Options Extrinsic Value as a Stock Indicator By Jason Ng At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

I bought DNDN shares last month at about $4.00 and less than a month later, I sold it for $21. Yes, that’s 425% profit in less than a month. Was that pure luck? How often has that happened to you? What if I told you that luck has nothing to do with this and that I bought DNDN shares knowing that it will break out strongly very soon?

Yes, I did know for a high level of probability that DNDN was going to stage a big rally soon and I didn’t even look at their news or their earnings nor financial statements in order to do that. In fact, it took me only about 1 minute to spot this great trade. What? Just one minute without even looking at the charts?

That’s right and here’s how I did it:

Every day, I simply look for stocks with unusually high extrinsic value on their out of the money call options. I usually look for extrinsic values that are over 20% of the price of the underlying stock itself.

Why do stocks with unusually high extrinsic value signal a rally?

What is extrinsic value ( http://www.optiontradingpedia.com/extrinsic_value.htm )? Extrinsic value is the part of the price of an option which goes down to zero when the option expires. It is the extra money you pay to market makers for selling the options to you. It is like insurance premium which goes to zero when the insurance expires. Of course, a lot of factors go into determining fair extrinsic value and one of the biggest determinant is implied volatility or how volatile market makers think the stock is going to be in the near future.

Market makers are members of the exchange and are who you are buying and selling options with when you trade options. Market makers control the extrinsic value of options through adjusting the implied volatility of options in response to news, sentiment or trading activities. Market makers are the “insiders” of the market and they know when something is brewing and then raise the extrinsic value of options on those stocks so that nobody can reap a free lunch through purchasing those options. Sad, but true. Somehow, these market makers are extremely accurate and stocks do rally, most of the time.

With this information, one could either do a covered call options trading strategy on these stocks ( http://www.optiontradingpedia.com/free_covered_call.htm ) or they can simply hold on to the stocks itself to speculate the stock going higher. How about buying call options instead? Yes, if you buy deep in the money call options with little extrinsic value. At the money call options and out of the money call options are out of the question since the extrinsic value would have been high enough to significantly reduce any potential profits, if any remains.

Yes, this is no rocket science and you can easily set up a screener for such stocks using most of the online options trading accounts. Have fun, good luck and remember to obtain professional advise before acting on any of the above suggestions.

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