But the Flow shows a lot of call volume coming ahead of the ex-div date!
- You might be seeing market makers that are looking to capture as much of the dividend as possible, who are looking to exercise deep ITM call options.
But why do MMs trade pre-div dates?
- To capture as much of the dividend as possible, two market makers enter into an agreement to trade deep-in-the-money call options back and forth with each other on the day prior to the ex-dividend date.
- They take advantage of the fact that individual options traders will fail to exercise their deep in-the-money call options in order to collect the corporate dividend payment themselves.
- Market makers who engage in the dividend trade strategy step in and capture the dividend instead, while distorting volume with millions of contracts.
$ZI - 🌊🔍 Flow Deep Dive per @unusual_whales 📆📈 - No filters on the below post. Highlighted the unusual trade I am going to look into, the 4K and 2.5K contracts on the $70 and $65 strike call options for 21-Jan.
TL;DR: I think they rolled their strike up and bought more.
Click on the ↕ emoji (where my cursor is) to view the trades that came in together (potentially) as a part of a strategy.
That opens up this panel which shows us the relevant trades that came in together.
On the $65C, we can see that the volume on the day was about the size of this order in fact, but the open interest was 3.8K...so we simply cannot know if they were bought or sold to open.
Folks sometimes will look at the @unusual_whales flow and point to some of the tags as being indicators to take an entry, make an exit, or to outright avoid a trade altogether.
For instance, sometimes there are trades that come through marked as "floor". What is a "floor" trade?
Floor traders work on the floor of an exchange.
When a floor trader executes a trade, exclusively for their own account, it must be reported on an exchange by the "floor" tag.
That's it.
Well...
...Except for the fact they might be initiating a trade on behalf of a client for any other reason or with knowledge from said client(s).
But that's hearsay (literally?).
This is a pretty cool video showing off floor traders from a couple of decades ago:
Filters:
- Greater than or equal to $25,000 premiums.
- Size (of order) over open interest (OI).
- Sorted descending by size of orders.
- Intraday only.