Weekly Options Constructive On Home Depot
by Option Review - May 23rd, 2013 9:38 pm
Today’s tickers: HD, IMAX & DOV
HD - Home Depot – Shares in the home improvement retailer are trading lower on Thursday, off the lowest levels of the session but still down 1.25% at $78.69 as of 11:50 a.m. ET, amid a down day for U.S. stocks. Trading traffic in newly issued weekly options on Home Depot suggests some traders are taking advantage of the dip today and positioning for shares in the name to resume hitting record highs next week. The stock yesterday rallied as much as 3.6% to touch an all-time high of $81.56 after the company reported better-than-expected first-quarter earnings and raised its full-year earnings forecast. Traders preparing for shares in HD to potentially rebound in the near term looked to the May 31 ’13 expiry options contracts, and appear to have purchased calls and sold puts on the stock. Call buyers snapped up roughly 1,000 calls at the May 31 ’13 $77.5 strike for an average premium of $1.27 each, and around 500 lots at the $80 strike at an average premium of $0.28 apiece. These contracts make money at expiration next week as long as shares in Home Depot recover from today’s slight declines. Meanwhile, fresh interest in weekly puts appears to be largely driven by sellers of the contracts. It looks like traders sold around 900 in-the-money puts at the May 31 ’13 $80 strike in the early going for an average premium of $2.09 each. Sellers of the contracts walk away with the full amount of premium at expiration should shares in HD settle above $80.00. Several hundred contracts appear to have been sold at the May 31 ’13 $77.5 and $82.5 strikes as well.
IMAX - IMAX Corp – Put options changing hands on the entertainment technology company this morning look for shares in IMAX to potentially head lower during the next four weeks. Shares in the name are down 1.5% in early-afternoon trading to stand at $27.60 as of 12:20 p.m. in New York. The most traded contracts on IMAX…
Fully “Fixed” Friday – Extend and Pretend Edition
by phil - July 22nd, 2011 8:22 am
All fixed!
Greece is getting another $229Bn at 3.5% with about 30 years to pay it from the EU (ie. Germany and France) and private bond-holders will share about 1/3 of the pain by "voluntarily" renegotiating their own notes. Sounds like a really great offer, right? BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Another $630Bn of already promised emergency aid has now been places into a very slushy fund that will now allow the EU to throw money at any nation that so much as sneezes – WHETHER OR NOT THEY ASK FOR ASSISTANCE. This will allow them to play economic Whack-A-Mole, putting out all the little Euro-zone fires until that money runs out (about 6 months at the EU’s current burn rate).
All this fantastic news from Europe has sent the Dollar down to test the 74 line and that was down from 75.37 just ahead of yesterday’s open and that’s a 1.8% drop so we would expect our indexes to go up at least 1.8% – BUT – none of them did. In fact, the Nasdaq only gained 0.72% and the Russell was up 1.07% and the Dow was up 1.21% and the S&P was up 1.35%. The NYSE, which had been our perennial laggard, did the best yesterday – gaining a close, but still no cigar 1.57%.
Will we make it up today or is this an indication that things may not be quite so good as they seem? After the close yesterday, I did a news round-up for our Members and there is still plenty to worry about and we took a stab at some SPY Weekly (today) $135 puts at .79 for our aggressive $25K Virtual Portfolio on the off-chance they "fix" the US debt ceiling and accidentally make the Dollar strong again. At the moment, we are still playing our short lines in the futures, where we’ve been scalping nickels and dimes since my 3:23 am Alert to Members (if you are not a Member, you can sign up here), where I said:
I like shorting the Futures here: S&P (/ES) at 1,346, Nas (/NQ) 2,415, Dow (/YM) 12,720 and Rut (/TF) 842.6 – as long as 74.20 hold on the Dollar, we should get a bit of a sell off so these are levels to look for as the Dollar heads