Weekly Options In Play On Intel
by Option Review - July 8th, 2013 9:14 pm
Today’s tickers: INTC, LEG & ALKS
INTC - Intel Corp. – Put options purchased on Intel during the final 30 minutes of trading last week have since roughly tripled in value, with shares in the chipmaker down 3.5% at $23.22 on Monday morning. The stock was cut to ‘Underweight’ from ‘Equal-weight’ with a 12-month target price of $20.00 at Evercore Partners this morning. The largest increase in open interest in weekly options on INTC was in the Jul 12 ’13 $23.5 strike puts. Time and sales data indicates more than 4,400 of the $23.5 strike put options were purchased for an average premium of $0.13 apiece on Friday afternoon. The contracts are now changing hands at more than three times that level, with the last-traded price on the contracts at $0.43 each just before midday in New York. Today, some traders appear to be bracing for further weakness in the price of the underlying, buying around 800 of the Jul 12 ’13 $23 strike puts for an average premium of $0.15 each, and picking up around 500 of the $22.5 strike weekly put contracts at an average premium of $0.05 apiece. Intel reports second-quarter earnings next Wednesday.
LEG - Leggett & Platt, Inc. – The diversified U.S. manufacturer of components in residential and office furniture, among other products, appeared on our ‘hot by options volume’ market scanner this morning due to a sizable trade in August expiry puts. Shares in Leggett & Platt are down 0.30% at $31.18 as of 12:25 p.m. ET. The largest transaction in LEG options thus far in the session suggests one trader is bracing for shares in the name to pullback during the next five weeks. It looks like the options player purchased 1,000 puts at the Aug $30 strike for a premium of $0.55 apiece. The trade, which…
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Weekly Wrap-Up – Why Does This Rally Give Me the Creeps?
by phil - April 25th, 2010 8:29 am
I’m sorry, I am trying so hard to get bullish but it’s not working…
My only solution is to, as we often joke, switch off my brain and stop reading the news (listening to it is great as everything is coming up roses in TV-land) and ignore the now-exposed shenanigans on Wall Street (why should I worry about my investments just because the people running the game are up on fraud charges?) and for goodness sakes don’t even look at something as depressing as "The Economic Elite vs. the People of the United States of America," neither Parts 1-3 or Parts 4-6 because that can lead to thinking and thinking makes it REALLY hard to go to sleep at night with your money riding on the top of an 80% market while gold is trading at $1,150 an ounce because of overwhelming global instability and a total lack of faith in the global financial markets.
Yep, if we don’t think about all that stuff and focus on the good stuff, like the fact that Unemployment is only 3% for those of us who earn $150,000 a year (for the poor it’s 31%), and 93% of our virtually fully-employed analysts predict the S&P will finish the year even higher (although not too much higher) with only Andrew Garhwaite of Credit Suisse in need of an "attitude adjustment" with his puny target of 1,175, which is 32 points lower than Friday’s close. Fortunately, enlightened analysts like Deutsche Bank’s Binky Chad think we can still squeeze another 100 points out of this rally (about 10%) although Goldman Sachs is wimping out at 1,250, their partner in "whatever you want to call it", JP Morgan is up at 1,300. So it’s BUYBUYBUY from the gang of 12 and we’ll be whipping Andrew into shape by the next report or he may find himself the fall guy for the next scandal…
Oops, sorry, I wasn’t supposed to mention the scandals as that’s not really a buying premise unless of course you look at the sheer volume of things the IBanks were getting away with and then look at the virtual nothing that is being done about it and then we can conclude there is no reason they can’t pump this market back up to Dow 14,000 because we already know it was such total BS last time, when we dropped 50% like…
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Thursday’s Thrills – Greek Tragedies and Wall Street Worries
by phil - April 22nd, 2010 8:28 am
Obama is coming to Wall Street.
The President will laying out his case for legislation at 11:55 to crack down on Wall Street with new regulations. "One of the most significant contributors to this recession was a financial crisis as dire as any we've known in generations," Obama will say, according to excerpts from his speech released by the White House. "And that crisis was born of a failure of responsibility — from Wall Street to Washington — that brought down many of the world's largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great Depression. It is essential that we learn the lessons of this crisis, so we don't doom ourselves to repeat it. And make no mistake, that is exactly what will happen if we allow this moment to pass — an outcome that is unacceptable to me and to the American people."
The President needs just one Republican vote (or two non-votes) to pass the 1,336-page Financial Reform Bill authored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd which aims to bring new oversight to hedge funds and derivatives while cracking down on risky bank trading and to put in place protections for consumers of financial products. It will also establish a system for unwinding troubled financial companies to (theoretically) prevent a repeat of past catastrophes with BSC, LEH and AIG.
