Replies to post #166891 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[oimatey]

Zeev - this may answer your question - posted by Todd Harrison at his site minyanville.com:

The flow has quieted down some although a pretty meaty QQQ put spread just traded. A customer bought 90,000 January 33 puts and sold 90,000 January 30 puts. That creates a bean and a half QQQ for sale (1.5 million) as the dealer gets hedged. Odd lot!

Hope that helps - great site by the way, nice independent thinking

[The Freep]

oimatey already posted a reply, but for clarification, it looks like only 40,000 of each of the puts (QQQ 30 and QQQ 33 puts in January) traded via CBOE (meaning only 40K of each are listed on today's volume). The rest were at other exchanges.

This leads to a couple questions. There's still huge numbers of QQQ puts out there through January, though mostly at 34 and under. While these appear to be support, I wonder if there's anyway to know how many are actually straddles like this one? This appears to be a bearish bet, though not as bearish as 180K of open interest would imply....

the freep

[TJ Parker]

> Today QQQ put buying trounced calls by more than a factor of
> 3...Unfortunately, I cannot find a trace of those QQQ puts in
> the actual volume of the QQQ options on Uahoo

40k were 30 jan, 40k 33 jan, and ~10k for dec, nov, nov at various strikes in the mid/low 30's.

just summarizing from schaeffers' "notable options activity" table:

http://www.schaeffersresearch.com/commentary/market_recap.aspx

[Justa Werkenstiff]

Z: Okay, but my point was that you are not looking at a larger picture which the 21 dma captures. So while you might be right in your micro daily assessment, you can see the trend change toward less puts and more calls on a relative basis. Here, for example, in the equity only which is shown by the first chart:


http://www.vtoreport.com/sentiment/putcall.htm


Re: "Today, which was a mild downturn brought the equity P/C to .80, the same level it reached last week when we hit 1842, not extremely bearish."

So what. I could tell you all the days it was in the 60's the past three weeks. Yesterday it was .58 and we were at the same market level. But why bother? You get the picture with the 21 dma.

Scroll down and look at the second chart while you are at and you can see a change of trend as well.