‘You Can Observe A Lot Just By Watching’ — Yogi Berra
Those of you with strong stomachs may
want to hold that short SEBL 30 — 25 put spread (sold March 6
for $2.25), but we’re taking half that spread off for $0.85 and letting the
other half ride. I guess it’s just too tempting to pull $1.40 off the table
against the $2.75 we had to put up in margin. For those of you that are
counting, that’s a 50% return in a little over a month. OK, we’re nearly
breaking our arm patting ourselves on the back, but as Yogi Berra said, you
can observe a lot by just watching!
As far as today’s market activity, the reaction to CSCO’s shortfall and
warning has been muted, but as you may note from our chart below, the $
weighted put volume has been trading near 20:1 all day.
NCR Corp.
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PowerRating) has certainly put in a
stellar performance today, as the former AT&T spin-off is trading up
$3.24. You have to wonder how many folks out there dumped NCR and held Lucent
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PowerRating). My guess is anyone that made that trade isn’t talking about it!
A little over an hour ago we tracked an institutional customer selling 3000 Texas
Instruments
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PowerRating) April 30 calls for $4.10 on the AMEX. TXN was
trading for 33.62 and has since slipped to $33.07. The calls fell to $3.60, go
figure! Keep in mind that they declare earnings after the close today, so
someone wanted to write some premo, thinking the news wouldn’t be good
enough to lift the semiconductor and digital-signal-processing giant.
Likewise, someone pretty big was buying puts in Intel
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PowerRating) this morning. We showed 7000 July 22 ½ puts for $1.65. Given all
that action on the bearish side, I guess the smart money is more worried that
confident about the semis.
| SymbolCall
Volume PutVolume $WCall Vol $WPut Vol | AMAT9,86514,29337,10363,296 | CIEN6,0347,87933,65923,291 | CSCO29,87974,90266,6211,360,634 | INTC16,07924,28824,93883,341 | JNPR12,12115,79067,288137,048 | MSFT33,74715,016102,38938,591 | QCOM10,4086,06344,63547,584 | YHOO8,5682,20911,07289,341(1010WallStreet.com has licensed the use of Hamzei Analytics proprietary options analytics)
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