General Electric (GE) Put Volume Remains High

General Electric Co. (GE) put volume continued to remain high on Monday after trading above the four-week average every day last week, boosted at the start of this week by one trade with a strike price 39 percent below the March 18 close, according to Bloomberg.

A block of 39,526 September $12 puts to sell the world’s largest maker of power-generation equipment traded for 18 cents each at 10:39 a.m. in New York, all at the ask price, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. An investor bought 45,000 of the same puts on March 18. Today’s trade came from the same broker as Friday’s, Henry Schwartz, president of Trade Alert LLC, a New York-based provider of options-market data and analytics, said.

More than 125,000 puts changed hands today, 1.6 times the four-week average and 1.6 times the number of calls to buy. The September $12 puts were the most traded and accounted for 46 percent of all put volume. Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE gained 2.4 percent to $19.72 today and hasn’t fallen below $12 since July 2009.

General Electric closed Monday at $19.72, gaining $0.47, or 2.44 percent.




Source