Caterpillar executives take note. You have leeches using your companies stock to suck out money in a systematic way. Let me explain. It's ingenious what they are doing and at the same time somewhat laughable. In the next couple of paragraphs I am going to show you something that is going to change your thinkings of how you should be looking at the markets. Let's start with Caterpillar chart of last Thursday with Friday being Good Friday and a day the markets are closed. This makes them one day or last day to expiring options.
What do you see? I see a stock that sold of on the morning and then rallied and then petered out the rest of the day. Nothing to out of the ordinary one might say. Now this. The low of the day was at exactly 9:45 a.m.. In a blog I did two days ago entitled "Caterpillar Puts On A Thursday Morning With Friday Being A Holiday" I was tracting the 720 series of Puts. Here is a printout I showed watching how they traded on the opening.
The high for the day on these Puts was $13.95 at exactly 9:45:00 a.m.. At that exact moment the stock turned on a dime and charged back upwards. Not at 9:44:58 a.m. or at 9:44:59 a.m. It happened at exactly 9:45:00 a.m.. Now here is where it gets strange. The stock then started to rebound and it topped out at exactly 9:59:59 a.m.. Does that timeing raise some eyebrows? It should. A 9:59:59 a.m. the stock was trading at $720.70 which was a gain of $10.70 in fifteen minutes. Call option traders were well rewarded if they caught that move.

The stock then proceeded to wobble sideways for a few minutes until it jumped again to reach it's high of the day. Guess what? The high of the day was at a time period also ending with the 59 second number in it. The high of the day was at 11:44:59 a.m. when the stock reached $730.07. Can you see how A1 trading is kicking in with progammed buy and sell tickets set in this case in fifteen minutes intervals? All of this is happenig on relatively light numbers of option trades. It's like they want to keep these activities relatively unnoticed. For interest only, here is how the 720 series of Puts closed on the day on relatively light volume.
Is this a case of market manipulation? Are the market regulators on top of this? It's Ai trading scamming the sytem. All I know is that it's going to get worse before it gets better. This type of Ai generated trading is not going to go away. As a small fish if you are able to recognize this pattern you can try and tag along for the ride.
Comments