Oracle Options Heating Up Before Earnings

Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) is seeing its volume pick up in the stock options ahead of Tuesday’s earnings report.  On Friday we outlined that the case for this report being a ‘make or break’ report for the company in our full earnings preview and the options trading sure appears to be supporting that case.

Here is the volume for the options expiring on March 22, 2012:

CALL$ Vol.  OpInt

29.00  3,731  2,050

30.00  5,422  4,525

31.00 5,180 4,977

PUT$  Vol.  OpInt

28.00 2,179 1,170

29.00 1,378 1,084

And here is the volume for the APRIL-2012 expiration:

CALL$ Vol.  OpInt

30.00 23,535 44,411

31.00 4,599  22,483

32.00 1,362  23,845

PUT$  Vol.  OpInt

26.00 1,598 2,578

27.00 9,315 37,565

28.00 1,778 11,358

29.00 6,645 6,076

Oracle reports on Tuesday after the close and the Thomson Reuters consensus estimate is $0.56 EPS on $9.02 billion in revenues.  The weekly options are only pricing in a move of up to about $1.00 in either direction as of Monday for the earnings report.  That might not be enough based upon the huge drop after the last earnings report.

Oracle is also in a different place than its technology peers today.  Most tech stocks are at or challenging 52-week and multi-year highs.  At $29.68 in mid-Monday trading, the 52-week trading range is $24.72 to $36.50.  The $5.00 that the stock has recovered from its lows has all been on the market’s coat tails.  Tuesday’s report sure looks like a make or break quarter.

JON C. OGG