Twitter's headline-heavy week is attracting plenty of option traders
Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) has been a headline staple this week and its no surprise why. The social media giant just came off an impressive fourth-quarter earnings report, which catapulted the equity to seven-year highs, while news circulates that former U.S. President Donald Trump has been permanently banned from the platform. Meanwhile, a highly publicized dispute with India over its refusal to take down over 1,100 accounts is also making headlines today. The company's near overwhelming presence in the media has attracted quite a bit of analyst attention too.
In fact, Twitter just popped back up on Schaeffer's Senior Quantitative Analyst Rocky White's list of stocks that have attracted the highest weekly options volume within the last two weeks, with new names to the list highlighted in yellow, TWTR being one. According to White, 476,649 calls and 274,811 puts were exchanged over this two week time period. The most popular position was the weekly 2/12 70-strike call, followed by the March 65 call.
It looks like options players are keeping up this bullish momentum. So far today, 151,000 calls have exchanged hands, compared to 89,000 puts. The most popular is the February 70 call where it looks like positions are being sold to open. This suggests that these traders are expecting the $70 mark to act as a ceiling for the underlying stock til these contracts expire next Friday, Feb. 19.
The equity is, in fact, cooling off today, last seen just a hair north of breakeven, to trade at $67.79. While the stock hasn't managed to topple yesterday's post-earnings peak today, it has seen an impressive run on the charts since its early January pullback staged a sharp bounce off the 120-day moving average. Year-to-date, TWTR is up 25.2%. A short-term pullback could be in the cards for TWTR, though. According to the equity's Relative Strength Index (RSI) of 83, TWTR has edged right into "overbought" territory.