The House of Representatives approved a bill in December that called for the most sweeping regulatory changes since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The House bill embraced most of a comprehensive package of financial reform proposals introduced by Obama in 2009. The Senate version, if passed, would have to be reconciled in joint committee with the House before it goes to Obama for his signature and becomes law. Meanwhile, the IMF has a proposal on the table to tax bank balance sheets that some analysts suggest will cut pre-tax profits by as much as 20% if the measure moves forward
And speaking of catastrophes that need unwinding – Greece has sent the Pound and the Euro back to recent lows and has Europe down about a point as The EU says Greece’s budget deficit last year was worse than it previously forecast and could top 14 percent of gross domestic product as “off- market swaps” cloud its estimates. …
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Through the Roof Thursday or Smashed into a Thousand Pieces?
by phil - July 23rd, 2009 8:26 am
GRANDPA JOE: But this roof is made of glass. It'll shatter into a thousand pieces. We'll be cut to ribbons!
WILLY WONKA: Probably.
Is today going to be the day? After pressing against our breakout levels all week, today we should finally have the gas to get over the top. We didn't have a stick save yesterday and the Dow fell, but not very much and the Nasdaq made its 11th consecutive positive move in a row, something it hasn't done since 1996. The conditions are right, the hits just keep on coming in earnings with another 200+ earnings beats logged this week against 32 misses (those we easy to count). More importantly, 20 companies have been so bold as to raise guidance while only 12 have been worried enough to lower them.
So we have optimists outweighing pessimists by almost 2:1 in the only poll that matters – the outlook that is filed with the SEC! We also have the FACT that 85% of the companies reprorting this week have done as good or better than analysts expected and we have some signs that the economy may be improving. I said earlier in the week that it was going to be 8,900 or bust for the Dow and we're toying with that line but it's really 6,232 on the broader NYSE that MUST be broken and held for this great glass elevator of a market to get through those upside resistance levels and prove these moves are for real. That did not stop us from adding some QID covers into yesterday's close because, as Willy Wonka said to Grandpa Joe – it probably won't happen!
Willy Wonka had the physics right, there had to be enough power to get through that overhead resistance or it was going to be a very painful test of the top (like the one we had in June). Since our last dip, we've come back for another try and the volume has been up 35% on the average day on this leg. Is that going to give us enough "thrust" to break through this time? As it was in June, all of our inexes are making their targets EXCEPT the NYSE so we do not…
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Plenty of put selling as market slide picks up steam
by Option Review - February 23rd, 2009 4:56 pm
Today’s tickers: LTM, AA, JCP, LEG, INTC, ADS, FXI, GE, APOL & MDCO
LTM – Life Time Fitness, Inc. – The fitness and health brand edged onto our ‘hot by options volume’ market scanner after a large sale of puts was transacted in the March contract. Shares of the professional fitness company are currently down by over 5.5% to $9.42. It appears that one investor sold over 9,700 puts at the March 7.5 strike price for a premium of 25 cents each. Is this some optimism on behalf of an investor despite the decline in share price today? The chunk of puts observed represents nearly half of the existing open interest on the stock, and thus may indeed be tied to a short stock position. If it is not tied to stock but rather is naked put-selling, this investor faces real downside exposure should shares continue declining.
AA – Alcoa Inc. – A large 10,000 lot put spread just traded in the April series of Alcoa whose shares are taking a 7% beating today at $5.85. An investor traded the 5.0 and 7.5 puts at a net 1.41 premium. Implied volatility on the options is running at around 104% given the slip through the existing 52-week low.
JCP – J.C. Penney Company, Inc. – The major retailer popped onto our ‘most active by options volume’ market scanner after more than 27,000 puts – representing about 20% of the total open interest on the stock – traded at the March 12.5 strike price. JCP is lower by 4% at $14.50 today. Open interest of only 6,129 contracts currently resides at the 12.5 strike confirming that today’s trading has fresh impetus. Within today’s total volume at the strike, over 14,000 puts sold for an average premium of 37 cents. This indicates that a trader is either selling puts in conjunction with shorting the stock or just outright confident that the shares won’t slip below $12.13 by expiration. If they do, this investor would be happy to own them.
LEG – Leggett & Platt, Inc. – The manufacturer and producer of a variety of engineered products has declined slightly by 3% to $11.87 today, and appeared on our ‘hot by options volume’ market scanner after over 10,200 puts were shed by one investor at the March 10 strike price for a premium of 15 cents apiece. The lot of puts sold represents more…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site