Straight from Benzinga newsdesk, hosts Brent Slava and Steve Krause bring you the market news and stocks to watch.On Fridays Benzinga's resident Options Expert Ryan Faloona joins us to spice things up.Today Steve and Ryan focus on:Elon Musk's TWTR Deal On HOLD - A Negotiation Tactic?What are some plays on TWTR that stand out?Stocks To Watch: TWTR OTRA AEO DEA AIKIOptions To Watch: Ryan's options tickers: CCL, GM, DALToday's 5 Stock Ideas:Twitter (TWTR) - Shares fell as much as 27% in pre-market action following a tweet from Elon Musk that said his deal for Twitter was "temporarily on hold." A couple hours later, Musk tweeted again and said he was still committed to the deal. While Twitter shares rebounded to over the $40 level following the second tweet, the stock was still down about 12% ahead of the open.OTR Acquisition Corp. (OTRA) - A special purpose acquisition corporation (SPAC) redemption play for Friday and likely next week. A tweet highlighted "shareholders approved Comera Life Sciences deal, 10.3 million shares (98.4%) redeemed, leaving only 168k shares remaining." Benzinga writer and SPAC expert, Chris Katje, said the approved vote led to "one of the biggest redemptions ever."American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) - A retailer with a decent dividend yield. The company's current $0.18/share quarter dividend yields about 3.5%.Easterly Government Properties (DEA) - A play on a property owner for US government buildings (such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Agency and Central Intelligence Agency). CNBC "Fast Money: Halftime Report" contributor and Gilman Hill manager Jenny Harrington on Thursday highlighted this stock as a play on a higher interest rate market.AIkido Pharma (AIKI) - On Thursday, the company announced it secured an interest in data and AI company, Databricks.Hosts:Steve Krause Reach out to Steve at
[email protected]. Reporter Benzinga NewsdeskBrent Slava Reach out to Brent at
[email protected]. Reporter, Head of Benzinga NewsdeskRyan Faloona Reach out to Ryan at
[email protected] of Customer Success pro.benzinga.comFree 2-week trial, no credit card requiredUse coupon code YOUTUBE20 to get 20% offDisclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.Happy Friday, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Benzing. As daily sacks watch podcast. Today is Friday, May 13th, 2022. I think our first Friday, the 13th of the year. Good luck to everyone out there on lucky Friday, the 13th Benzing is daily stacks.Watch podcast is a list of at least five star. Handpicked by the Benzinga pro Newsdesk team. We've got them on our radar today. We want you to know about those and maybe think if you want to get them on your radar today, get them on a watch list. Get them on a chart. See how they treat. My name is Brent Sava.I'm head of Benzing is Newsdesk team and joined with me today is Is Ryan Faloona. He is our resident options expert. How you doing today, Ryan? No, really good bread. Happy Friday again. Sorry, I wasn't looking for last week. We miss you buddy, but here you are. That's what matters. All right. So our list for today.Is going to be five sacks. And then Ryan is going to hit us with some option activity that he was noting throughout the week. He's got three stacks for us and my partner, Steve Kraus is a way today. He's going to be away on Monday also. So Ryan, if, as I'm going through the sax watch list, if you want to pop in and give some of your thoughts, you are more than welcome, sir.Our first sock to watch for the day is Twitter. TWT are we haven't really talked about Twitter. Very recently. We had been talking about it pretty consistently for a few sacks watch podcasts there and kind of fell off the radar. It's back to. Our SOC to watch. Number two is OTR acquisition Corp it's ticker O T R a number three is American Eagle is Outfitters H E O.Number four is easterly government properties, ticker DEA, and our last sack to watch today is AI Quito pharma. It's ticker a I K I let's get it kicked off with Twitter here, folks. So an update on the Elon Musk. Shares had fallen as much as 27% earlier in today's pre-market session. Elon Musk tweeted that he was putting the Twitter deal temporarily on hold shares.Again, fell almost 30%. The reason that Musk gave in the tweet, I was like a little uncertain of, I don't know how it would be uncertain of it, but I read it and I was like, that's sort of odd to me, the full tweet. Twitter deal, Twitter deal temporarily on hold, filing pending details, supporting calculation that spam slash fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.I was a little confused because I, Ryan, maybe you can pop in here with your thoughts. I was confused because I read the tweet and I was like, so does that mean. It's over 5% that he wouldn't want to do the deal or something like that. That seems kind of crazy, right? Yeah. To me, to me, this seems like a negotiation tactic to be quite, I was hoping you're going to kind of say something like that.One of the biggest metrics that Twitter reports when they report their earnings or when anyone talks about