Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST) is a Washington state based retailer that operates over 650 wholesale club locations across the world. As of the time of this post (2:05PM CST), COST is currently trading at 150.27, up 2.29% on the day. The stock continues its strong bullish uptrend that has carried on throughout the year, and today we saw COST break out to fresh 52 week highs as the stock printed as high as 150.88 just moments ago.
Earlier this afternoon OptionHacker detected and flagged some unusually bullish options activity in COST just moments before the stock broke out above the 149.00 level and continued to rally higher. At around 1:20PM CST OptionHacker flagged a large sweep of 1,481 of the weekly 150 strike calls that are expiring this Friday, February 6th. A trader stepped in and lifted the offer of 0.99 across multiple exchanges, representing an initial cash outlay of approximately $146,619 before commissions. Going off against an open interest in the strike of just 77 contracts, we can confidently surmise that this was a bullish opening position. With just over three full trading sessions remaining before expiration, these calls represent an assertive bet that COST will be trading over the 150.99 break-even point (before commission costs) for this trader by Friday’s weekly option expiration. It seems as though the buyer of these calls was correct in doing so however, as at this time the calls flagged by OptionHacker have already traded as high as 2.12, signifying over 110% profits in the matter of an hour.
Trade: trader bought 1,481 of the COST Feb 6th Weekly 150 Calls for $0.99
Risk: $99 per 1 lot
Reward: Unlimited
Breakeven: $150.99
These calls have already more than doubled in value making this trade an absolute blowout winner.
Andrew Keene
KeeneOnTheMarket.com
