Monday, April 22, 2013

Tesla Motors Trades At All-Time High (TSLA)

The stock is at $49.75, up 4%, after trading as high as $50.19.
The thing to remember with all-time highs is there is no overhead supply, no shareholders thinking "As soon as I get to breakeven I'm getting out".
From Schaeffer's Research, Apr. 19, 2013:

Bulls Abandon Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA) at Just the Wrong Time 
Bulls may have given up on Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) a little too soon. With the stock up nearly 6% today to hit a new all-time high of $49.88, there remains growing evidence that bullish options speculators have been heading for the exits.

When I looked at Tesla Motors last Thursday, I noted the waning optimism in the name,as indicated by reduced demand for call options. At that point, Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) for TSLA stood at 1.16, higher than 88% of the past year's worth of readings. In the ensuing days, this ratio has jumped to 1.30, which is just 1 percentage point shy of an annual peak.

In other words, put contracts currently exceed call contracts 130-to-100, and this ratio reveals a demand for puts that is nearly unprecedented over the last 12 months. What's more, since the SOIR only measures options expiring in the next three months, the recently purchased large block of puts expiring in January 2015 did not inflate this reading.

Elsewhere, since my April 11 check-up of TSLA, its 10-day call/put volume ratio tracking buy-to-open activity on the International Securities Exchange (ISE), Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), and NASDAQ OMX PHLX (PHLX) has dropped to 1.16 from 2.72. The present ratio is in lower than 77% of all readings taken during the past year....MORE