Tesla is absolutely speeding into Wednesday afternoon’s earnings report. The electric automaker’s share price has more than doubled since the company’s last report in October, climbing 124% during that time.
Whether Tesla’s next earnings announcement can kick-start the next leg higher for the stock remains to be seen, but whatever happens, we’re likely to see the stock move quite a bit over the next few days, according to Michael Khouw, president of Optimize Advisors.
“Right now the options market is implying a pretty big move of about 11% [in either direction]. That’s larger than the 9.5% that it has averaged over the last eight quarters,” Khouw said Tuesday on “Fast Money.”
As Khouw would point out, the magnitude of those post-earnings moves is even more impressive given Tesla’s large market capitalization of more than $100 billion. By market cap, Tesla is the world’s second-largest automaker behind Toyota.
That’s already a fairly striking stat, but one trader is betting that Tesla could dethrone Toyota by June, and thinks the implied post-earnings move of 11% in either direction doesn’t even begin to measure where the company’s stock price could be headed next.
“Where we saw the activity today that caught my eye,” Khouw said, “was the purchase of 900 of the June 800-calls. The buyer paid just under $20 a contract for that.”
Since each options contract is worth 100 shares of stock, this translates to a bet of just under $2 million in premium that Tesla’s stock price will rise above $819.80 by June expiration, or about 45% higher than Monday’s closing price.
“That would make [Tesla] as big as Volkswagen and Daimler [by market capitalization] combined, which have 17 times the revenue of Tesla,” Khouw said.
Tesla was up nearly 1% midmorning Wednesday.
