Volume Spike Investor

On the immediate surface, there has been some unusually high PUT OPTION activity seen in Unitedhealth Group, Inc. (NYSE: UNH) today. This is probably an easy explanation of a PUT SPREAD, with the caveat that this means someone else took the other side of the bet. As of 2:50 PM EST we had seen the following options trade in the PUT options for July 2008 expiration:

July-Strike Volume OpInt
$25.00 PUTS 52,407 31,159
$30.00 PUTS 48,446 52,277

based upon the breakdown of the trade, it looks like one huge PUT SPREAD was made. As a reminder, if you add and divide these you come up with essentially 50,000 contracts. That is a bet on 5 million shares if you consider that each contract is worth 100 shares.

On Unitedhealth stock itself, we’ve “only seen 12+ million shares trade hands so far today. This trades about 12.9 million share son an average day.

Jon C. Ogg
July 7, 2008