CAT Puts

Carvana has a dubious reputation it can't shake. Insider stock manipulation or something like that. That's old news and now there are more new fears over their accounting procedures and with that comes stock volatitity. You Tube videos also talk about this situation. Here is it's five day chart and here is how their "two-day-until-expiring" Call and Put options are positioned going into tomorrows (Thursday's) trading session. .... Both are crazy expensive however they do offer two days of trading activity. That's a long time for options on a stock like Carvana. Look at the dip and the rebound it had on Wednesday. Now I am jumping ahead to Friday, the final day of trading on these two series of options. Look at this. First a five day chart showing Thursdays and Friday's action. Now it's Friday only chart. So what's important about this one day chart? This. Look at how it's Calls options traded. The Call holders lost all their mon...

So if you like the stock Caterpillar and want to play the upside on it using options you could buy these ones. But why would you? They are up 46% on the day so the real money was made in buying them yesterday and selling them today. The stock would now have to go up about $25.00 in one month just to break even and everything above that price would be profits. If you now look at a thirty day chart you will see that's what it did last month. These are "one month-out" options which are ten dollars "in-the-money" and they trade in a different fashion than short term options. Yet that not what I want to talk about. I note that only 13 contracts traded on this series on the day and the open interest in them stands at only 11. What does this tell us? 1) It tells us that professional money managers are totally lacking in their understandings of the dynamics of option trading. 2) It tells us that retails traders are to some degree misguided by the learning materials ma...

Exxon had legs last week. See the above chart. Now this week. Do you just go with the flow and buy in on the upside on this tinest of dips? It's a tough Call. Now Thursday's action. A spike upwards. Get out at the opening if you see this happening. Always get out if you can catch a spike. .... With one day to go these Calls are to scary to play.

How expensive? $3,250.00. Yikes. It's a hunch I have. A hunch is "a feeling or guess based on intuition rather than known facts". Are you wasting you're time reading about some person you probably don't even know talking about a hunch a stock option? Maybe. Now this. Look at this 30 day Eli Lilly chart. It's ugly. A few days back I looked at its chart when it looked like this. At that time I commented on it and called it a "step-down" chart and a precursor to bad things to come. Are we now at a bottom? Botttons are difficult to predict. Now this. The most expensive Call option I have ever considered. It cost $3,446.00 dollars U.S. and it expires a week Friday. What we are looking for is a turnaround. The potential profits in holding this Call on a good day is like a gain of $100.00 an hour. Would you like to bank your money here? Here we are now 30 minutes later. Look at this printout. It is already up more than $100.00. This is a different wa...

G.M. popped yesterday on an earnings report. That puts us in "a now what" trap. Will it go up or down and what about the Calls and Puts on it that expire this week (today is Wednesday) and next week? Look at at this weeks Calls and Puts that expire in three days. The first printout below are the Calls followed by the Puts. They show only the closing prices of the previous day. ............. As one would expect there are more outstanding Calls than Puts. Now a question. Would you be nervous that G.M. might sell off on the opening? Why? Well investors now have had time to digest this earnings report and fret over what might happen to the car industry in America going forward. B.Y.D. is now sending boat loads of vehicles to large ports all over the world. 6,000 new vehicles are being shipped at a time. That can't be a good omen. So to catch any action on G.M. the very best time would be in first ten minutes of today's trading. Here is how one series of it's Puts tr...

Here is the news. G.M. is the same story. Re : Onshoring vehicles. This onshoring move is only going to cost them money in the short term. On a different note, what happened with Boeing this morning was somewhat to be expected. A good earnings report that was more or less anticipated. Now back to G.M.. G.M. has a way of pulling lots of levers to paint a picture of what is happening. Many option players stay away trading options on the week before these reports come out. Catching Tesla Calls on a Wednesday afternoon when the DJIA jumps 300 points in two hours is a simpler way of speculating in option trading and surviving.