Strong Liquidity Examples

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In today's take five segments I want to talk a little bit about what great liquidity looks like and two things that you should check for when you're looking for great liquidity on a stock that you might want to trade options on.

Liquidity is not only important in the actual underlying options but it's actually important in the actual stock itself too. I think that most traders actually miss that. We're going to go over two different examples to keep this kind of whole two theme: a stock that has great liquidity and a stock that has okay liquidity.

It's not a stock that has horrible liquidity, because those are easy to find but something that maybe has, kind of okay liquidity to start the day and kind of borderline and we can talk about those.

The first one that we're going to talk about is Twitter and Twitter's a pretty good chunk today by almost 2% today as the market opens up and it's only about 10:30 in the morning so about an hour after the market opened.

You can see the first thing that we want to check is we want to see, again, great volume and actually the underlying stock. This is important because this really tells us that the market is extremely liquid for the stock which then helps us understand a little bit better about the numbers that we haven't...

And just being more confident in the numbers that we get as far as probability numbers and standard deviations. Things like that.

By having an underlying stock that trades anywhere from at least you know couple hundred thousand shares a day, you can see that Twitter has already eclipsed almost 4.2 million shares just in the first hour, so extremely liquid.

I would say that, you know, kind of a baseline that you maybe want to stay with is somewhere around 500,000, 600,000 shares a day on average is really really good and very good liquidity. Again, Twitter's a big name so it's going to trade a lot more and obviously it's going to be even more liquid.

The other thing that you want to look for as you want to look for actually liquidity in both the volume and open interest of the actual underlying options.

With Twitter, again, you can see both on the call side and on the put side they've got a ton of volume and open interest at the money strikes, deep in the money strikes on both sides, have lots of volume and open interest.

It bodes well for Twitter, and as an options trader, this is what I like to see. There are some fills going in this morning. I like to see a lot of open interest because that means that the markets are deep. There's a market there. It may not be active today.

In the volume category and kind of the volume column, then you can see what activity we've had today, and you can see a couple hundred shares, a couple hundred contracts traded and each individual strike price.