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All About Stock Options

My goal is to give you a basic understanding of what stock options are all about without hopelessly confusing you with unnecessary details. I have read dozens of books on stock options, and even my eyes start glazing over shortly into most of them. Let’s see how simple we can make it.

Basic Call Option Definition

Buying a call option gives you the right (but not the obligation) to purchase 100 shares of a company’s stock at a certain price (called the strike price) from the date of purchase until the third Friday of a specific month (called the expiration date).

People buy calls because they hope the stock will go up, and they will make a profit, either by selling the calls at a higher price, or by exercising their option (i.e., buy the shares at the strike price at a point when the market price is higher).

Basic Put Option Definition

Buying a put option gives you the right (but not the obligation) to sell 100 shares of a company’s stock at a certain price (called the strike price) from the date of purchase until the third Friday of a specific month (called the expiration date).

People buy puts, because they hope the stock will go down, and they will make a profit, either by selling the puts at a higher price, or by exercising their option (i.e., forcing the seller of the put to buy the stock at the strike price at a time when the market price is lower).

Some Useful Details

Both put and call options are quoted in dollar terms (e.g. $3.50), but they actually cost 100 times the quoted amount (e.g., $350.00), plus an average of $1.50 commission (charged by my discount broker – commissions charged by other brokers are considerably higher).

Call options are a way of leveraging your money. You are able to participate in any upward moves of a stock without having to put up all the money to buy the stock. However, if the stock does not go up in price, the option buyer may lose 100% of his/her investment. For this reason, options are considered to be risky investments.

On the other hand, options can be used to considerably reduce risk. Most of the time, this involves selling rather than buying the options. Terry’s Tips describes several ways to reduce financial risk by selling options.

Since most stock markets go up over time, and most people invest in stock because they hope prices will rise, there is more interest and activity in call options than there is in put options. From this point on, if I use the term “option” without qualifying whether it is a put or a call option, I am referring to a call option.

Real World Example

Here are some call option prices for a hypothetical XYZ company on February 1, 2010:
Price of stock: $45.00

Expiration Date  
Strike Price Feb ’10 Mar ’10 Jan ’12 Terminology of Option
(price of call option)  
40 $5.50 $7.00 $18.50 “in-the-money”
(strike price is less than stock price)
45 $2.00 $4.00 $16.00 “at-the-money”
(strike price is equal to stock price)
50 $0.50 $1.00 $14.00 “out-of-the-money”
(strike price is greater than stock price)

The premium is the price a call option buyer pays for the right to be able to buy 100 shares of a stock without actually having to shell out the money the stock would cost. The greater the time period of the option, the greater the premium.

The premium (same as the price) of an in-the-money call is composed of the intrinsic value and the time premium. (I understand that this is confusing. For in-the-money options, the option price, or premium, has a component part that is called the time premium). The intrinsic value is the difference between the stock price and the strike price. Any additional value in the option price is called the time premium. In the above example, the Mar ’10 40 call is selling at $7. The intrinsic value is $5, and the time premium is $2.

For at-the-money and out-of-the-money calls, the entire option price is time premium. The greatest time premiums are found in at-the-money strike prices.

Options that have more than 6 months until the expiration date are called LEAPS. In the above example, the Jan ’12 calls are LEAPS.

If the price of the stock remains the same, the value of both puts and calls decreases over time (as expiration is approached). The amount that the option falls in value is called the decay. At expiration, all at-the-money and out-of-the-money calls have a zero value.

The rate of decay is greater as the option approaches expiration. In the above example, the average decay for the Jan ’12 45 LEAP would be $.70 per month ($16.00/23 months). On the other hand, the Feb ’10 45 call option will decay by $2.00 (assuming the stock stays the same) in only three weeks. The difference in decay rates of various option series is the crux of many of the option strategies presented at Terry’s Tips.

A spread occurs when an investor buys one option series for a stock, and sells another option series for that same stock. If you own a call option, you can sell another option in the same stock as long as the strike price is equal to or greater than the option you own, and the expiration date is equal to or less than the option you own.

A typical spread in the above example would be to buy the Mar ’10 40 call for $7 and sell the Mar ’10 45 call for $4. This spread would cost $3 plus commissions. If the stock is at $45 or any higher when the options expire on the 3rd Friday in March, the spread would be worth exactly $5 (giving the spread owner a 60% gain for the period even if the stock stays the same – less commissions, of course).

Spreads are a way of reducing, but not eliminating the risks involved in buying options. While spreads may limit risk somewhat, they also limit the possible gains that an investor might make if the spread had not been put on.

This is an extremely brief overview of call options. I hope you are not totally confused. If you re-read this section, you should understand enough to grasp the essence of the 4 strategies discussed in Terry’s Tips.

