Williams is about as boring as stocks get.
It runs pipelines that move natural gas across the country, and people own it for the dividend, not the fireworks. This past April, somebody spent seven days piling $380,952 into bets that it would jump in two weeks.
It blew past their target in five days. I bought calls the day before the move, sold them the day after and made 350%, and I didn’t know a thing about why it was moving.
A bet like that leaves behind three signs.
Once you know them, you can spot the next one before the news hits, in any industry, without becoming an expert in the business.
Why It Was So Strange
The bet was that Williams would climb $4 in 15 days. If you’re used to momentum stocks, that doesn’t sound like much. Nvidia can move $4 before lunch.
But Williams isn’t Nvidia. The company says it handles a third of America’s natural gas, and it gets paid to move it whether prices go up or down, so the stock tends to crawl.
From the start of this year to mid-June, Williams gained about $11.50 in total, and that includes the move I’m about to show you. This bet wanted more than a third of that in two weeks. On a stock like this, that’s a big ask, and somebody kept buying it for seven straight days.
Then The News Hit
On April 14, Williams broke ground on a pipeline expansion through Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. It’s enough new natural gas to serve the equivalent of 2.3 million homes, and it came after years of permitting fights.
I wasn’t in the room when that project got the green light. I wasn’t part of the negotiations, and I know virtually nothing about how a natural gas pipeline is built, nor do I ever care to.
What I did know was that somebody had spent nearly $400,000 betting a sleepy pipeline stock was about to wake up.
The Three Signs
Start with the stock. A big bet on Nvidia before earnings tells you almost nothing, because big money trades Nvidia every day. A big bet on a stock that normally sits still is different.
Then look at the size and the persistence. One big order can be anything. Somebody coming back day after day to keep buying is building a position.
The last sign is the target and the deadline. When a bet asks a quiet stock to make a move it rarely makes, in a few weeks or less, somebody is paying for precision.
Plenty of strange bets still go nowhere, and some are hedges against something else entirely. That’s why I check what else the trader did before I follow anything.
I’ve watched order flow for more than 25 years, going back to my days on the Cboe floor. Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET, I’m hosting a private training to show you how I find bets like the Williams one, the newsfeed I built to track them and the two stocks I’m watching right now for a big move in the next five days or less.
===>Get Into Wednesday’s Private Training
Your only option,
Mark Sebastian
P.S. Ford isn’t a high flyer either. In May, it had its biggest single-day surge in six years, more than 13%, on news about its new battery-storage business. I had no clue that announcement was coming, and I still turned $21 calls into $65 overnight. Save your spot for Wednesday at 7 p.m. ET.