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Exxon On A Thursday Morning With Only Ten Contracts Traded.

Why only ten contracts traded? Sure there are other platforms to trade oil contracts and Exxon's listed options are only one way to do it. Yet think about this. Exxon employs about 61,000 people world wide. Some are accountants watching their books. Why is their so little interest in taking positions on their companies Call and Put options? Why are there not more contracts traded on Exxon options that expire tomorrow? To me it's all so strange. Here is Exxon's five day chart. Now this, a look at some of the action as of 10:00 a.m. The 112 series of options have doubled and thw 113 series (depending at what time you got in) are have gone up even more. This is the kind of activity I look for on Thursday mornings. *** Exxon ended up closing down on the day. Here is how the 112 series of Calls closed. Look at how few contracts traded. Look at the high of $2.00. Exxon can be a good stock to play options on with only a few days to go. Last week's blog showed the same thi...
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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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