Joe, you may be asking the wrong guy (see post 2769), but IMVHO the "description" column lists calls and puts by the month of expiration and the strike price. For example, "C May 97 5.000", the first entry on the current chart, indicates an option to buy a share of AXC for 5 bucks. The right to do so expires this month. Option rights always expire on the third Friday of each month, so you have to get down on a May option before the 16th. The ticker symbol for "C May 97 5.000" is AXCEA, as shown in the last column, where "AXC" is the option symbol (for stocks listed on the NYSE and the AMEX the option symbol is the same as the stock symbol whereas for stocks listed on NASDAQ the option symbol is different than the stock symbol), " E" is code for the month of May and "A" is the code for the 5 bucks. According to the chart for 5/11/97, the "last" guy who bought this option paid a buck for it. The "bid" column shows you
that someone was offering to pay 75 cents for the option. For some reason, the chart doesn't show the "ask" price which is usually a quarter or 37 cents more than the "bid" price. The "chg", "high", "low" & "vol" columns are pretty much self-explanatory. The OI refers to the open interest which is the number of contracts that have been sold and whch are still "open" either because the time to exercise them hasn't expired or because the guys who bought them haven't "closed" their positions by selling them. The chart shows that there is a much higher open interest in calls than there is in puts. My interpretation is that there are more speculators who are betting that Ampex shares will appreciate in the next few months than there are those who think they will decline in value. But since calls can also be used to hedge a short position, I can't really be sure. I'd have a better idea if I had followed the put-call ratio in AXC options and the ratio of short-long interest in AXC shares over a period of time, but I haven't done that. Maybe someone on this thread has, and can enlighten the rest of us. |
