February 10, 2015 Market Recap

The S&P 500 surged higher today, closing at 2068.57, up nearly 22 points. Some market participants feel that tomorrow’s Eurozone finance minister meeting will be positive, and attribute today’s market pop to that.

The VIX closed at 17.23, down nearly 7%.

The crude oil market continues to remain volatile. The United States Oil ETF, USO, was down over 4%, closing at 18.94. In addition to the move, we saw some heavy put buying in some energy names. One that stuck out was Halliburton, HAL, earlier this morning we saw one trader come in and buy over 6500 March 41 puts, lifting the offer at $1.28. In the afternoon, Halliburton announced that they would be cutting 6.5 to 8% of their global workforce.

There are a number of earnings that traders will be watching tomorrow, some include:

Wednesday: PepsiCo (PEP), AOL, Inc. (AOL), Applied Materials, Inc. (AMAT), ARM Holdings plc (ARMH), Baidu Inc (BIDU), Mondelez International Inc. (MDLZ), Mosaic Co (MOS), NetApp Inc. (NTAP), NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA), Tripadvisor Inc. (TRIP), Tesla (TSLA), Tesoro Corporation (TSO), Whole Foods Market, Inc. (WFM), Zillow Inc. (Z), FireEye Inc. (FEYE), Time Warner Inc. (TWX), and Metlife (MET).

One company that caught headlines late in the afternoon was First Solar, FSLR, the company announced an $848 million pact with Apple (AAPL). The stock closed at $48.54, up 4.77%, however, it traded north of $50 in the afterhours.

On the options front, we saw notable bullish option activity in TIVO, ISIL and UQM. In addition, we saw bearish option activity in DAN, ENT, and WBMD.

We’ll be back on Thursday, for our next market recap.