In yesterday’s Cboe block trade report, fingerprints of a professional investor making gigantic bets in Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) calls were everywhere.

We did a deep dive into the data and found that the Pro originally bought August 200 calls on June 28th. Yesterday, they did what is called a Roll Up & Out in options terminology. They locked in profits in the August options, but then took all of those profits and some of the original investment and bet that TSLA shares will continue to march higher. With yesterday’s transactions, we can see that this Pro is betting $270,380,000 that TSLA stock price will be above 270 in September.

You can see the information from our deep dive in the table below. The Pro initially bought calls worth $96 million. Yesterday they sold the calls for $310 million for a profit $214 million. They then took the entire profit plus $56 million of their initial investment – pocketing $40 million in the process – rolling up and out to the September expiration.

TSLA’s stock price has been on the rise, and the professional investor is betting that this will continue. The 3-month implied volatility (the lower blue line) is rising along with the stock price. This means options are getting more expensive and demand for options is growing as the stock price increases.

This MDM graph compares the modeled expectations of current options prices (the orange line) to the actual movement of TSLA’s stock price over the past two years. You can see that the actual behavior (the blue histogram) matches the modeled behavior expected by current options prices. This means that options prices are accurately representing the expected moves of TSLA stock behavior. This is important because the MDM graph is telling us that options are fairly priced.

This Volatility Term structure shows us that options expiring in September are cheaper than options expiring in August, but more expensive than options expiring after September. To learn more about Volatility Term Structure, click here.

This Volatility Skew is very important for our trade idea today. If we want to follow along with the professional investor’s bullish expectations for TSLA, we aren’t taking profits from a previous trade to provide an advantage like the Pro. The MDM Graph on page 4 tells us the options are fairly priced and that we don’t have an edge. However, this skew chart shows that higher strike prices are relatively more expensive than the lower strike prices. This will allow us to create a strategy that has limited risk with an advantage.

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TSLA’s stock price has been rising. A professional investor thinks that the stock will continue to rise. They are using profits from a previous trade to give them an edge if TSLA continues to rise. We don’t have the profits from the previous trade, but we can use the volatility skew to create a strategy that mimics the bullish sentiment of the professional investor and still gives us an advantage.

Be sure to read the ODDS Online Daily Trade Idea report to get the details of our trade ideas for TSLA options today.

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

Thank you,

Don Fishback