A huge call sale dominated the options in Carnival on Wednesday.
Total option volume in the cruise-line operator topped 18,500 contracts, more than 5 times its daily average for the last month. optionMONSTER systems show a single trade dominated that activity.
A block of 15,000 January 2015 36.50 calls was sold for the bid price of $3.20. This is clearly a new position, as open interest in the strike was just 6,111 before the trade appeared.
The calls weren't tied to any CCL stock trading identified by our systems in the session, so they could have been sold naked with an initial bearish bias. But they could also have been sold against an existing long position in a covered-call strategy , which would be bullish up to the strike price but not beyond. (See our Education section)
CCL was up 0.64 percent to close at $36.19. Shares have been trading in an increasingly tight range in the last three weeks.
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