We had fun on Friday looking in real time for hyper-leveraged opportunities in Google, monitoring put and call options that were expiring in mere hours rather than the usual days, weeks or months. We were initially focused on bull trades via bottom-fishing an intraday low. However, as GOOG continued to smash one Hidden Pivot support after another, it finally dawned on me that perhaps the stock wanted to go lower. Then, two hours before the close, with GOOG trading around 1190, I posted the following, based on a just-noticed Hidden Pivot pattern on the lesser charts:  “I’m looking at a possible washout to 1185.86, so momentarily-expiring, ultracheap puts are [therefore] just as viable as calls right now.”

The puts I had in mind were the March 22 1187.50s, quoted at 0.50-0.80 at the time.  Although they had traded for as little as 0.10 earlier in the day, when the stock traced out some freakish gyrations on the opening bar, they were hovering beyond easy reach as we watched them ratchet higher.  By day’s end they had traded as high as $6.00, implying that a perfectly timed $100 gamble could have returned as much as $6000 for two hours of work. We were explicitly looking for such opportunities, the theory being that relatively small price swings in a stock can produce enormous price changes in options when they are about to expire in an hour or two.  The outcome we saw exceeded anything we might have imagined, mainly because GOOG fell by $16 that day.  But it is evidence nonetheless that we can trade weekly options just one day a week — on Fridays — and hope to reap bigger gains than we would earlier in the week, when options are still fat with premium.