Moving The Goalposts
As we said early on, we feared this would go to the Supreme Court. Today the
Florida Supreme Court hears the case, and a ruling reaffirming the Secretary of
State’s ability to use her discretion in the certification would mean we take a
major step closer to resolving the election matters. We see the stability of
market turning on this, and if the ruling goes another way, then you have to
look at the murky conceptual issues about what constitutes a vote. This
uncertainty looms over us. The pre-open numbers looked like this…
Pre-open order volume was
moderate. Overall, call sellers led buyers at a 4:1 ratio, and put sellers led
buyers at a ratio of 3:2. With the exception of
(
ORCL |
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surprises in the top five order volume leaders today:
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MSFT |
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(
JNPR |
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CSCO |
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and Dell
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DELL |
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PowerRating). News of a top executive at Oracle sent the stock reeling and put
buyers queued up.Â
During the first hour of
trading, buyers came back into the picture, edging sellers 60/40. ORCL put
sellers were most apparent, as were
(
TYC |
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PowerRating) and Agilent
(
A |
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(
BRCD |
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PowerRating) and
(
CIEN |
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(
SCMR |
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PowerRating) gapped lower and put buyers
showed up in force.
We are starting to see some of the selling pressures pick up. We currently
are “hanging out” on half of the verticals we bought last Monday. We
spread off one half of these on the rally up Wednesday, and were looking for the
Friday rally to continue, allowing us to sell the balance of the position. With
the action of late Friday and early today, we need to hold on any trades until
we get better levels. If you have purchased cheap (low-priced) options as we
urged, you should be fine. Look to roll this down through vertical or diagonal
spreads.