Further Reading

Two more steps will help your understanding. First, read the Frequently Asked Questions section. Second, Subscribe To My Free Options Strategy Report, and receive the valuable report “How to Create an Options Portfolio That Will Outperform a Stock or Mutual Fund Investment”. This report includes a month-by-month description of the option trades I made during the year, and will give you a better understanding how at least one of my option strategies work.

Stock Option Symbols

In 2010, option symbols were changed so that they now clearly show the important fearure of the option – the underlying stock that is involved, the strike price, whether it is a put or call, and the actual date when the option expires. For example, the symbol SPY120121C135 means the underlying stock is SPY (the tracking stock for the S&P 500), 12 is the year (2012), 0121 is the third Friday in January when this option expires, C stands for Call, and 135 is the strike price.

Stock LEAPS are one of the greatest secrets in the investment world. Hardly anyone knows much about them. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times do not even report stock LEAP prices or trading activity, although sales are made every business day. Once a week, Barron’s almost begrudgingly includes a single column where they report trading activity for a few strike prices for about 50 companies. Yet stock LEAPS are available for over 400 companies and at a great variety of strike prices.

LEAPS, Simply Defined

Stock LEAPS are long-term stock options. The term is an acronym for Long-term Equity AnticiPation Securities. They can be either a put or a call. LEAPS typically become available for trading in July, and at first, they have a 2.5-year lifespan.

As time passes, and there are only six months or so remaining on the LEAP term, the option is no longer called a LEAP, but merely an option. To make the distinction clear, the symbol of the LEAP is changed so that the first three letters are the same as the company’s other short-term options.

LEAPS Are Tax-Friendly

All LEAPS expire on the third Friday of January. This is a neat feature because if you sell a LEAP when it expires, and you have a profit, your tax is not due for another 15 months. You can avoid the tax altogether by exercising your option. For example, for a call option, you purchase the stock at the strike price of the option you own.

Owning Call LEAPS Is Much Like Owning Stock

Call LEAPS give you all the rights of stock ownership except voting on company issues and collecting dividends. Most importantly, they are a means to leverage your stock position without the hassles and interest expense of buying on margin. You will never get a margin call on your LEAP if the stock should fall precipitously. You can never lose more than the cost of the LEAP – even if the stock falls by a greater amount.

Of course, LEAPS are priced to reflect the inputted interest that you avoid, and the lower risk due to a limited downside possibility. Just like in everything else, there’s no free lunch.

All Options Decay, But All Decay is Not Equal

All LEAPS, like any option, go down in value over time (assuming the stock price remains unchanged). Since there are fewer months remaining until the expiration date, the option is worth less. The amount that it declines each month is called the decay.

An interesting feature of the monthly decay is that it is much smaller for a LEAP than it is for a short-term option. In fact, in the last month of an option’s existence, the decay is usually three times (or more) the monthly decay of a LEAP (at the same strike price). An at-the-money or out-of-the-money option will plunge to zero value in the expiration month, while the LEAP will hardly budge.

This phenomenon is the basis for many of the trading strategies offered at Terry’s Tips. Quite often, we own the slower-decaying LEAP, and sell the faster-decaying short-term option to someone else. While we lose money on our LEAP (assuming no change in the stock price), the guy who bought the short-term option loses much more. So we come out ahead. It may seem a little confusing at first, but it really is quite simple.

Buy LEAPS To Hold, Not To Trade

One unfortunate aspect of LEAPS is due to the fact that not many people know about them, or trade them. Consequently, trading volume is much lower than for short-term options. This means that most of the time, there is a big gap between the bid and asked price. (This is not true for QQQQ LEAPS, and is one of the reasons I particularly like to trade in the Nasdaq 100 tracing equity.)

The person on the other end of your trade is usually a professional market maker rather than an ordinary investor buying or selling the LEAP. These professionals are entitled to make a profit for their service of providing a liquid market for inactively traded financial instruments such as LEAPS. And they do. They manage to sell at the asked price most of the time, and to buy at the bid price. Of course, you are not getting the great prices the market maker enjoys.

So when you buy a LEAP, plan on holding it for a long time, probably until expiration. While you can always sell your LEAP at any time, it is expensive because of the big gap between the bid and asked price.

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TERRY’S TIPS STOCK OPTIONS TRADING BLOG

May 22, 2023

May 22, 2023

Dear [[firstname]],

I didn’t send a newsletter for the past couple of weeks because I didn’t like how the trades were setting up early in the week. One moved against us, so it didn’t look as attractive. The other moved in our direction, so there wasn’t enough credit available for a viable trade.

It’s not right to send a newsletter for the mere sake of sending a newsletter. If the trade is good, I’ll give it to you. If not, I’ll hold off. And you’ll just have to go without our incredible offers for a week or two!