it, frankly, it's going to be their, their daily active users and those daily active users numbers of that really important data point is being inflated due to fake. Then that's a bargaining.Exactly. It it's a bargaining. Ultimately, what does this mean? I don't know. Um, I think that, you know, given the market conditions here on how everything is down, I would imagine he's trying to get it at a better price. That's kinda what I took from it. And his second tweet about, about the acquisition still being on showed you that he still wants to do this.He still wants to fix this, but he's not just going to shell out 54 20. If he can shell out, let's say 44. Right or whatever it ends up being. So I think that this is probably just a negotiation. So a couple of hours later, as, as Ryan just sent it out there, he tweeted again. He said, he's still committed to the deal.Shares were kind of already rebounding when Musk had tweeted that, but they did move over. Let me just pull up my chart here real quick. They did move over. Uh, about the $40 level when the second tweet from Mohs came out and he said, I'm still committed. Shares are around 39 50 here in pre-market session.And Ryan, you were, you were looking at, uh, you were looking at options in Twitter this week and seen a little bit, a few interesting. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, you know, I was watching the options quite a bit this week. Nothing really stood out to me on Twitter until I woke up this morning and the news.And I was like, you know, the interesting, let me go back and see what happened these past couple of days. Okay. If, if anyone positioned for it and I can't tell for certain, uh, of course you can't, you can't tell for certain, but yeah. I find a couple of transactions that were interesting. So, so number one, there were, there was a sweep, uh, yesterday that these, these four transactions took place yesterday.And the day before yesterday, there was a 44, uh, Sweep for the December 16, those are going to be your December monthly contracts. And someone paid $6 in premium for like 104 contracts. This was interesting to me because this was a, a strike that had not yet been traded. So there was a very high volume to open interest ratio on that trade.And that generally gets my eye looking at it. Um, now, uh, what was the open interest before on that one? Ryan? Uh, let me, let me get that here for you. Open it up. Oh, wow. Okay. So there were nine sidetracks being held open. Then someone came in and swept up 104 of them. So that was a call right to me. And they're leaving some time on this trade, right?So this, this tells me that yeah, they, they are bullish on it, right. Were, these are definitely calls to the upside high premium, um, and they're bullish on it, but they they're, they're kind of positioning themselves a day before this kind of goes public. And then they're giving themselves time for this to play out.Right December. We still have half of a year here. For this thesis to play out. Um, so I don't know if that's related. I saw that one yesterday. The other one that I saw yesterday was a bet in the other direction, which is interesting. It was the 41 put sweep and it expires on June 10th. So if I look at the, uh, if I look at the option at the option chain here, June 10th is going to be a weekly call, right?So that's not the monthly call. It's a weekly call. It expires 28 days from. Someone came in and bought 192 contracts at 180 5. Now this trade is only about $36,000 in terms of total premium, um, but was still there at that strike at that weekly strike, there were only 21 contracts being held open in the open interest and someone came in and bought nearly 200 of them.So again, something worth noting. The other two transactions were a little bit bigger. One was a thousand, uh, con uh, excuse me, a thousand. Uh, by, and it was for expiring August 19th. So that's eight 19, and that is the monthly contract. So there, there's definitely more, uh, activity and contracts like that.They paid $4 for those contracts and they shelled out a total of 400,000 in order to take that position. Um, so that's definitely a bet to the downside and, you know, that's a 46 strikes, so that was effectively an app. Trade when that trade went off, that one went off on the 11th. So that was Thursday.Excuse me. That was Wednesday. That was Wednesday. Uh, so that one is obviously a downside bet. And then we had another call that on the same day someone bought the 49 calls that expire may 26. Uh, so that's, that's a weekly, that's a week after the monthly expert. And though that trader bought 1,344 contracts, uh, at 91 cents a contract.So the total premium outlay was 122,000 there. Uh, that was actually a block that wasn't even a sweep. Uh, And that also had, you know, only 637 contracts in the open interest. Then someone came in and bought 1300 double what was in there. So it's interesting. There were bets in both directions and, and to me that tells me that no one was really sure what was going to happen, but they probably had an.That's it, at least something was going to happen. They didn't know what was