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Strategies & Market Trends : Technical analysis for shorts & longs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Johnny Canuck who wrote (37420)	6/25/2002 2:06:09 AM
From: Johnny Canuck	Respond to of 70561

Monday's Option Activity Watch: Playing with Mattel By Beth Gaston (bgaston@sir-inc.com) 6/24/2002 10:25 AM ET Mattel (MAT: sentiment, chart, options) is a toy-making force to be reckoned with, claiming such household brand names as Barbie, Fisher Price, and Hot Wheels. The company also has licensing deals with Sesame Street, American Girl, and Disney. MAT caught the eye of some options players on Friday, as over 3,000 contracts changed hands on the October 22.50 call, over half of which translated as new open interest. This is unusual activity for the equity, which is often not eyed by the speculative crowd. This near-the-money position is now the site of heaviest open interest across all options series, both call and put. Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) for the stock stands at 0.39, meaning there are only 39 puts for every 100 open calls in the front three-month series. This reading ranks in the 55th percentile of all annual measures taken of this sentiment indicator for the last 12 months. On the technical front, MAT has been motoring higher of late since taking out potential resistance in the 21 region. The stock is now hovering at an annual peak. IBM (IBM: sentiment, chart, options) is setting up for a rocky session today; Goldman Sachs Group reduced both its 2002 and 2003 earnings estimates for Big Blue early this morning. Since the beginning of the year, IBM has been embroiled in a solid downtrend, sloughing off over 45 percent of its value and sinking well below its intermediate-term moving averages. The stock was the site of notable option activity on Friday, with June options expiring at the session's close. Over 15,000 contracts changed hands on the June 70 put, while more than 12,500 contracts crossed the tape at the July 75 call strike. There is currently a significant amount of out-of-the-money call open interest in the newly front-month series, mostly between the 75 and 100 strikes. These bullish bets could cause additional resistance on the shares. Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) currently stands at 0.86, in the 48th percentile of all annual readings. Microsoft (MSFT: sentiment, chart, options) said Friday that it was teaming up with Verizon Communications, the nation's largest telecommunications company, to launch a co-branded, high speed version of the software giant's MSN Online service. MSFT not only saw activity amid the newswires, but in its options pits as well, as over 11,000 contracts were executed on the January 2005 70 call. Nearly all of this volume translated on the far-out-of-the-money LEAPS position, which had previously been home to less than 3,000 contracts.