Volume Spike Investor

Unitedhealth Group, Inc. (NYSE: UNH) saw what looks like major PUT OPTION activity today during market hours, but the reality is that this looks more like an options roll-out trade ahead of Friday’s expiration.  Below are the volumes for each and you can see the open interest: Contract/Strike           Volume     OpInt JUL08 $25.00 PUTS      66,375    68,457 [...]

Magellan Midstream Holdings, L.P. (NYSE: MGG) rarely makes the most active list of options trades. Back on June 17 we noticed what appeared to be an options roll-out trade on roughly 20,000 contracts from June to July in the $22.50 PUTS. We are now seeing this trade roll-out all the way to September (~60 days) [...]

Ambac Financial Group, Inc. (NYSE: ABK) is a wonder of a stock with percentage price swings now looking wider than predicting this year’s Super Bowl winner.  At 2:18 PM EST we have seen 44 million shares trade hands and shares are up 11% at $2.36.  This is triple normal trading vol;ume levels, but the low [...]

National City Corporation (NYSE: NCC) has not gone without its shares of trouble since the financial meltdown started. OCT08 $4.00 PUTS have seen some 27,079 contracts trade over the last 45 minutes.  Its prior open interest was a mere 6,220 contracts.  As a reminder, 27,000 contracts equals 2.7 million on a fully leveraged basis.  This [...]

Merrill Lynch & Co. (NYSE: MER) is seeing some accelerated PUT OPTION activity today in the various JULY 2008 expiration PUT contracts.  Based upon all the rumors around almost every single financial, it may not be totally abnormal.  What is interesting is that with a $35.00 stock handle, some of these are WAYYY out of [...]

Time Warner Telecom Inc. (NASDAQ: TWTC) is almost never a volume leader in stocks nor in in options volume.  But this morning there has been 20,050 contracts trade in the JAN09 $20.00 CALL Options traded hands.  The open interest before today was 2,454 contracts.  As a reminder, 20,000 contracts represents some 2 million shares on [...]

Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc. (NYSE: BUD) is suddenly seeing some unusual options activity in late morning trade.  We saw some elevated trading earlier but over the last 90 minutes the trading in current run JUNE 2008 call options volume is running.  It isn’t highly unexpected considering all of the InBev rumors that have been ongoing regarding [...]