going to happen, but at least something was going to happen. Ryan, a question really quickly that I think there are listeners are going to, like, how often do you go back and. Unusual option activity that gives you some value for a decision that you're going to make today.Oh, man, that is a fantastic question. I don't think I'm going to be asked a better question than that today. Um, the, any time that there's like a big kind of surprise like this, I will often go back and see if there's anything I can see in the options. Now, obviously we're, we're talking about going back in time, so there's no way to actually trade off of this information, but one of the things that I hope.Say again, it's informing your, your path forward. Right. And that's exactly right. One of the things I'm hoping to do is to look for patterns or look for something that stands out. Um, it wa was there something where I can kind of put the puzzle. Together and come up with something that I can then use in the future.Um, like I, I was just telling you, you know, I had a gut feeling about this and one of the, one of the contracts that I have for my segment here, um, it, there's kind of a gut feeling aspect to it. And I've developed that, getting that feeling by watching some of these, even if I don't trade them, there's value in watching them and seeing how some of these places.Awesome. Awesome stuff, Ryan. All right. I'm looking forward to your, your next call here. Let's keep it rolling with our second sock to watch for the day. It is OTR acquisition Corp. The ticker is OT, R a. This is a spec redemption play for today. Likely throughout next week, there was a tweet, there was news last night and a tweet that we saw highlighting it noted that shareholders approved his deal, approved the company's deal with comm Comoro life sciences.There were 10.3 million shares related to this back redeemed. That was almost 98%. That was over 98%. And when this redemption happened, it left only about 170,000 shares out there in the. Now we have a spec expert at, and Benzing, uh, Chris catchy is also a writer for us and he tipped me off to this one.And he noted that this vote led to what you said, quote, one of the biggest redemptions ever, and why this is important because when we have these SPAC redemptions, what ends up happening is investors. Give those shares back and then they're way less shares in the flow. And we know what happens with lower float names.They can tend to be more manipulated. They can tend to be more pushed around. Traders can kind of like corner the market in the, in the sack a little bit. And so Chris reached out to me, he said, Hey, I'm going to be watching OTR today. I'm going to be watching OTR next week. This is probably going to be a popular spec redemption play moving forward.Our third sack to watch is American Eagles, American Eagle Outfitters AEO. I'm probably surprising a few people with this one. This is a retailer with a pretty decent dividend yield. Let's just keep that theme that we've been having on the, to watch for the last few days, highlighting some bigger dividend paying companies as we're moving into seemingly more of a value market versus a growth market.Dividends are going to become more important. People are going to be looking for forms, a ways to get passive income and a dividend is a good way to do that. American Eagles has an 18 cents per share quarterly dividend. That's about a three and a half percent yield. If we're getting over two to 3% in dividend yields, that's like a pretty nice dividend.If we're getting over 3%, even better. If we're getting a dividend yield, that's over five or 6%, that's like really, really high. And so American Eagles around a three and a half percent dividend yield, pretty nice little dividend that they're paying their staff to watch. What number are we on? Easterly government properties.The ticker is DEA. This is kind of a fun one, a good ticker symbol that this company has because they are a play on a property owner for us government buildings. They own the buildings that have. The drug enforcement agency, that house, the FBI, that house, the CIA and yesterday I was tuned into CNBC's fast money halftime report.And one of their contributors from a lady named Jenny Harrington from Gilman hill. She really liked this act. She said she had been watching the stock for seven or eight years. And she didn't see an opportunity to buy it over those seven or eight years. And now as we're moving into a higher interest rate market, she said, this thing is starting to get a little bit sexier.I don't know if she, I don't remember if she said she, she bought some or she was buying some, but kind of an interesting little niche play here. If you're ever looking for a way to get access to the property that us government buildings. Our last stock to watch for the day is AI Quito pharma. It's AI. K I Ryan, this is, this is kind of a cool one.If you, if you hadn't heard about heard of this company a few weeks ago, this company disclosed that they had a stake in discord, like the chat platform discord. Yes. And you, uh, yesterday we saw a press release