Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Patterson-UTI Energy (PTEN) - Calls Accumulator into Earnings; New High Price

PTEN is trading $33.80, up 3.0% today. The LIVEVOL® Pro Summary is below.



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Patterson-UTI Energy, Inc. (Patterson-UTI) owns and operates fleets of land-based drilling rigs in the United States. Patterson-UTI’s contract drilling business operates in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and western Canada.

This is an order flow note, about a week ahead of earnings with the stock reaching a new high in stock price. The company has traded over 8,500 contracts on total daily average option volume of just 2,141. Calls have traded on a 25.1:1 ratio with just 328 puts trading against 8,249 calls. The action has been in the Aug 30 and Aug 32 calls. The Stats Tab and Day's biggest trades snapshots are included (below).





The Options Tab (below) illustrates that the Aug 30 and 32 calls have traded more than existing OI, but could be substantially closing based on the trade volume to OI comparison. As far as I can tell, both lines are purchases today and they both have existing long OI (we'll see tomorrow if the OI increases on both lines). What's interesting is the action in the Aug 32 line -- that OI jumped from 847 to 2,156 on 7-18-2011 (so the trades happened on Friday 7-15-2011). Looks like a call accumulator here.



The Skew Tab snap (below) illustrates the vols by strike by month.



The shape is actually quite normal -- annoyingly normal. There aren't any real obvious kinks. The front month is elevated to the back due to the earnings release this cycle; likely 7-28-2011.

Finally, the Charts Tab (6 months) is below. The top portion is the stock price, the bottom is the vol (IV30™ - red vs HV20 - blue vs HV180 - pink).



We can see the stock rise along with the vol. The 52 wk range in stock price is [$13.38, $33.67], so today is a new annual high. In fact, it's at least a 2 year high if not all-time. The 52 wk range in IV30™ is [31.01, 45.27] and IV30™ is sitting at 41.64, right now.

This is trade analysis, not a recommendation.

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1 comment:

  1. Patterson-UTI Energy, Inc. reported that for the month of September 2011, the Company had an average of 225 drilling rigs operating, including 212 rigs in the United States and 13 rigs in Canada. For the three months ended September 30, 2011, the Company had an average of 221 drilling rigs operating, including 209 rigs in the United States and 12 rigs in Canada.
    See: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/PattersonUTI-Reports-Drilling-prnews-3076689352.html?x=0&.v=1

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