Monday, January 14, 2008

A bounce

Qs and everything else popped today on the news from IBM that things are good. Although the volume wasn't all that convincing, the Qs opened at R1 and basically hung around there all day, neither declining to PP or rising to R2, which I took as a sign of non-commitment. Although these days of non-pivot turns occur about 15% of the time, they seldom follow back to back, so I suspect the market will yield clearer turn signals tomorrow.
I took the Open pop as an opportunity to buy back the MS puts for .05 that I sold Friday at 15:15 for .18 and which closed Friday at .12. Interestingly enough, although I bought back the puts for .05 at 9:32 this AM, and the Qs closed .30 above the open, the MS options were still trading .o5 at today's close, even with a whole day of decay. A bit unusual it seemed to me, and when I saw this behavior going into the last 15 minutes I decided to go the other way and bought the OTM Feb puts, since decay is going to get ferocious for the next few days and there are few short put plays that look attractive right now. We may actually get a little more juice out of this rally, and if so I will adopt a delta neutral position and will look to exit the long side at or before Wednesday's close, the highest probability 3-day pivot high day.

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