That sounded to me like stop losses for short positions. If they expect the market to go further down they may not want to close those or take profits.
Nancy, few years back, I tried to find a correlation between the major indices option activity and the future market direction. I could not find any, so I am not using the indices. The QQQ option activity today (as reported by CBOE) was puny at 30,000 calls and 20,000 puts, not even worth taking out of the normal equity EPC to get the virgin EPC....
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