In tracking the option open-interest for the NDX mega-caps I get the following as of Friday's close. The data is from Yahoo! for September/02, October/02, and January/03.
The following top 8 stocks account for 40.5% of the NDX: MSFT, INTC, CSCO, AMGN, QCOM, DELL, ORCL, AMAT. (Actually, MXIM is slightly larger than AMAT, but has so few options that I substituted AMAT.)
To calculate the combined put/call of these stocks I took a simple average of the individual put/call values after throwing out the highest and the lowest value.
Sep OI put/call: .65
Oct OI put/call: .67
Jan OI put/call: .51
Notably high put/call values for Sep are AMAT at 1.19 and MSFT at .78. CSCO has the lowest for Sep at a bearish .44. For the series, both INTC and CSCO have the lowest values.
The QQQ OI put/call for Sep, $20-$30 only, is .71, but for Oct, it's at a bear-scaring 1.44 for that range of options.
BTW, while updating my data I discovered the key to getting rich. -g It would appear that all one need do is buy call options out of the money for tech stocks that are beaten down hard. Lots of calls as far out as you want to look.
The old darlings that are now trading at 5%-20% of their price at the NASDAQ highs are very popular. I can't imagine what the logic is here. I guess folks see a SUNW at $4 and think that there is no way in the world it could trade there for any length of time.
Option traders never die, they just expire worthless. |
