Time Warner after the bell 09-14-06: quiet day, punishing Cramer?

This was actually a quiet day for Time Warner (TWX), even with the stock down 0.4% to close at $16.91. There was some good news for TWX when Time Warner Telecom (TWTC) announced that TWX and affiliates were selling some 27.5 million shares. This is actually good as it allows TWX to focus on its own entities a tad more, and allows the company to unlock some of the hidden value in its assets. That won't generate enough cash that the bond rating firms will take much note, but it won't be bad for them at all either. The volume was pretty normal, with 21.9 million shares traded compared to an average daily volume of 20.5 million.

The move probably wasn't even a "Punish Cramer" after he said "BUY TWX" yesterday because of how his call on Hansen (HANS) went so poorly in the immediate day after. It seems that the stock was just doing a healthy pullback because of overbought indicators. That isn't indicative of a bunch of short sellers and it isn't indicative of a big institutional investor or key insider bailing out. This is just some clean profit taking on overbought conditions that we had previously telegraphed. When stocks go up seven out of eight or nine days, that happens.

Options activity was quiet a day ahead of expiration date, so there wasn't any added options volatility causing any artificial moves. I was shocked that I had to go all the way out to the January 2008 contracts just to find contracts that posted over 1,000 traded on the day at 3:15 PM. The JAN08 $15 PUTS traded 5,495 contracts as of that time. Someone made a highly speculative bet in an options trade by purchasing 1,362 of the JAN08 $30 CALLS for a $0.05. That is someone looking for a highly leveraged trade that they will make a fortune on if the stock starts to rally significantly.