FYI, this helps explain the high put/call ratio today:
http://www.schaeffersresearch.com/sentiment/optionbytes.asp 1:29 PM Today's big option trade of the day appears to be a put sell on the April 10 strike of Applied Materials (AMAT: sentiment, chart, options) . Seven blocks of 5,000 contracts traded nearer the bid for 0.50 ($1.75 million) on little prior open interest (there was also a block of 3,954 contracts at the same price near the same time that may or may not have been involved). AMAT has been trading tightly around $12 more than two weeks now and had a multi-year low of $10.26 back in October. –JW
From my data feed, it looks like 72,000 of these were traded on the CBOE. If you exclude these big bullish bets from the put side of the put/call equation, the CBOE equity put/call as of 2pm Eastern is .54.