Makes you think someone knows something... stock is up a buck and suddenly someone sells off 20k+ calls ... look on apr. the apr 85 was trading nicely up before the sale. Any guesses on what this was? Naked sale or covered sale banking a guaranteed $5 profit for the next 2 calendar months?
saw it ...it was unreal...I bet they will NOT report in APL exp as it shows at Yahoo right now. And someone knew about it today...The sad part is that I was about to enter short MAR/APRIL calendar , damn !
brilliant: http://www.apple.com/investor/ April 25th earnings !!!! That is somewhat a relief for me ... I'm very bullish and rather see that as a call sale reason than something fundamental.
IB lets you watch option volume... we figured its neutral.. it just means people who were long april got out to escape IV deflation from earnings date change forward.
That was Tuesday Check out what happened on Wednesday! AAPL up 3.84%, huge volume. And no explanation. Until... after market hours, when it hit the newswire that Apple and Cisco had agreed to a compromise on the iPhone trademark. So somebody knew something alright, judging from the massive spike on Wednesday. But it sure wasn't the guy who dumped 20K calls on Tuesday! It was interesting that even though AAPL was up decently on Tuesday the calls dropped so substantially. I suppose Wednesday proves that AAPL underlying is quite volatile. At the same time, I'm still not sure I grasp why on Tuesday the stock went up but the calls went down so much, except simple supply and demand faced with the dumping of 20K contracts.
I think thats precisely it. Sellers there dumped enough contracts to depress IVs on solely April. Regardless, I'm curious if today's action was based on csco/aapl or the analyst upgrades (the official reason) ... We'll know tommorow if the open gets faded or not. Pretty sure about a gap up. The finish is the question. Its due for some continued strong up movement. In the face of the rest of the exuberance in this market, aapl should be at 95+ as a base and 110 as 'overextended' ... had no business at 85 again.
I don't have a Reuters feed in my den, but AAPL was off to the races a whole trading day before the CSCO/AAPL story broke. And AAPL was already up several points before the analyst upgrades came out as far as I could see A LOT of people got some kind of good news long before I did. I already bought my calls a week ago, but something seems odd. The AP story about the Prudential upgrade came out after 3PM. If I buy more term life will they tip me on these upgrades? Alternatively, if everything, or at least the iPhone, is unleaked and by the book, then the CSCO/AAPL effect still hasn't kicked in. AAPL is up 0.4 in after hours trading. Regarding IV, how does dumping call contracts affect the IV of the underlying stock? OTOH, on Wednesday I can see that a stock that moves 4% in one day, the underlying demonstrates more (implied?) volatility, thus further pumping the cost (price) of the calls.