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Costco. It's Short Term Options

 Options on stocks in the $1,000  range often move  50%  or more in only a matter of  minutes on the opening on Wednesday and Thursday's . The trick is to  anticipate correctly which way the markets are going to move. That's a fools game you might say? Yes and no. It may not be a game you ever play but it might be something to consider to put in your bag of tricks when you are on a role. One thousand dollar stocks sometimes move five, ten or fifteen dollars on the day. If you have profits it's best to take them quickly. Costco is a prime example of that. Let's look at this mornings action. First it's five day and one day charts. Tuesday's trading was kind of choppy. Might it drop on the opening tomorrow? Here is a look at where the 1,035 series of Puts closed that expire this Friday. They closed at $8.50. It looks like Costco cycled up about five times yesterday. Given a weak market opening doesn't it stand to reason a three or four or five dollar will be i...
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Biogen - A Tough Cookie to Play

Drug stocks are difficult to play. One year ago to this date Biogen was trading at $292.20. Today its at $193.61. That's down almost $100.00 on the year.
Now look at it's three year chart.
Back on May 11th 2022 the stock dipped down to $191.07. So the question now is will that now be a support level? That could be something to watch. How do you play options on a stock which has dropped for a year or more? You can't really. The system, for lack of better words has a built in defense mechanism. Let me try to explain it this way. Yes I think a rebound might be imminent for technical reasons however there are barriers to entry. Look for example at how expensive the one month out Calls are.
A May Call contract (one month out) slightly above the current asking price is $8.00 a contract. When was the last time this stock ever went up $8.00 in one month? Well there was one $10.71 bounce between March 6th 2024 and March 12th 2024 so in theory anything could happen. Yet having said that, it's still a crazy price to pay and a risk much to high to take. Now let's look at these Call options that will expire in three days.
Note only 15 contracts traded on the day and an open interest of only 9 contracts. What's more, the spread between the bid and ask is high making it more difficult to trade. What this tells us is that traders don't see any value in trying to navigate in these waters during periods like this. It will be interesting to look back at this blog in one months time to see how this situation played itself out.* Here we are now in July, some three months out. So what happened?
The stock did find a support level. It's still to difficult to play. What is missing is that there are no spikes of upward volume coming into it. Without that happening this stock could dip further.

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