I had been following this guy on Twitter for a couple of weeks and noticed he had been making some spectacular gains in options trades... until the wins kept adding up without mention of a loss or bad trade, only retrospective sales of "winning" trades. Usually a sign of someone who posts for attention and falsely earned accolades rather than actual trading skill. But I figured I'd give the benefit of the doubt until this morning's egregious nonsense (all times listed are CST):
OK, sounds good, $GOOG gaps up big in the pre-market, leading to the following tweet:
Hmm, well first off, so much for "rolling up" to the higher strike I guess... but selling at $15 "ish" and $7.8 "ish" respectively seems a little suspect considering the chart on those weekly options...
$GOOG DEC 12 W700 CALL
$GOOG DEC 12 W710 CALL
As you can see from these two charts, the weekly $700 call peaked at a price of $15.15 and the $710 weekly peaked at $8.00. Looking at the volume in the first five minute candle you can also see a total of 491 contracts were traded from about a $8-15 range in the 700 call and 401 contracts traded in a $4-8 range in the 710's. All this action took place in the first five minutes of trading. Unlikely as it is, it's still possible, that @smartertrader accounted for almost half that volume in the 700 and a quarter of the volume in the 710 in those first five minutes... until you took at the T&S of these two options (click on image to view full size/in detail):
Here you have the time and sales data from the 700 call, filtered to display transactions of any size that went through at a price between $13-16:
The T&S from the 700 calls shows a couple things:
1) Almost NO ONE traded these things anywhere near $15. The very few that did, the earliest ones listed at the bottom in green, were going off at the ASK, meaning they were being BOUGHT.
2) The largest order, the one that looks like it was a market order that began working at 8:30:09 went off for about 100 contracts and also traded closer to the ASK, meaning it was a BUY order.
So, even if you counted all these transactions between $13-16 you would have nowhere near 200 contracts traded in that generous price range, much less 200 sold near the BID for anywhere near $15.
Here is the T&S from the 710 call filtered to display all transactions that traded within a price range of $6.5-8:
This data shows a similar theme. NO ONE was trading these contracts near the high. the absolute peak was ONE SINGLE contract that traded for $8.00 right off the open. After that there were a few small sales of a handful here or there for about $6.50. The rest of all orders that went through in that price range were BUYS at the ASK, and even those counted in total about 60 contracts....
Where are the 200 contracts of 700 weeklies sold at $15 "ish" ?
Where are the 100 contracts of 710 weeklies sold at $7.8 "ish" ?
This is the tape, and the tape doesn't lie. However "traders" on Twitter do.
