Trading Tips Blog

Straddle trade bets on shares moving sideways in next month. October 18th $35 call options on TAL Education Group (TAL) saw 6,100 contracts trade, on the same day 6,200 $35 put options traded on the same company for the same strike date. The overall type of trade looks like a straddle—where the trader is betting on shares to trade around that price. With a cost of around $2.18 for the put and $1.20 for the call, creating the overall position may ...
Read More About This

President & CEO makes a 32,000 share buy. Cigna Group (CI) President & CEO David Cordani picked up 32,509 shares recently. The buy increased his stake in shares to over 357,500 shares, and the recent purchase cost just over $5 million. Insiders at the company have largely been sellers year-to-date, albeit in smaller amounts of a few hundred to a few thousand shares at most. And Cordani recently sold 27,000 shares in March at a price just 6 percent higher. Cigna Corporation ...
Read More About This

Bet on double-digit drop in shares by February. The January 2020 $16 put options on Hanesbrands (HBI) saw nearly 7,000 contracts trade, a 28-fold surge in volume over the prior open interest of 243. With shares trading around $15, the option is particularly unusual in that it is an in-the-money bet on shares remaining under $16 between now and January 17th, 129 days away. With a cost of $2.10 per contract, nearly $1.00 of that is in-the-money. In order for the option to ...
Read More About This

Senior VP buys nearly $100k in shares. Kyle Larkin, a Senior Vice President at Granite Construction (GVA), picked up 3,500 shares of the company, increasing his stake by nearly 73 percent. The cost came to just under $100,000. Insiders have been net buyers, and data shows that in the past year, corporate insiders have gone from owning 1.8 percent of the company to 2 percent, a small but important increase. Granite Construction is in the business of infrastructure contracting and construction materials ...
Read More About This

Multiple insider buys over past few weeks. Multiple insiders have been buying shares of Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF) in the past few weeks. Directors John Baldwin, Eric Rychel, Ann Harlan and Robert Fisher have been buyers, as well as CFO Keith Koci. Overall, since the start of August, insiders have picked up over 60,000 shares, paying close to $8 per share on average, with the total coming out to over half a million dollars in insider buys. With the company’s share price around $7.50, ...
Read More About This

Volume soars on late September calls. The September 20th $245 call options on Home Depot (HD) saw nearly 8,900 contracts trade against an open interest of 123. That’s a 72-fold surge in volume that the company’s shares, trading around $230, can rise another $15 in the next 11 days. With a cost of just $0.14, or $14 per contract, any move higher could move the option higher on a percentage basis. Given the 52-week range of shares, another 6.5 percent rally in ...
Read More About This

There are a lot of ways to make money in the market. But even if you find that rare company that can move ten-fold and provide one of the best profits of your lifetime, that will take time.Most investors get impatient. Trading Tips’ Andrew Packer explains why you should be looking at blue-chip bargains ...
Read More About This

Put option buying bets on decline. The October 4th $26 put options on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) saw over 10,400 contracts trading—a 41-fold increase over the prior open interest of 250 contracts. With 28 days left to go and with shares around $32, the bet is that shares will decline nearly 19 percent. At just $0.15 for the option, or $15 for the full contract, the trade may simply be a hedge following the strong rally this week on the announcement ...
Read More About This