that said that the company secured an interest in a, another non seemingly pharma company is a data and AI company.It's called data bricks. If you ever heard of data bricks. So this company, AI, Quito, they're kind of like becoming this sort of like portfolio of kind of some cool, like AI and web 3.0 and metaverse assets. I don't know what the company does as far as their pharma or their biotech assets go. This is in my opinion, a play on these interests that this company is kind of collecting kind of a cool one, kind of a fun one here off our list.You know, you know, what's interesting about this one is this actually appeared on the relative volume scanner that I use within Benzinga pro it's what I use every day to find day trading opportunities. Okay. W I said, believe what you're talking about happened on me. Um, because that thing, yeah, the information about it, Akido pharmaceutical reports, strategic investment in social communication platform, discord military, that actually popped the stock from a 39 cent handle all the way up to 58 at the highest.So a stock that small making that kind of move is. Absolutely going to get traders in it. And if you look at the chart that volume, the volume stick is, is gigantic. Um, I had heard of this because of the period on my scanner. I have no edge to it. I have no, I have no position in it, but I'll be honest. I I'm, I'm eagerly awaiting, uh, the discord IPO.And I think that there's going to be other opportunities for other stocks that are mentioned alongside discourt shares. Discord probably going to be 20, 20 twos, hottest IPO. Would you venture to agree with me, right? Yeah, I think, I think that you're right. I don't play a lot of IPO's. I may play that one.Ooh. Interesting. I'm intrigued. I'm intrigued. Right. All right. I am excited to hear some of your options, ideas here. Do you want to reveal the tickers or do you want me to intro them? Okay, so I got three for you today. First of all, I'm a long bias trader. So. It was a little tough on some of the long side ones.However, there were some interesting things that I found and we're gonna talk about them right now. Uh, three tickers that I have are going to be CCL, which is carnival cruise lines, GM, which is general motors and D a L, which is Delta airlines. Uh, first here, the CCL one. This one is perhaps the most interesting, um, this, uh, was the June monthly fees for next year.So that expert date on these contracts is six 16 of 2023. Okay, 20, 20 threes. This is next year. It's the 12 and a half strike and it was, uh, about a million dollars in premium. Um, so, so first of all, obviously that's, that's gigantic just in terms of the, just in terms of the total premium, but this was a put sweep.So here's the thing. I actually think that this was a. Okay, because if you take a look at, at what's going on here, first of all, these puts went off at the bid. So there was 3,600 contracts that went off, uh, at the bid and the total trade value was 997,000. So that's a. Uh, a million bucks there and they're so long, they're so far into the future.I think what's happening here is that we recognize there was a very, very precipitous drop in pretty much market-wide. And I think what they're trying to do is sell, puts at the bottom, right? So the hope here is that they never have to revive these, that these just expire worthless. And even if they do have to buy these, perhaps they buy them back at a much, much cheaper price premium paid for these was 2 77 per contract.So, um, again, we don't get debit and credit information from the exchange. So it's impossible to know for certain, if the transaction was opened or closed, however, um, monitoring where these took place with respect to the bid or the asking sometimes tip you off to what's going on. And I've seen this before.Um, I. To me, my, again, this is just my gut feeling is that these were sold contracts. And the hope here is that they never have to buy these back. And they just immediately were credited with that million dollars in their account. Pretty cool stuff, uh, rich for my blood, but definitely, definitely interesting.I would not follow this. Um, but to me, it's almost as if this marks a pretty decent floor for carnival cruise lines, right. 12 and a half 18. And she was saying it looks to be a price floor. We'll see how that plays out over the summer here. And then into next year. Um, second one that I have here was GM.This was this year's June monthly 42 calls, and it was about $936,000 in premium. So again, just under a million dollars, 24,000 contracts, these were out of the money contracts, uh, that were taken here and there were 24,000 of them. Um, so th th this is, this is actually a. Um, this is actually the type of trade that I like to follow along with.Right. Um, because these contracts were only 39 cents a contract. Like what's the big deal for me grabbing 10. Like even if these expire worth is my risk is well-defined and if they end up going up a couple of hundred percent, that's a nice, that's a nice little trade there. So, uh, this one's really, really interesting.Okay. Actually expire. Let's see