Option Block 336: Earnings and the Death of Minis
Trading Block: A mild day on the street. Apple catching a bid. Tuesday’s computer error at NYSE ACRA and NYSE AMEX options markets resulted in almost 20,000 erroneous trades.
Odd Block: Call buyers trade in Nike Inc. (NKE), call sellers trade in Gilead Sciences, Inc. (GILD), put spreads trade in iShares Barclays 7-10 year Treasury ETF (IEF) - closing roll, and closing put buyers trade in NQ Mobile Inc. (NQ).
Xpress Block: Late May/Early June is the target date for enhancements to OX mobile, which will include single-leg walk limits, as well as OSO and OTO orders.
Mail Block: In which Option Pit steals the show.
Website comment from Kaiserdog76: Loved todays Option Block. Especially the focus on Mini Options and their total failure. Mark Sebastian said it best when he talked about the people that really need a break in the Market getting "Bo Didley Squat" when the dust settles. I have all ways hated Minis. Talk about a getting "Stupid" on an option trade. One tenth the size but %100 the commission. Spreads wider than Honey Boo Boo. This product is a total joke and in my humble opinion never really lived. This was dead on takeoff.
Website comment from Meatball-in-training: Great show. The question from one of your listeners about the trade scanner that keeps popping up two standard deviation ITM debit spreads was very interesting. Is it perhaps the case that the scanner is ignoring the cost of carry on the premium itself when looking at prospective trades? That is the sort of thing I can imagine someone overlooking when programming a trade scanner and for wide verticals with lots of time to expiration, it might be enough to make expensive debit spreads look superior to their synthetically equivalent credit spreads. I am one of Mark and Andrews’s students, so if this is all wrong, feel free to blame them.
Tweet from OtC bOuNcEr$ @stevesokol21 - Is there a way to run a scan anywhere to find more stocks with that pattern? Thanks a lot for the help
Around the Block: Still some more earning left out there: ATVI - 5/6, CBOE - 5/6, DIS - 5/6, EA - 5/6, GRPN - 5/6, TSLA - 5/7 & PCLN - 5/8