Thursday, January 29, 2015

Elevated 5 Day Total Put/Call Ratio - Bullish Implications in an Uptrend

total put/call ratio
Click on Chart to Enlarge

This chart sorts all the days where the closing 5 day simple average of the total put/call ratio was greater than or equal to 1.11 which is the current level.  Notice that the average may stay above that level for several days in a row as a market is down trending.

But some points of notice are that the average 2 month future maximum return was about 1.5 as great as the 2 month max decline since 2012, a period where the market has clearly been up trending.

Also, I have constructed an option pricing model which gives a theoretical maximum gain on an ATM call or put option over the next 2 months.  They are represented by the green and light red columns.  It indicates that over the next 2 months we may expect the call option to gain in excess of 100% while the maximum gain in the put may be limited to 25-30%.  Additionally the way I constructed the model it appears that almost none of the puts were still in a profit after 6 or 7 weeks from the signal day.

So, while there are interesting cross currents here and my timing on yesterday's call option purchase was not great right before the FOMC announcement sell off, from a purely historical basis, it appears that the reward to risk appears skewed to the long side in coming weeks.

A factor that would significantly improve the skew to the long side would be a reversal day where price makes a lower low for the decline but price then closes up for the day and/or where price closes above the midpoint of the daily range.

So if you are not long here or in call options on the US indexes it may be sensible to have it on your radar for a speculative play and enter on an appropriate shorter term chart buy signal (like a 30 or 60 min chart).  I would be looking at ATM or ITM call options with expirations of March (end of month) or later.

Pete

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