the June 17 contract that expires in 35 days. Right? So we're going to know real quick at this trade's going to work. Stock is currently at $36. The strike price was at 42. If looking at the chart here, if the stock bounced, it would actually take out this downside formation, uh, this recent downside formation that's been going on since the beginning of may.So to me, this is very, very interesting. There was a huge volume stick on the equity. Um, Yeah, I believe this was yesterday. Yeah, May 12th, uh, yesterday. So just a really, really interesting call. This is one that, um, you probably could have also scalped the stock as soon as the set, just because it's so big.Uh, but again, I didn't, I didn't trade any of these. I'm absolutely watching this. Here's the other thing, Brent, going forward. If I see repeats. Huge sweeps and some of these GM names or anything that's around this, that's going to make me think even more that, Hey, you know, they, we expect a bounce here in GM or maybe even the overall market, and that might be worth plan.So I got my eye on that one as well, add in the premium in there from where the Sachs trading in, I mean, this, this better is thinking that GM shares are going to be up a good 20% over the next like month. Right. Wow. Interesting. Interesting. I really like what you're saying about watching. At this contract too, it'll give you more conviction that this better is more convicted themself, right?Yep, absolutely. And then one of the other things that you can watch for is to see, like, if they roll out of this one and roll into the forties, for example, uh, perhaps they're saying, okay, well maybe that bounce is not going to be as much as we thought, but we still want exposure to the upside. So again, This is an aggressive bet out of the money calls like that.Um, often very appealing because they're inexpensive and a lot of people can buy them, but just a really, really interesting trade definitely fits the criteria for unusual that's for sure. Last one we have here is Delta airlines. Um, so th th these are interesting to me too. The airlines are really interesting to me.I know personally that the prices of all of the tickets are going up, bookings are going up. It's the summer people want to travel. Um, so th this one really interesting to me, $40 calls. This transaction also happened yesterday. These calls, these are the contracts that is for the June monthly. So again, 6 17, 20 22 35 days, uh, for this to materialize, they paid one 17 per contract and the total tray and they, they bought 9,000.423 contracts, which means that the total trade value of this trade was $1.1 million. So another big bet, um, these contracts, interestingly enough, these contracts are quite affordable at a dollar 17. Again, you know, even a retail trader can pick up just a couple of them and have some pretty good leverage, uh, here for Delta.And when we were looking at Delta here, you know, Delta is currently at $37, but the Delta was at $40 on. All right. So we'll bounce back to. With any type of good news is absolutely possible. And when you're in a levered trade like this, you could see some pretty substantial gains, obviously. Um, uh, also one more thing to note on those, those contracts went off at the asks.So those are calls at the ask and, uh, there was the open interest. Is it, you know, these airlines, especially in some of these monthly contracts, there are, these airlines are. Quite a bit, uh, there was 21,000 contracts in the open interest, so I don't have like an outlier number here for volume over open interest.Um, but it is still a huge, huge bet. And it does, if you look at the chart, it kind of looks like Delta is going to bounce right here. So just a really, really strategic interesting, but a huge and a really affordable. Ryan really, really good stuff, man. I love you coming on because it brings some fresh blood to the podcast, brings a fresh angle.Really appreciate your time. Really appreciate your insights are. And I hope that our listeners. Do you also thanks for coming on, man. Really appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. And to the listeners out there, um, give me some feedback, let me know what you want to see. I watch a lot of different option contracts.I try to pick something different. Uh, today I tried to go with one that I thought might be a sale. So, uh, let us know, let us know what it is that you want to see and what we can do. I'd be happy. I'd be happy to come on and talk about it. I love this. I love doing this awesome, man. We'll we'll put Ryan's email in the description for the podcast.So check it out there. My, my emails also in there, you, you guys and gals can always give us feedback. That's how we get better as individuals. That's how we get better as an organization. So would really appreciate that feedback that is going to wrap it up for us this week. Another week in the books. I hope everyone has a really good weekend.And we'll we, we will be back with you next week for our SACS watch podcast. Everyone. Good luck out there today. Take care.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy