April 4, 2007
Custom Sentiment Data
I read this article about ISEE Select with some interest because I plan to take the service for a test drive. The author writes:
“My theory is that institutions will short QQQQ heavily, but may buy call options to temporarily hedge that short position.”
But I always thought the value in the ISEE data was seeing what small retail traders are doing; the institutional traders, who are legitimate hedgers and not wild-ass speculators, are out of the picture. As the ISE says (emphasis mine):
“The traditional put/call ratio makes no distinction as to the source of the trade. ISE categorizes three sources of trades: Market Maker trades, Firm trades which include institutional trading desks, and Customer trades. If a large institution’s proprietary trading desk buys 2,000 XYZ calls, are they bullish? Although buying call options are generally viewed as a bullish move, a proprietary trading desk could be short 1,000,000 shares of XYZ and they could be hedging 20% of their position. Therefore it cannot be determined if this purchase was bullish or bearish, but the traditional put/call ratio calculates this as a bullish trade. The ISE sentiment calculation omits Market Maker and Firm trades when calculating the sentiment value, which we believe provides a more accurate representation of true investor sentiment. ”
Am I missing something here? (I’m slow — no big words (over two syllables) in the comments, please.)
April 5th, 2007 at 1:11 am
I asked Jason to take a look at this so you may get a two syllable answer from the man himself :-)
April 5th, 2007 at 1:24 am
That’s a good point about firm and mm trades, but that’s only true if it’s originating from, say, Goldman Sachs. If there’s a hedge fund out there trading a big slug of options, then as far as the ISE is concerned, it’s a customer order. As far as I know, they don’t differentiate the trades based on size, only by origination.
April 5th, 2007 at 5:47 am
jason: I’ll have to ask my contact at the ISE about it (who is out of town until the 16th) … maybe he can shed some more light on how they differentiate customer orders.
Syllabic no-no’s: customer, originating, origination, differentiate. ;-)