PowerOptions WeBlog

Journalists have long been required to disclose relationships with any sponsors, as well as any endorsements or compensation they receive for their articles and reviews. The same has not been true for bloggers, until now.

When the new FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising come into effect on December 1, 2009, bloggers reviewing commercial products will be held to the same standards as mass media journalists and advertisers. Any blogger who has received commercial product, including free samples, must disclose this fact.
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EMC Corporation’s (EMC) call option volume spiked yesterday and its stock price was unchanged.

If you’re looking for products to store and manage your data, then EMC may have just what you need. EMC offers information storage systems, networked attached storage systems, content addressed storage and direct attached storage systems. EMC also markets software products for managing storage system data and consulting services.
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Sun Microsystems (JAVA) stock options volume went into orbit yesterday and its stock price was up about 4%.

Sun Microsystems once-upon-a-time proclaimed itself as the “dot in dot-com,” but fell from grace with the dot-com implosion.

Sun is in the business of providing software, servers, storage, networking and desktop systems. The company is known for developing its line of high-powered workstations and for developing the Java programming language.

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We’ve received a lot of questions, interest and comments regarding the article on short squeezes, “Short Squeeze and Stock Options”, so we’re going to follow that up with another article on short squeezes.

If you had followed the covered call investing position for Bank of the Ozarks (OZRK) selected in the previous short squeeze article, you would be sitting pretty right now, as the price of the stock has increased and the time value of the November 22.5 call option is approaching zero, so an investor could have already made about 3% on the covered call position for OZRK.
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Coinstar’s (CSTR) call option volume was significantly up on Friday and its stock price was down almost 9%.

If you’re looking to rent a DVD or get rid of all of your pocket change, then Coinstar is the company for you. Coinstar provides DVD rental kiosks and self-service coin counting machines.
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MEMC Electronic Materials (WFR) stock options went haywire yesterday and its stock price was up about 2%.

MEMC is based in St. Peters Missouri and is in the business of silicon wafers. It’s wafers are used for all sorts of semiconductor devices, microprocessors, memory and solar cells.
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Barrick Gold (ABX), Anglogold Ashanti (AU) and Harmony Gold Mining (HMY) stock option volumes are sky high today.

Barrick Gold is Canadian based company primarily involved in searching for and producing gold. Barrick is also involved in copper, silver, platinum, nickel, oil and gas.
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CommVault Systems (CVLT) call option volume was significantly high on Friday, while its stock price was down about 2%.

If you’re concerned about you’re company’s computer system crashing and want to make sure all of your important data is safe, then CommVault’s products may be just what you are looking for. CommVault Systems provides data and information management software applications on a global basis. CommVault provides software to aid in archiving, back-up and recovery of data. CommVault’s signature archive and back-up product is Simpana.
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Weatherford International’s stock options volume jumped off of the chart yesterday. Call option and put option volume was inordinately high for Weatherford. There didn’t appear to be any significantly related news for Weatherford yesterday. They announced that their next earnings report is scheduled for January 26, 2010, but such a far off event shouldn’t create a spike in stock options volume.
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Sometimes when making lemonade there’s just not anymore juice that can be squeezed out of a lemon. In investing, there’s a similar idea with shorting a stock, sometimes the investors shorting the stocks have piled on so much, there’s no way for the stock to go down anymore.

In general, short sellers of a stock have to close or buy back the stock they shorted at some point. There are the cases where the company goes bankrupt and the stock ceases to trade anymore, but in most cases short sellers have to exit.
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