Netflix and Nvidia are two of the stocks that have led the Nasdaq to hit record highs in the New Year, and one trader has ideas for how to play both in the short term.
Video streaming giant Netflix jumped over 8 percent after a massive earnings beat last Wednesday, and the stock is currently up over 11 percent year to date. Netflix’s leap off earnings leads Todd Gordon of TradingAnalysis.com to think that the stock has room to move even higher.
“You can see we have a really nice sort of bull flag that’s formed following the gap up in earnings,” said Gordon Monday on CNBC’s “Trading Nation. ” “Provided that this gap area of about $136 holds support, we should be able to move up into the mid-$140s. ”
In other words, Netflix could be making a new all-time high. To take advantage of the video streamer’s next leg up, Gordon wants to buy calls as a result of the stock’s implied volatility. Implied volatility, or the price of options, for Netflix has dropped dramatically following earnings, leading Gordon to buy 140-strike calls and sell 145-strike calls for a bullish “call spread. ”
“Being that options are very cheap, those at the money calls, those 140s that we’ll be looking to purchase, will be very cheap,” explained the trader.
Netflix has surged an incredible 185 percent in the past two years — and the second stock Gordon is looking at has done even better, rising more than 400 percent.
That name would be Nvidia , which has flatlined following a meteoric rise last year. Implied volatility for Nvidia has settled recently, meaning that options prices are cheaper now than they were when Nvidia broke out over $100 in November of last year.
Since he expects that implied volatility will continue to fall, Gordon wants to sell options instead of buying them. The trader believes that Nvidia will continue to rally into earnings, so he wants to sell 100-strike puts and buy 95-strike puts for a put credit spread. “Being that implied volatility is so expensive here, we’ll receive fairly decent premium for the sale of the 100-puts,” said Gordon.
