{"id":1702,"date":"2009-08-21T07:39:07","date_gmt":"2009-08-21T12:39:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leavittbrothers.com\/blog\/?p=1702"},"modified":"2009-08-21T07:39:07","modified_gmt":"2009-08-21T12:39:07","slug":"before-the-open-aug-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/?p=1702","title":{"rendered":"Before the Open (Aug 21)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning. Happy Friday. Happy Options Expiration Day.
\nThis week the market has done exactly what it needed to do to cause lots of pain for the bears who expected a big sell-off and were willing to put their money where their mouths were by buying put options.
\nHere\u2019s the QQQQ open-interest chart I talked about last weekend. … The stock closed at 39.76 yesterday. The last strike that has any decent OI is 40, so pretty much that huge block of puts (red bars) will expire worthless.
\n\"\"
\nEven if the market drops today, most of those puts will expire worthless because their breakeven levels are at least a point \u2013 and more likely more \u2013 below their strikes. This type of analysis doesn\u2019t always work. I\u2019ve loosely followed the OI and have found its record month to month to be spotty. This month the market wasn\u2019t going to let those put holders cash in.
\nThe market tends to do exactly what you think, but not when you think.
\nMonday\u2019s huge gap down has filled\u2026the market is up slightly for the week\u2026not bad considering we\u2019ve had 2 gap downs great than 10 points.
\nLooking at several hundred charts yesterday gave me the following feeling\u2026they don\u2019t look as good as a couple weeks ago, but they don\u2019t look bad either\u2026and they definitely look much better than just a few days ago.
\nThe Asian\/Pacific markets closed mixed. China, which seems to be on everyone\u2019s watchlist lately, rallied 1.7%. Europe is currently up across the board. Futures here in the States are up several points, so as of now we\u2019ll be getting a gap up open for the cash market. More after the open\u2026
\nheadlines at Yahoo Finance<\/a>
\nstocks to watch from MarketWatch<\/a>
\ntoday’s upgrades\/downgrades<\/a>
\nyesterday’s Sector Performance<\/a>
\nthis week’s Earnings Reports<\/a>
\nthis week’s Economic Numbers<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good morning. Happy Friday. Happy Options Expiration Day. This week the market has done exactly what it needed to do to cause lots of pain for the bears who expected a big sell-off and were willing to put their money where their mouths were by buying put options. Here\u2019s the QQQQ open-interest chart I talked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.leavittbrothers.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}