ahhh, answered my own question: pulled this off the tradeking options playbook:
Imagine you’re bullish on stock XYZ, trading at $50. As a beginning option trader, you might be tempted to buy calls 30 days from expiration with a strike price of $55, at a cost of $0.15, or $15 per contract. Why? Because you can buy a lot of them. Let’s do the math. (And remember, one option contract usually equals 100 shares.)
Purchasing 100 shares of XYZ at $50 would cost $5000. But for the same $5000, you could buy 333 contracts of $55 calls, and control 33,300 shares. Holy smokes.
Imagine XYZ hits $56 within the next 30 days, and the $55 call trades at $1.05 just prior to expiration. You’d make $29,970 in a month ($34,965 sale price minus $4995 initially paid) less commissions. At first glance, that kind of leverage is very attractive indeed.
When you buy a call option with a strike price of $55 at a cost of $0.15, and the stock currently trading at $50, you need the stock price to rise $5.15 before your options expire in order to break even. That’s a pretty significant rise in a short time. And that kind of move can be very difficult to predict.
One of the problems with short-term out-of-the-money calls is that you not only have to be right about the direction the stock moves, but you also have to be right about the timing. That ratchets up the degree of difficulty.
Furthermore, to make a profit, the stock doesn’t merely need to go past the strike price within a predetermined period of time. It needs to go past the strike price plus the cost of the option. In the case of the $55 call on stock XYZ, you’d need the stock to reach $55.15 within 30 days just to break even. And that doesn’t even factor in commissions.
In essence, you’re asking the stock to move more than 10% in less than a month. How many stocks are likely to do that? The answer you’re looking for is, “Not many.” In all probability, the stock won’t reach the strike price, and the options will expire worthless. So in order to make money on an out-of-the-money call, you either need to outwit the market, or get plain lucky.
