Alibaba Group Holdings Limited (BABA) is trending in the news this morning after the company announced an increase in fees on some of its services. If you’ve been reading our ODDS Online Trending Stock Report for a while, you might be excited to see BABA as our Trending Stock again today. BABA has been very good to us in the past. 

BABA has an earnings report scheduled for August 8th that could be a catalyst for another big move in the stock price. It is a bit surprising that options investors are underestimating the potential for a big move in BABA share prices given the stock’s history.

This Volatility Term Structure for BABA shows us the implied volatility of the at-the-money options for each expiration. To learn more about Volatility Term Structure, click here. The expectations are relatively flat. The highest point in the term structure is near 37 and the lowest is near 31. We’re going to select the September 20th expiration because it gives us time for the stock to move after the earnings report. September is also a seasonal time period for increasing market volatility which could help our option buying strategies.

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This MDM graph compares the modeled expectations of current options prices (the orange line) to the actual movement of BABA’s stock price over the past two years. You can see that the actual behavior (the blue histogram) shows us that BABA made big moves more frequently than modeled options prices currently expect. That is good news for our option buying strategies.

This Volatility Cone for BABA shows us that volatility expectations (the yellow dots) for every term are below the two-year historical volatility average. To learn more about the Volatility Cone, click here. This confirms that options on BABA are relatively inexpensive.

BABA has a history of making bigger moves than options investors are currently expecting. It is unusual that investors are underpricing BABA options this close to a scheduled earnings report. BABA’s history with relatively low volatility expectations gives us another option buying opportunity.

To get the specific details and prices on today’s trade ideas, be sure to read today’s ODDS Online Daily Option Trade Idea.

To access Odds Online Daily and be able to see any stock you are tracking in this software, click here.

Thank you,

Don Fishback