Relatively Heavy Call Activity on eBay Inc, Yahoo! Inc, and Cit

eBay Inc (EBAY), Yahoo! Inc (YHOO), Apple Inc (AAPL), Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO), Microsoft (MSFT), Bank of America (BAC), and Citigroup Inc (C) were among the many stocks seeing a bias to toward call buying in the International Securities Exchange (ISE) Monday. The SPDR Trust Series I (SPY) and PowerShares QQQ Trust (QQQQ) also saw some activity.

Regular readers of this column may note that the call activity seems heavier than usual. Further evidence of this can be seen in the ISE Sentiment Index (ISEE), which the International Securities Exchange publishes here. This is a call to put ratio that measures opening long customer transactions only. The "All Equities Only" ratio hit 201 yesterday while the "All Securities" ratio surged to 220. Both of these are relatively high numbers.

The SPY, which tracks the S&P 500 (SPX), and QQQQ, which tracks the NASDAQ 100 (NDX), sit at the top of today's scan. More than 90,000 calls were bought on the SPY, while the QQQQ "only" saw 43,000 calls.

In broad strokes the call buying was on many of the usual suspects we have discussed recently. Tech stocks, discussed yesterday, were once again popular with eBay Inc, Yahoo, Apple, Cisco Systems, and Microsoft all making the list.

The upside bets on Bank of America and Citigroup also continue. Both stocks are being bid up this morning in pre-open action so the bulls might get a chance to see how strong a rebound can be. 

This filtered scan is based on the International Securities Exchange (ISE) buy-to-open data. It looks for stocks where the previous day's call volume on the ISE is at least twice as great as the put volume. It then sorts the stocks based on the call volume. Since this is buy-to-open data, this can be a good source for finding stocks where optimism is emerging. Of particular interest to me would be situations where we see call activity on stocks that are still in intermediate-term downtrends. This would be a potentially cautionary sign from the contrarian perspective

Other companies seeing a skew towards calls in the previous session: Genentech Inc (DNA), Wells Fargo & Co (WFC), International Paper (IP), Schering Plough Cp (SGP), Hartford Financial Services (HIG), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM), HSBC, plc. (HBC), Ford Motor Co (F), Oracle Corp. (ORCL), Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), Hershey Foods (HSY), U.S. Bancorp (USB), Continental Airlines (CAL), Morgan Stanley (MS), Union Pacific Corp (UNP), KB HOME (KBH).