Options Traders Take Sides on Ciena Stock

CIEN also recently pulled back to a notable moving average

Ciena Corporation (NYSE:CIEN) once again showed up on Schaeffer's Senior Quantitative Analyst Rocky White's list of the 20 S&P MidCap 400 Index (MID) stocks that saw the most options activity in the past 10 days. Names highlighted yellow are new to the list. CIEN options traders have recently taken a strong interest in put options, though there's also been very notable activity on the call side, as well.

As you can see from the table, puts have out-traded calls during the past two weeks by a wide margin. Plus, Cien sports a Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) of 0.98. While this still shows near-term call open interest outweighs put open interest among contracts expiring within three months, this reading ranks in the 95th annual percentile, showing the near parity between short-term puts and calls is quite rare.

Meanwhile, the biggest rise in open interest over the last 10 sessions occurred at the weekly 11/30 34-strike call, which is now the top open interest position overall. Data from the major options exchanges shows heavy buy-to-open activity here, so many traders have been betting on CIEN shares to rise above $34 by the close this Friday, when the contracts expire.

Looking outside the options pits, there's been a notable decrease in short interest recently. In the last reporting period, short interest fell by 35.6%, but 7% of the float is still held by short sellers. Considering this, there's room for more short-covering tailwinds moving forward.

That's not the only thing working in favor of Ciena. White's data also points out that the shares recently pulled back near the 80-day moving average after a lengthy stretch above it. The last six times CIEN has pulled back to this trendline, it's gone on to average a one-month advance of 4.4%. The stock was last seen trading near $31.34, up almost 50% year-to-date.