$ORCL bulls triple their money

Oracle has quietly been on the comeback trail, and option traders have been racking exponential profits along the way.

On July 2, Investitute’s market scanners detected the purchase of 3,450 September $46 calls for $1.07 to $1.12 with shares at $44.10. Volume was well above the strike’s open interest of 2,838 contracts, indicating that this was fresh buying.

Investitute co-founder Pete Najarian cited the unusual activity at that time on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” and chose Oracle for his final trade on the network’s “Fast Money” show Wednesday evening.

Those calls traded up to $3.80 today, about 3.5 times their purchase prices. The stock rose 11.61% in the same time period, illustrating the kind of leverage that can be achieved with options.

Long calls lock in the price where a stock can be purchased, gaining with a rally and providing leverage to the underlying shares. The contracts can quickly lose value if the stock stalls or pulls back but also carry less risk than owning the shares themselves.

ORCL was up 0.61% today to close at $49.26. The database and cloud-software company plunged after its last earnings report in June but has since regained all of those losses and may be breaking above recent resistance.