Subject: Re: Second quarter comments
And they are also currently 22% lower than yesterday!
How is this possible? They don't have a lever of 25 or so. Or do they? I just don't understand this.

They did indeed change in price that much. And they do indeed have a lot of leverage.


It makes a very big difference how far the stock price is from the strike price. A small change in that gap can result in a big change in price.

At any given moment, the amount that the price of the option will change, given a $1 change in the price of the underlying stock, is called the "delta".
(the delta itself changes with time and distance from stock price to strike, which is why I say "at any given moment").

Mid afternoon yesterday, the stock was around $363.50 and that option was around $7.25.
At close today, the stock was $358.02 and the option was around $5.45.
So, the stock moved down by around $5.48 and the option moved down by about $1.80, meaning that option had a delta of about 0.33.

The option is very cheap in absolute terms relative to the stock.
So even though the option price moved only 33% as much as the stock price in dollar terms, that still means a big percentage change in the (small) option price.

Yes, these options are very high leverage. The stock price was 50 times the option price yesterday.
But the leverage ratio varies quite a bit depending on precisely where the stock price is relative to the strike price on any given day.
At the moment, the leverage is around 66:1

Jim