Daily Options Report

So where did the world need calls ahead of the new year? Unlike his hometown team, Nick Perry of Schaeffer's showed up for work for morning and is naming names.

Here are the stocks that saw a bias toward call activity in the previous session. This filtered scan is based on the International Securities Exchange (ISE) buy-to-open data. It looks for stocks where the previous day's call volume on the ISE is at least twice as great as the put volume. It then sorts the stocks based on the call volume. Since this is buy-to-open data, this can be a good source for finding stocks where optimism is emerging. Of particular interest to me would be situations where we see call activity on stocks that are still in intermediate-term downtrends. This would be a potentially cautionary sign from the contrarian perspective.

Companies included in today's scan results: Citigroup Inc (C), Microsoft Corp (MSFT), DryShips Inc. (DRYS), Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS), Talbots (TLB), JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM), Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT), MEMC Electronic Materials Inc (WFR), Medtronic (MDT), Palm Inc (PALM), Applied Materials (AMAT), Intel Corp. (INTC), Amedisys Inc (AMED), Chesapeake Energy Corp (CHK), Micron Technology Inc (MU), CVS Corp. (CVS), Innophos Holdings, Inc. (IPHS), Abercrombie & Fitch (ANF), Rambus Inc (RMBS), EMC Corp. (EMC), Sears Holdings Corp (SHLD), Eastman Kodak (EK), Target Corp. (TGT), United Parcel Service (UPS), TiVo Inc (TIVO).

As he also notes, the real winners were the financials as C, JPM and GS were all in the top 6 in terms of Call skews.

If you're a conspiracy theorist inre GS, there's thought that they knocked themselves lower and then paid themselves in stock, so look at above. If you're not a conspiracy theorist on Goldman....well then you're just not American, lol. Either that or you write for Clusterstock.