With that said, here is your Option Trade of the Week, as included in this past weekend’s Saturday Report for our Terry’s Tips Insider Members. This is a post-earnings bullish trade on a gaming company that looks better today than it did over the weekend. In fact, you should be able to get an extra 10% in credit. Good luck with the trade!   

But first, our Honey Badger portfolio is on a huge roll. I know I keep saying that every week, but it’s now up a mammoth 45% for 2023. Of course, don’t forget that our portfolios beat their underlying stock performance by an average of 22% in 2022.  

Don’t miss out on the profits. For our loyal (thanks for that, by the way) newsletter subscribers, I’m keeping the sale going that saves you more than 50% on a monthly subscription to Terry’s Tips.

You’ll get …

  • A month of all trade alerts in our four portfolios, giving detailed instructions for entering and exiting positions.
  • Four to five (depending on the month) weekly issues of our Saturday Report, which shows all the trades and positions for our four portfolios, a discussion of the week’s trading activity and early access to our Option Trade of the Week.
  • Instructions on how to execute the 10K Strategy on your own.
  • A 14-day options tutorial on the opportunities and risks of trading options.
  • Our updated 10K Strategy white paper, a thorough discussion of the strategy basics and tactics.
  • Full-member access to all our premium special reports that can make you a wiser and more profitable options trader. 

To become a Terry’s Tips Insider Member, just Click Here, select Sign Up Now and use Coupon Code D21M to start a monthly subscription to Terry’s Tips for half off. You can cancel after a month but, of course, still keep all the valuable reports.

We look forward to having you join us! Now on to the trade …

Chip off the Old BLOX

Looking back on recent trades in this space, we’re a little heavy on the bearish side of the ledger. Without forecasting where the market is headed (I don’t do forecasts), I feel that we need a put spread to inject some bullishness.  One name that recently popped up is Roblox (RBLX), an online entertainment platform provider.

RBLX reported earnings last week that were mixed. The company suffered a wider loss than a year earlier, which came in lower than analysts were expecting. But revenue came in higher than estimates. One important metric for RBLX is bookings, which grew 22% for the quarter and beat the analyst forecast. The stock jumped 10% in the ensuing two days, pushing it above both its 20-day and 200-day moving average. The shares have traded sideways since then and currently sit between the 20-day and 50-day moving averages.

Analysts mostly cheered the earnings news, giving the stock a couple of upgrades and a few target price increases (there was one decrease). But overall, analysts are lukewarm toward the shares, averaging between a buy and hold. The average target price is also underwhelming, sitting just 6% above Friday’s close. But I’m OK with that because it tells me there’s ample room for upgrades. That’s evident from the two upgrades we saw last week even though the company fell short of the earnings estimate.

This trade is based on RBLX benefiting from its bookings strength and perhaps some more love from analysts. We’re going with a neutral-to-bullish put spread on RBLX with the short put strike (green line) below both the 20-day (blue line) and 200-day (red line) moving averages. If you agree that RBLX will stay atop these trendlines, consider the following credit spread trade that relies on the stock staying above $37 through expiration in 6 weeks:

Buy to Open the RBLX 30 Jun 34 put (RBLX230630P34)
Sell to Open the RBLX 30 Jun 37 put (RBLX230630P37) for a credit of $0.65 (selling a vertical)

This credit is $0.02 less than the mid-point price of the spread at Friday’s $40.01 close.  Unless RBLX surges at the open on Monday, you should be able to get close to that price.

The commission on this trade should be no more than $1.30 per spread. Each spread would then yield $63.70. This trade reduces your buying power by $300, making your net investment $236.30 per spread ($300 – $63.70). If RBLX closes above $37 on June 30, all options will expire worthless and your return on the spread would be 27% ($63.70/$236.30).   

Any questions?  Email Jon@terrystips.com. Thank you again for being a part of the Terry’s Tips newsletter.

Happy trading,

Jon

May 17, 2023

The phone has a 6.7-inch 60Hz AMOLED panel, and it features an Exynos 9825 chipset with plenty of power and a 64MP camera that takes great shots. The standout feature is the gargantuan 7000mAh battery with 25W fast charging. The F62 costs more at ₹23,999 ($325), but then again, you are getting a lot of phone here. On average, my smartphone lived on a single charge for 7-8 hours of active screen in 120 Hz mode.

  • Xiaomi isn’t positioning this phone as a camera-focused option, and that is evident in the resultant shots.
  • However, this is not solving all of the problems and as of now, there is not a global solution.
  • The main one is 50 megapixels in resolution and has an f/1.8 aperture.

