Floridian Water Torture
Do you get that feeling that this won’t stop until you die?
Or at least go to the U.S. Supreme court… which would be death for this market. Forget about a Christmas rally. That having been said, by the end of the day, yesterday, many stocks had made up almost half of the difference since it became apparent that the Gore campaign would take this as far as they have, and more. (It is the “and more” that is scary for me.) So capping off the bull vertical spread with a higher strike bear vertical spread could be a good strategy here. Traders might be wise to sell half of the number of spreads that they have long, and scale out the balance as this situation becomes more clear. Let’s look at this morning’s action….
Pre-open volume was very low today. In the overall market, call sellers edged buyers at a 3:2 ratio, put sellers outran buyers 3:2 as well.
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QCOM |
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PowerRating) climbed into the top five in terms of volume, with stalwarts
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CSCO |
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PowerRating),
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SUNW |
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PowerRating),
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ORCL |
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PowerRating) and
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INTC |
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PowerRating) rounding out the big-volume players. ORCL’s announcement of a new strategic partnership with financial giant Citicorp yesterday, increased its paper flow dramatically. QCOM paper was heavy in call selling with a 4:1 ratio over buying.
Some interesting developments pre-bell were as follows: GE paper was heavy in put buying with a 3:1 ratio over sells; and
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AMCC |
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PowerRating) showed a significant increase in its average pre-open volume, and it appears everyone is selling calls with a 10 to 1 ratio over buys. In
healthcare on the whole, options traders are selling puts at a 12:1 ratio, and most of the activity in the sector comes from Major Drug companies. Our sample size was small, and
the balance of the first hour showed us that there is a great deal of fence-sitting.
Certain situations will outperform the market within this quagmire of uncertainty. A safe strategy for executing
options in this environment is to stick with lower-priced options and stay away from trying to pick up the premium through shorting what look like “fat” options. We are going to be on a roller-coaster, unless you see resolution, in which case we’ll see the top pop off of this market.
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