Today’s tickers: CAT, QLGC & CPRT
CAT - Caterpillar, Inc. – Trading traffic in weekly call options on the world’s largest maker of machinery indicates some traders are betting Caterpillar’s shares, up 3.75% at $87.43 as of 12:50 p.m. ET on Friday, extend gains next week. Bullish bets in weekly contracts expiring next Friday are heaviest at the May 10 ’13 $87.5 and $90 strikes. Upwards of 4,000 calls changed hands at the $87.5 strike, with the bulk of the volume purchased in the early going at an average premium of $0.51 apiece. The price tag on the $87.5 weekly calls has roughly doubled to $1.03 as of the time of this writing, with the stock sitting at the highs of the session. Traders long the calls profit at expiration next week as long as CAT’s shares exceed the average breakeven price of $88.01. More than 2,000 of the $90 strike weekly calls have traded as well. It looks like most of the contracts were picked up this morning at an average premium of $0.13 each. Premium on the $90 calls expiring next Friday has also roughly doubled since this morning, with the last traded price on the contracts up at $0.25 apiece. Overall volume in CAT options is above 51,000 contracts, topping the stock’s average daily volume of around 46,700 contracts, with the call/put ratio up above 2.0.
QLGC - QLogic Corp. – Shares in QLogic are bucking the trend today, sliding more than 7.0% to $9.71 during the first half of the trading session even as the S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rally to fresh highs. QLGC had been participating in the run up in U.S. stocks earlier this year, rising nearly 25% from the start of 2013 to as high as $12.35 in mid-March. During the seven weeks since then, however, shares in the name have dropped more than 20% to the current level. QLogic’s shares slipped to a fifteen-week low today after a number of analysts lowered target prices on…
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