Jim Cramer likes December $500 calls on Google. when this piece came out goog was up and the calls were trading 7-7.50. within an hour goog sold off and now the calls are 5-5.20. the guy is amazing.i predict you will not hear about this call again unless it goes positive.
I've followed Cram's option trades over the years. Hard to not laugh out loud most of the time. He claims to have been, at one time, the largest option trader and to have invented the term "Strike Pin". Truly a legend...
Cramer is one reliable fade. With his latest "blessing", this may the GOOG top. I would not be surprised if it gets whacked later this month at earnings. http://www.thestreet.com/video/cramermarketupdates/10313782.html
The sad thing is people watch him and the networks love him for getting people to watch him ... I remember reading a article about him and he himself talked about how alot of what he does is an act (obviously) so he can attract viewers ...
From da horse's (ass) mouth: Cramer's Options School Opens Again By James J. Cramer People keep asking me for more information on how to trade options. Historically I have been loath to encourage options trading. Let me tell you why. First, options trading is addictive. Options are like Lay's potato chips. You can't just have one. They have so much power and so much leverage that you find yourself thinking that you can make fortunes if you just get the tape right. And you can. Because of this addiction -- not because of losses -- I have been in option hell. I have stood at the abyss, watching positions bounce around in my head with the speed of light. I have been wiped out, cleaned out, atomized and vaporized. But I have also made millions and traded incredibly well. I have lived the life of the boy plunger, as sure as if I were Larry Livermore. But that's not the problem. In fact, it's just a symptom. The problem is that options have a way of mesmerizing you, of getting you hooked to the point where their sheer excitement becomes all that you live for. No, I am not kidding. Ask the Trading Goddess. I started trading options in 1981, using Fidelity. There was some guy named Joe McCarthy, God bless him, who never laughed at me once, despite all the tittering from the other people who used to answer as I swung around my three, five and 10 lots. Joe encouraged me, and for that, initially, I owe him. I would trade from phone booths outside of class. I would trade from my dorm. I would trade during lunch. I would trade during class breaks. I would keep 20, 30 positions in my head at once. By the time I graduated law school I could keep 50 positions in my head and trade them effortlessly. And profitably. Once I got to Goldman, it got more intense. I began to keep 75 to 100 positions on at a time. Ten years later I would only wish that's all I had on. I used to come in hours before work and just go over all of the permutations, all of the different ways I could win or lose money. I had matrixes all over my desk. I would be in situations where if Intel went above 80 I would make money but above 83 lose money but then above 85 make money but then above 90 lose money. And I would have them on the way down, too. I used to have three and four pages of Intel positions alone!! My positions sheets routinely swelled to 35, 40 or 50 pages. I entered every order myself and would wake up most nights in a cold sweat trying to figure out my positions. And I made money. Not just a little money. Big money. Big, big money. I couldn't leave the table, I was making so much money. But I never took a day off from work. I never took an hour off from work. I never went to the bathroom between 9:30 and 4:10. Too risky. If my family took a trip I would stay by the phone from 9:30 to 4:10 just getting markets. I never let those position sheets out of my hands. I had direct wires to options trading desks from my summer house. Bloombergs in the country place. Trading maybe 300 trades a day routinely. Man, was I a creepy guy to hang out with. And options expiration day? It was like D-Day. Every month. Battle gear, tension, German .88s tearing me apart. Trying to get to that darn seawall. Massive worry. Massive. A weekend's respite and then a whole new month's worth of worry. I could not break away. I became the largest trader of options on Wall Street, which, believe me, is an ignominious title. Then one day I got investigated for writing an article about stocks I liked. The stocks had jumped; I didn't sell; but, no matter -- the media was all over me. Man, they ate me for lunch. I was in that special media hell where everybody had to take a shot at me. Like being on that bus to Phoenix in the movie The Gauntlet, with nobody riding shotgun. I lost all my hair, and, more lasting, much of my reputation. Which I dutifully had to rebuild over many months of painful examination by Dow Jones and the government, before it was found that I hadn't done anything wrong... http://www.thestreet.com/_tscs/comment/wrongtactics/12191.html