Premium Shrinkage And Yawning Greet The New Week
Reports
that the government will have to use $9 billion from the Social Security surplus
this year because of the ongoing economic downturn should come as a surprise to
virtually nobody. Apparently the Congressional
Budget Office (CBO)
believes that the surplus has fallen from $281 billion to just $158 billion in
the past five months and that shrinkage (as George Costanza would say) has the Dems
and the Republicans each pointing fingers.
That’s more than can be said for the trading floors, where we would normally
expect slow trade ahead of next week’s holiday-shortened session, but option
volumes and traders in the pits are both at rock bottom levels. Even story
stocks like Microsoft
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and Intel
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are lacking any attention from traders that are only too willing to let the
session drift by without having to adjust their short premium positions.
Even this morning’s report about existing home sales failed to spark any
buying or selling interest, as traders found little outside of expected levels
in the report. That said, I guess we’ll all have to wait to see if the GDP
report contains any fuel of the follow-through variety.