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Why The Appeal Of Trading Caterpillar Options Is Now Diminishing

In previous blogs I looked at Caterpillar spiking upwards through the $1,000.00 barrier for the very first time. Twenty and thirty and forty dollar daily jumps on the stock were the norm. Today we are entering more sobering times. Pundits are now commenting on the upcoming release on August 4th of Caterpillar's quarterly earning report. That is not far away. The stock has doubled in price in a relatively short period of time. Is the party over? Look at Caterpillars one year chart. The companies earnings have not doubled in the last year. Far from it. So now what? Buy a Put option thirty days out in the hopes the stock might drop ten percent on a more normalized earning's report? Maybe. Here is an example of the cost of what one of these Puts would look like. Given it's current bid and ask the stock would have to drop to the $1,005.00 just to break even. It could, however most active option day traders are seeking opportunities which can play out in hours or in a day. Case...
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Shifting Views on the Relevancy Of Option Trading.

An article entitled "This Option Craze Could Spell Market Trouble" by a fellow named Steven Sears in Barron's this month is of extreme interest to me. He starts with the sentence "The options market is in the throes of a speculative mania." He claims that the industry now characterizes options that expire in one week as being financial fentanyl. One of this sentences says - "The truncated expirations seem to mostly incite aggressive speculation as they reduce put and call prices into Wall Street's version of cheap scratch-off lottery tickets." Is he adverse to these types of trades? Well he side tracks this question by saying "The curent option trading mania is dominated by hot teck stocks like Nvidia, Tesla, Meta Platforms, Apple, Micosoft. Super Micro Computer, and Amazon.com. Many of these stocks are so expensive that only weathy investors can afford to buy 100 shares - and even they might pause at paying top dollar for such steeply valued names." In other words he admits that short term option trading is not going to go away. In order to add more favor to his articles he references comments made by a fellow named John Marshall with Goldman's. It is Mr. Marshalls opinions he says that "the option markets provides rich details about investor expectations for coming catalysts, such as earnings or investor days". I am not sure what he means by investor days. He then negates the seriousness of such a conversation by adding this sentence. "Many experienced investors think trading options ahead of earnings is the equvalent of a coin toss." Now look at the movements in the following three stocks last five trading sessions. First Boeing.
The last spike up was yesterday a Monday morning. I you are a long time reader of these blogs you will know how I have talked about holding Boeing Calls over the weekend and gettng out if it jumps on Monday morning. Let's also look at a one day trading opportunity that became self evident the week before .
Now lets mention some of the selling pressure it was under back during the time period of March 12th.
Options are a way to capitalize on rationalizing the effects of short term events. Now Caterpillar in the last five trading sessions. What an remarkable move.
I have recently talked about how light the trading volumes are in option series on stock like this. Contrary to conventional wisdom, following the pack in how options seem to be trading is not a recipe for success. Lastly lets look at Disney in the last five days.
In the past two weeks I have written several blogs about how Disney is in an uptrend. My point is that to capitalize on short term stock moves is not a farfetched as many people think. Forget what the so called experts say.

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