See: Put-Call Ratio.
Add up all the puts out there. Add up all the calls out there. (They track totals on the Street.) When puts are twice as plentiful as calls, then highly educated derivatives traders (making $10 million a year, for starters) are telling the market, via their actions or trades, that they're bearish on things overall. That is, the big, smart brains are betting that the market's going down before it goes up again.
You have the reverse with calls. And yes, the strike prices and durations all have to be adjusted and averaged. But if you're sampling all of them, then the entire universe of them is kind of a normal curve, and is adjusted such that it represents a good sample of sentiment. When they're about the same number, there's just...meh. Confusion. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. CFUD. Like the sound when you clear your throat after a huge bowl of ice cream. When the put-call ratio is about even, derivatives traders are giving no real view as to where the overall market is heading. So, um...beware.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What Is a Put Option?83 Views
finance a la shmoop what is a put option? hot potato hot potato
ow ow! yeah remember that game well nobody wanted the potato, poor thing. the
players wanted to put it in someone else's hands. well put options kind [glue put around a flaming potato]
of work the same way. a put option is the right or option or choice to sell a
stock or a bond at a given price to someone by a certain end date.
all right example time. you bought netflix stock at the IPO a zillion years
ago at $1 a share. that's you know splits adjusted. all right now it's a hundred
bucks a share. if you sell it you pay taxes on a gain of 99 dollars a share. in
California that would be a tax of something like almost 40 bucks. well the
stock was a hundred but you keep only something like 60. feels totally unfair.
right so you really don't want to sell your stock but you're nervous about the [graph shown]
next few months that Netflix will crater for a while and go down ten
maybe twenty dollars. longer term though you think it'll hit 300. so this is the
perfect setup to maybe look at buying some put options on Netflix. if the stock
goes down your put options go up. with Netflix volatile but at a hundred bucks
a share ,you look up the price of an $80 strike price put option expiring in
December, and you know that's mid-september now .for five bucks a share
you can protect your stock for the next few months .think about it like temporary [stocks placed in vault]
term life insurance. you pay the five dollars a share in the stock goes down
to 82 by mid December, worst of all worlds. well not only did you lose the $5
a share but your stock has lost $18 in value. but had Netflix really cratered
and gone to say $60 a share well you would have exercised your put and sold
your shares at 80 bucks. well those put options you paid $5 for
would be been worth 15 bucks a share. in buying that put option you've [equation shown]
guaranteed that your loss will be no more than a $75 value for your Netflix
position at least for that time period and ignoring taxes. well remember that
options expire after December whatever like the third Friday of the month it's
usually when options expire, you then have no protection and your shares float
along naked. naked? really who knew accounting could get so [paper put option goes "skinny dipping".]
raunchy. yeah well that's naked put options.
that's what they really are people.
Up Next
What is the Advance Decline Ratio? The advance decline ratio is used to determine how the market performed on a given day. It does this by comparin...
What is the Bid-to-Cover Ratio? The Bid-to-Cover ratio compares the amount of bids made for Treasury securities to the amount that is actually sold...
What is a call option? A call option is a type of contract that lets the investor buy shares of a stock at a certain price and within a window of t...