Other than these two things the rest of the hardware design is identical to that of the Poco X3 NFC. This means, the same camera module layout along with the snappy fingerprint scanner built into the power button. The IR blaster is still there on the top rail along with the headphone jack on the bottom. And yes, that reminded me about the haptics on this phone.

volver a rom stock poco x3 pro

Other phones may get the Snapdragon 860, but they don’t have it at the time of review. The Poco X3 Pro lost ground in the camera section of this review, but it makes up a good deal of it with its chipset. That’s the Snapdragon 860, a processor that should interest many of you. The Poco X3 Pro can take nice photos, better ones than the Microsoft Surface Duo (original cost $1400 / about £1,075), which we tried recently.

  • The brightness is almost always enough, but the auto brightness does not work quite correctly and often you have to move the slider manually.
  • The Poco X3 Pro supports LDAC, SBC, AAC, aptX, and aptxHD Bluetooth codecs.
  • They offer excellent battery life, along with a decent camera setup.
  • Color reproduction is on the saturated side, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
  • The marquee feature on the POCO X3 Pro is the Snapdragon 860 chipset.
  • I’m actually more impressed Poco included support Stock Firmware for 26W USB-PD that’s almost as fast and works with more plugs.

The form factor is similar too, but this time Poco has worked on the weight and thickness, as X3 Pro is 9.4mm thick compared to 10.1mm on the X3. Since the X3 received a lot of criticism about its weight this time X3 Pro weighs about 213 grams as per the brand. But in our testing, it came out to be 215 grams, which is slightly lighter when compared to X3 with 225 grams. So, I would say Poco has definitely worked on the feedback, but the phone still feels bulky and heavy in hand, I hope Poco works to refine it more in the next model. By default, the phone delivers 12 MP shots that contain a good amount of detail and natural colours.

May 12, 2023

Flashfilegsm.com is the best site for you if you are a mobile technician. This website gives you everything free without a password (money). Download the latest stock rom for Realme RMX1941 (Ver 11_C.57).

  • We’ve implemented a new Read Codes Online procedure for Samsung MTK models without ROOT.
  • You can Upgrade or Downgrade Realme 6 Pro RMX2063 with a Stock ROM file.
  • He is a Computer Science Graduate and Certified Android Developer, Making His Career towards this Technology.
  • Like – WhatsApp, Calendar, SMS, Call logs, Photos, Videos, Music, Browser Bookmarks, Album, Audios, Apps data, WiFi passwords, and apps settingIf you want to save data get a backup before start.

So, you can use this file to upgrade or update your phone, as well as fix the device boot logo problem also. Now click on the below download link to get the ROM. Initially, they focused on Mid-Range mobiles, and Later, they also released Budget Flagship mobiles. In a Different way, they released their competitor phones with slightly modified specs.

As usual, you can always update your mobile using the software update option. When you can’t do the auto method, you can use one of the below manual ways. Download Realme 5i RMX2030 Latest Flash File From gsmduniya.com We have given the official link for download the Realme 5i RMX2030 Flash File (Firmware). Download and Flash Your Phone For Removing All Types Of Screen locks Password. It has to be rolled out using any unzip software like WinRAR also get official firmware free, 7zip, etc.

  • The firmware comes with a zip file and it contains Stock ROM, USB Driver, Flashing Tool & How-to Flash Manual guide.
  • And in such a case, you need to manually install the USB drivers for your Realme phone and the tool facilitates an option for the same.
  • This will save you time during the procedure, it also reduces errors due to forgotten or wrongly executed cable insertion.
  • Firmware Realme 5 Pro RMX1971 flash file from Gsm1x and flash your phone for remove all screen locks and fix hang on logo problem, erase frp, bypass Google account….

  • So first make successful one-click root on Android to make use of SP FlashTool download and process.

If You faces problems in Your RealMe phone Or tablets like Screen freezing, unresponsive Touch, camera fail or bootloop, you can factory reset or flash the latest RealMe 1 Firmware Stock Rom Files. Everyone can read or write a parameter like the data functions on the smartphone via one-time programming (OTP). Huawei Smartphone Multi-Download Tool is a windows application to flash Stock ROM for Huawei Smartphone. Click here to download touch repair file of Samsung J7 Next (J701f) device.

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All the files or Software on our website have been taken from its official site. The same file software will be available on Androidji which is free from the official site. Before Download any File and Software from this site, You need to know about it. If You faces problems in Your RealMe phone Or tablets like Screen freezing, unresponsive Touch, camera fail or bootloop, you can factory reset or flash the latest RealMe C2 Firmware Stock Rom Files. Download Vodafone firmware is clearly the largest mobile phone and internet service provider hence any individual who becomes the company s client … After downloading (and copying) the firmware to your phone, launch file manager and navigate to the folder where the file is. Click on the file to run, and click Update now on the popup.

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