Years ago when savvy investors talked about a potential moonshot on a stock, they’d talk about making money using the proverbial “cheap option.” Buying out-of-the-money call options for pennies in comparison to laying out even half due to the power of buying stock on margin could lead to a huge payday for those in the know, if and when bull fever took hold.
Have those days passed us by? If you look at Tesla Motors (TSLA) where 216,000 options changed hands in the first three hours of trading Tuesday you might think so.
In order to buy a call option expiring on March 21, 2014 for less than a dollar, investors would have to look to the $325 strike, some 25% above Tesla's latest all-time high of nearly $260 today. While much of the cost of the premium is due to Tesla’s triple-digit share price, it is also attributable to a lofty implied volatility reading of 55.5% (+8.4%).
By comparison if you wanted to spend less than a dollar on similar expiration call options on Facebook (FB), whose shares are trading at $70, investors could afford two calls at the $80 strike for exactly a dollar. To get there, Facebook’s share price would need to rise only 14% or half the magnitude of the journey needed to reach the goal. Implied volatility on Facebook is 41% by comparison.
The three most actively traded options on Tesla’s stock Tuesday belonged to Friday’s expiring calls. As the stock moved higher, so too did volumes in the $250, $255 and $260 strikes where volume so far stacks up to 30,000 contracts. Decent volume was seen in the March 21 expiration at call strikes of $240, $245 and $250, while the $300 strike was also in demand.
The most actively traded puts expiring in March were at the $240 and $220 strikes where around 2,000+ possible bear plays were in action. Pricier options premiums, it appears, are having little effect on options traders’ desire to take part in Tesla’s bull run.
