Social media madness has struck the market.
Shares of Snap, Facebook and Twitter have all been soaring in 2019, with Snap up a whopping 162%, Facebook tacking on a 55% gain and Twitter climbing more than 30%.
And, ahead of Snap’s earnings report, scheduled for Tuesday after the market close, traders continued to make bullish bets, piling into call options on the social media giant’s stock.
Snap shares saw four times the amount of calls — trades that bet on the stock going higher — as puts, or more bearish bets, with the options market implying a 14% move for the stock by the end of the week.
While that’s shy of Snap’s average 17% move on earnings, it’s enough for some traders, said Michael Khouw, resident options expert on CNBC’s “Fast Money” and co-founder and chief strategist at Optimize Advisors.
“One of the bullish bets that we saw was [a purchase of] the August $15 calls,” Khouw said Monday on CNBC’s “Options Action.”
“Somebody spent 84 cents to buy 1,365 of those,” he said. “And, as expensive as those calls seem, that basically represents a move of about 12% by August expiration to the upside, at least, just for these calls to break even. That would be in just over three weeks.”
After Snap’s huge move this year, another 12% doesn’t seem too outlandish, even for those who take issue with its monster run.
“I’m with Mike on this one,” Guy Adami, director of advisor advocacy at Private Advisor Group, said in the same “Options Action” segment.
“Options are saying it’s going higher,” Adami said. “You can make a lot of compelling arguments why the stock should be lower, but it’s not. I think it continues to go higher from here, as much as it makes no sense to me the stock goes higher from here.”
Snap shares jumped early Tuesday on an analyst upgrade from Stifel, climbing more than 1% at the open.
Disclosure: CNBC parent NBCUniversal is an investor in Snap.
