mostly all jumped out before the end of the day. Why? The risk of being part of Monday mornings trading action was to rich for their blood. Us, little fish should learn to play the same way.

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