Market Insights
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Options Alert: Call Volume Spikes in United Airlines
United Airlines hit turbulence as geopolitical tensions rose this month, but options traders could be staying on board.
Quadruple Witching Dates for 2022: How Can They Impact Stock and Futures Trading?
Quadruple witching is an event in financial markets when four different sets of futures and options expire on the same day. Futures and options are derivatives, linked to underlying stock prices. When derivatives expire, traders must close or adjust positions. That...
The Nasdaq-100 Rebounds After a Brutal January: What Does the Chart Say?
The Nasdaq-100 has rebounded following a sharp drop. It's a good time to consider where things stand with the tech-heavy index. First, Wednesday's close represented almost exactly a 50 percent retracement of the decline from December 28 through January 24. Second,...
Energy Stocks Aren’t The Only Companies Riding the Inflationary Trend Higher
Inflation is a key theme for investors this year. Aside from lifting energy stocks, it's also boosting a lesser known corner of the market: agriculture. Companies like Deere (DE), Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Mosaic (MOS) have outperformed the market by a wide...
Options Alert: Giant Neutral Strategy Targets Intel Following Sharp Drop
Intel's been dropping for nine months, but one big options trader is looking for the semiconductor giant to stabilize. This large transaction involving short calls and short puts occurred yesterday as INTC tried to hold its lowest level in over a year: 30,000 March 50...
Stocks Cling to Support as the Fed’s Hawks Go to Work. Growth Heads for Worst Month in 20 Years.
Stocks clung to support last week as investors brace for a series of rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. The S&P 500 spent most of the period in negative territory, but rallied sharply in the final 90 minutes on Friday, January 28. That resulted in a 0.8 percent...
Don’t Fight the Fed? Powell’s New Hawkishness Is Making Investors Reprice the Stock Market
Stocks are tumbling as the Federal Reserve's tighter monetary policy forces investors to rethink the entire stock market. The S&P 500 is down 9.2 percent in January, its worst month since coronavirus shuttered the economy in March 2020. High-multiple growth stocks...
Technology & Communication
Options Alert: Call Buyers Target Plug Power After Amazon.com Deal
Options traders are buying the pullback in Plug Power, two weeks after a key deal with Amazon.com. Unusual activity in the provider of hydrogen-fuel technology began less than five minutes after Wednesday's opening bell. Traders initially purchased the 9-September...
History May Favor Bulls This Quarter, Despite Volatility
Stocks are coming off their worst week since March, but history may favor the bulls. After all, we're in the fourth quarter -- a time of the year with a strong bias to the upside. Consider some of these points we crunched from TradeStation's wealth of chart data: The...
Basics of Hedging, Part 3: Buying Vs. Selling Options
We recently outlined protective puts and covered calls as common hedging techniques. This brings us to the important question of selling options versus buying options. To understand the these two basic kinds of transactions, traders need to recognize the difference...
Nasdaq Gets Slammed as Rates Shoot Higher
Stocks began the fourth quarter in the red as interest rates spiked and money streamed out of the technology sector. The S&P 500 slid 1 percent between Friday, September 28, and Friday, October 5. But that was nothing compared with the Nasdaq-100's 3 percent drop...
The Message Behind Yesterday’s Volatility Spike
Yesterday was a reminder for traders who forgot what volatility feels like. The S&P 500 had its biggest drop since June 25, and Cboe's Volatility Index ($VIX.X) had its biggest spike over the same period. Even more impressive, TradeStation data showed 23.6 million...