Option trade for upside in Sandisk

December 09, 2013 - 8:38 am

Sandisk provides flash storage products, flash drives and wireless memory devices that are used in various consumer devices such as cameras, cell phones, laptops, tablets and gaming devices.  This market has been growing due to the global adoption of consumer devices which require memory to store music, videos, games, pictures and data.  This market has also benefitted from the movement towards flash hard drives, or solid-state drives which help computer manufacturers produce smaller, lighter, quieter and longer running laptops since these drives don't spin like traditional hard drives.  

We see continued upside in Sandisk after the recent pull back from $70.50 to $69.  The stock was trading under $68 last week, and is currently at approximately $69.  To capture upside in this stock we are entering a synthetic long position by selling puts and buy calls. 

Today we sold the April 2014 $67.50 Puts for $4.60, and bought the April $70 Calls for $4.80.  This trade costs $0.20 per pair, and gives us long exposure to Sandisk.  

As the stock moves up, the puts will lose value which helps us since we've sold them short, and the calls will go up in value which we're long.  However, if the stock drops below $62.90 before April 2014 option expiration we can get put the stock and have to purchase it at $67.50.  Overall considering that this trade costs very little to put on and it gives us upside exposure, we are looking to take advantage of any upside movement in SNDK over $71 ideally in the next 8 weeks before the time premium significantly decays on the calls.  We'd like to be out of this trade by the end of January.