INTU - Week 2

The stock has moved up a bit from last week. Correspondingly, the Put I am watching has gone down, and the Call I am watching has gone up. I will be tracking these here for a while because I want to establish a feel for the relationship between the underlying stock and these options.

Date	Stock Price	Jan 2007 Put 45	Jan 2007 Call 40	Jan 2007 Call 45
October 28	45.74	3.70-3.90	9.60-9.90	6.50-6.70
October 21	$44.72	4.00-4.50	9.00-9.30	5.90-6.80

INTU - following the Jan 07 $45 put

The Jan 07 $45 put today is priced at $4.00-4.50. The stock price is at $44.72. The put option is down from where it was about three weeks ago. It looks like the stock price is around the same, maybe slightly higher than it was about three weeks ago.

What do I conclude from this? Nothing yet - I haven't been monitoring this one long enough yet to draw any conclusions.

Just for future reference, I am noting that the Jan 07 $40 call is priced between $9.00-$9.30 and the $45 call is priced between $5.90-$6.20.

INTU - moving down

INTU is one of my favourite stocks to watch.

I've done some trading in call options before but not in put options. Since INTU is showing a downward trend right now, I wonder if there might be an opportunity for a put play?

The INTU Jan 07 $45 put is priced at $5.50-5.90 today. Let's watch it to see where it will go as the stock price changes.

MACR - What will it do next?

This chart caught my attention. The underlying stock has had an almost steady climb from November to June then fell. Since August it has been relatively flat but with a slight upward movement. What will it do next? Let's watch and see.

Welcome to Trading Decimal Places

Almost exactly a year ago (September 17, 2004) I compiled a list of 16 companies I wanted to watch on the stock market.

For this list I chose competitors of Intuit. I have no affiliation with Intuit except that they make Quicken, a product that I use and like. My search for their competitors gave me a list of over 200 companies, which was a far bigger list than I wanted to deal with. Using two criteria, I whittled the list down to 16.

My first criterion was totally subjective - I selected only those companies that I had heard of or thought that I had heard of. The second criteria was more objective - the company had to have a positive P/E ratio.

Symbol	Company	P/E Ratio
ADBE	Adobe	27.76
BEAS	Bea Systems	26.38
CHKP	Checkpoint	22.04
COGN	Cognos	21.04
CTXS	Citrix Systems	27.29
ERTS	Electronic Arts	45.78
HUMC	Hummingbird	N/A
INTU	Intuit	22.51
MACR	Macromedia	68.47
MERQE	Mercury Interactive	33.47
ORCL	Oracle	19.46
PRGS	Progress Software	31.38
PSFT	PeopleSoft	N/A	PeopleSoft has been merged with Oracle
SY	Sybase	31.61
SYMC	Symantec	25.55
TTWO	Take Two Interactive	16.65

I will be monitoring these companies and will be using this blog to test and evolve an options trading system. I will also use this blog to track my "paper trading" results.