TSLA announced earnings on yesterday’s close and gaped up 50 dollars a share today, closing finally at 640, up 63 dollars.

And to think not that long ago the company and its founder, Elon Musk, was the mockery of the market.

After cruising most of last year below 300 a share, it broke above 300 on October 25th and hasn’t looked back.

I wrote this back in August of 2017, giving a long term heads up on the stock:

Is TSLA the best long term investment since AAPL?



But this post is not about that. This is about options trading. And more specifically day trading stock options.

I wrote about this strategy for the first time in August of last year but primarily in this post in November:

#ShortStrangles on #Stocks – stealing money weekly in cash

That post was about holding the weekly options to week’s end and did not yet consider day trading. Still, as that post indicated there was a 5.6% gain on the margin requirement for the stocks that week. If consistent each week, that would add up to something for the year.

But could it be consistent when the risk on a short strangle strategy is unlimited while the gain is locked in on the credit received? Probably not. Take TSLA today – that 50-point gap on the open would have killed any short strangle, and it would have been even more devastating by the end of the day.

So day trading…

See the chart panel below. The top row of charts in the panel are last week’s four days (Tuesday through Friday) since the holiday. The lower row is this week through today (Thursday).

In the last eight days, day-trading short strangles in TSLA has gained 16.7% against the margin required each day. The margin fluctuates a bit each day depending on the call strikes and puts strikes executed but since the strategy is a day trade on the weekly options the margin remains roughly the same each day.

On the charts the negative numbers in the white flags on the lower right are actually the pluses on the shorts per contract, and the positive numbers are negatives.

For example, Tuesday (the chart second from left on the lower row) the loss was $365 per contract while today (the last chart on the right on the lower row) the gain was $660 per contract. All total, those profits equal $2,012 per contract over the eight days, give or take a bit for commissions and slippage. That’s about 16.7% against an approximate $12K margin requirement day in and day out. With the risk limited to a single day (with stops), there is likely much more consistency in the trades.

I’ve been by a lot of pundits on the internet, so-call options experts parading the common wisdom, day trading on stocks can’t be done (to say nothing about SPY which I’ve written about many times now).

And of course, it takes persistence and discipline and experience to day trade options on anything but in at least this case with stocks, the common wisdom is, again, suspect.

P.S. One final note on TSLA today.The trade was made after its earnings were in the market. Note on the chart for today (lower row, far right) how flat the price action was for the rest of the day as time decay racked up an approximate 5.5% against margin, a 54% gain on the actual money, per contract, put into the trade.

(Click on the chart panel for a larger view)



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