options

Major cryptocurrencies have witnessed a significant rally over past one week despite concerning economic data release in the U.S. What Happened: Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) surged over 12% in last five days while Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) rallied close to 9% during the period. At the time of writing,...

Earnings season and options trading go together like Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Whole Foods. Or Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) and LinkedIn. Or Gilead Sciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: GILD) and Kite Pharma. You get the idea. The binary nature of an earnings event—either Wall Street likes the...

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL)'s earnings has come and gone, which means many traders and investors can now move on to the next major stock scheduled to report earnings this week: Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA). Heading into Tesla's earnings report Wednesday, the stock is up nearly 50 percent since the start...

U.S. stocks have been extremely calm as of late with the Volatility Index trading near multidecade lows. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 index gained or lost more than 1 percent in a single trading session just four times this year in 2017. But that doesn't mean it will stay this way forever. Stocks...

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD) gained more than 10 percent on Wednesday and are now higher by nearly 15 percent over the past five trading sessions alone. The question on many short-term investors' minds now is if the time is right to take some profits or if there is further...

NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA) earns the titled as one of 2016's hottest stocks and is up another 48 percent since the start of 2017. But quietly behind the scenes the options market is now heating up, according to Dennis Davitt of Harvest Volatility Management. Nvidia is a stock that is "made...

Contrarian investors typically buy poor performing stocks that have become out of favor with investors. Case in point, shares of Macy's Inc (NYSE: M) hit a new 52-week low of $29.70 on Thursday and are now lower by more than 15 percent since the start of 2017 and more than 20 percent over the past...

Benzinga Pro is constantly active in monitoring options activity and flags unusual and notable trades. On Wednesday, a particular trade involving Fred's, Inc. (NASDAQ: FRED) was flagged. Fred's stock briefly turned negative late Wednesday afternoon after a big put sweep. A trader bought...

Nic Chahine, an options expert who specializes in selling options spreads to create a steady income, was a guest on Tuesday's edition of Benzinga's PreMarket Prep to discuss how to take advantage of risk arbitrage. Chahine started off by saying that while the market is "dangerously bullish" and "...

In the past decade, the popularity of stock options has exploded. Online trading platforms have injected liquidity into the options market and made it easily-accessible to retail traders. But many stock traders (and even some options traders) may not fully understand what exactly a stock option is...

Between Wednesday's closing bell and Friday's market open, four heavyweight companies will report earnings and the options market is pricing a massive $24 billion swing in their collective market caps. American Express Company (NYSE: AXP) and Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) will report...

Citi maintains its Neutral rating and $29 price target on Bats Global Markets Inc (BATS: BATS), despite saying the exchange operator's growth initiatives seem to be tracking to plan. "We still see the opportunity for outsized growth against peers, particularly in Hotspot (FX) platform, but we would...

John Marshall of Goldman Sachs identified the 25 most "out-of-consensus opportunities" ahead of earnings season. Marshall noted that both call and put buyers benefited from the high volatility and low correlation theme last earnings season. Marshall added expectations this earnings season are "low...

“Sanguine” and “trouble-free” are not terms that can be used to accurately describe the current state of affairs in Chinese equity markets, but there is no denying China exchange-traded funds have recently been perking up. Over the past month, the iShares FTSE/Xinhua China...

Get a full recap of this week's outlook in the video below: Scoreboard With the lack of hopium sources, equity markets ended the week on a sour note. Friday The Friday close was largely saved from much worse results by Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) mightily defending the 108.5 level (see the...