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Showing posts from April, 2026

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Trumph Picks A Friday To Change The Rules.

This is kind of dirty pool. So the stock and options jumped on this news. Did Trumph's cronies get in on this action? It's difficult to tell as they could have got in a few days or a week ago and they could have bought Call options with longer term expiracy dates. Or his stockbroker cronies could have bought the stock to also profit in this gain. Certainly the authors formulating these policy changes were part of this action. In all fairness I can't prove that insiders profited from this Friday event. Yet here is the thing. Releasing this kind of news on a Monday or Tuesday would mitigate this kind of an event from being as impactful as it potentially could be. Option premiums shrink in value the closer you get to their expiracy dates. Lawmakers know this. They should know better than to allow this to happen. No government policy changes that will directly effect the stock market should be allowed on the trading days of the week when the majority of short term Call and P...

Options On Stocks In The $4.00 Range "Big Bear a.i."

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First a look at the one day chart on a company named Big Bear a.i.. The second chart just above is a five day chart so the jump I am talking about happened on the fourth day of this five day chart which was Tuesday. On Wednesday as you can see the stock slightly retreated. Next you can see how on Tuesday the four series of Calls went from $.04 to $.25. I have blogged about this company in the past. A few months ago this stock was on the most active list week-after-week. Here is it's "year-to-date" chart. This story keeps going. The stock ended having a lessor bounce on Thursday. It was an interesting bounce with a portion of it happened at exactly 2:00 p.m. and lasted for about an hour. Here is what the bounce looked like and this time we are looking at the 3.5 series of Calls which is a lower series of "in-the-money" Calls than we looked at two days ago. Slightly "in-the-money" Calls are the best options to use in situations like this. While al...

Ford Options At The Start Of The Week. Why Try And trade Them?

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Ford one week options. It's kind of random. Throwing money into one week Call options on a stock that was down last week. Here is how the 12 series of Calls are priced going into Monday's opening market. . If the stock has a good day these options could go to $.90. It's not much of a trade however if you're using a discount broker to do your trading it could be a good "in-and-out" situation. It could also be a real drag if the stock starts to tank lower. Now look at this recent five day chart on Ford. I used it in one of my previous blogs. Ford is known to jump on good news. Now this question? Does the simplicity of my thinking scare you? I also follow Nio but I don't like the way it trades. Here it is going into todays opening. Nio like other EV companies are battling it out for market share. I don't trust the narratives of what they are up to. Five day out options (options that expire this Friday) in a way give you a one day free ride, meaning the...

The Appetite For Caterpillar Options Going Into An Earning's Report Is Quite Small .

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Let's start with this. Caterpillar has an earnings report coming out on April 30th. You should listen to it. It's not going to be difficult to find. Now look at these how these two series of options closed out the week. The Calls are just "in-the-money" and the Puts are just slightly "out-of-the-money".The cost to play the upside with one week options almost equals what it costs to play the downside. That's kind of strange as usually the Calls cost more to purchase than the Puts. Both are super expensive however Caterpillar as of late can jump $15.00 or $20.00 dollars in one day. When I say super expensive what do I mean? 2,690 means $2,690 Americian per contract. That is not chump change. You would have to have a very strong conviction it was going to move one way or another before you would want to jump in. Yet there is bigger problem. The current price of the stock is in a nose bleeding territory. Look at it's one year chart. Is it really doing ...

Avis Budget and A Short Squeeze Plus Hertz Getting Dragged Into The Action

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Hertz Global is on a terror. . Stocks in the $5.00 range sometimes do that. Yet really it's the Avis Budget short squeeze that is causing this stir. Look at how it jumped just over $105.00 dollars today. How often do you see a chart like this? It's a short squeeze and the stock is trading on high daily volumes. At one point this morning (a Tuesday) there was a "stop trading" on it. Trading options on it defies logic as they are so expensive. Look at this one example. These are the 700 series of Calls and the stock is only trading at 11:17 a.m. at $665.00. In other words they are $35.000 "out-of-the-money". Look at how crazy expensive they are. The stock would have to jump $105.00 or one hundred and five dollars by the end of the week just to break even! Who would be crazy enough to make such a bet? Day traders would be because they are banking on the effects caused by the stocks interday momentum. Let me explain this better by showing you an end of day re...

How To Avoid Time Value Traps With Last Week Options.

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This blog is not going to be an exhausting study of this topic. I just want to show you a few charts found in recent blogs and comment on which ones seem to skirt the issue of "time-value-concerns' and which ones don't. 1) Avoid Thursday at the close Call options. In this case Thursday is the second last day of the above chart. If you guess the wrong direction on the close it's going to be game over on Friday when the options expire. Thursday at the close on options that expire the next day are the biggest time value traps you can buy into. If the stock moves in the wrong direction it's game over. 2) Ford on a Monday going into Tuesday. On this chart April 13th is a Monday and Tuesday is the 14th. Can you see Ford closing strong on the close of the 13th? It would make sense to get in on the stong closing because these Calls would still have four trading days to recover if Tuesdays opening was not all that spectacular. 3) This time it's Caterpillar and it...

Tesla Options Near the Close on Friday Afternoon. Building A Case For Making A High Risk Trade.

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Tesla was up 11% in the last five days. Look at it's one and five day charts. ... Now here are one series of it's Call and one series of it's Put options with only 42 minutes of trading life remaining in them. Might these Calls rebound back upwards towards the closing? Afterall the D.J.I.A. is up almost 900 points on the day and this is one of the hottest stocks all week. The 400 series of Call options at this time are "in-the-money" by $.72, and are priced at $1.88. That's a premium of $1.16 over the striking price. Imagine all of the money lost by the existing 400 series of Call option holders in the last 60 minutes! Couldn't the stock now rebound two or three dollars in the blink of an eye? It did afterall once again just drop over $5.00 a share in the last hour of trading and it now seems to be holding steady. That's the carrot now dangling in front of everyones eyes. Is it time for a quick flip? If you have made twenty or thirty option trades on ...