Contrarian vs. the crowd: One trader made a massive bet against chip stocks

Contrarian vs. the crowd: One trader made a massive bet against chip stocks

A trader works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. NYSE

When it comes to the fate of the all-important semiconductor sector, traders in the options market are faced with a classic investing dilemma: go with the crowd, or the big-money contrarian?

According to options flows, the crowd is leaning the most heavily bullish since April. The catch is that the biggest single options trade in the entire market Monday – a $129 million trade that accounted for over a third of total premium in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) – was resolutely bearish.

First, the crowd: the ratio of open put to call contracts on the SMH slid to 1.89 Monday, the most lopsided towards calls since early April and down from a high of 3.5 the last week of June, according to Barchart.

The ratio hasn't fallen below 1.5 in at least a year, reflecting the general demand for puts as a hedging instrument to long equity positions.

The fluctuation of the open-interest ratio has arguably been a compelling indicator for the price of the underlying ETF this year.

Traders started buying up puts in late May and early June as SMH momentum slowed and the ratio reached a one-year bearish high on June 24, just two days before the fund peaked and entered a 25% draw-down.

"Bank exposure to leveraged ETF and Situational Awareness this summer got to the point they felt very exposed to jump risk in semiconductor names and that caused hedging and volatility to go way up," said Zed Francis, CIO of Chicago-based Convexitas, which runs a semiconductor options trading strategy for clients.

Queue the big-money contrarian.

Whether it's the dropoff in the cost of trading semiconductor options – SMH implied volatility collapsed from 65% last month to 40% Monday, the lowest since February – or just the trader urge to fade the crowd, someone put on a massive bet against the group on Monday.

Just before 11 a.m. ET, a trader on the Nasdaq PHLX exchange bought 20,100 630-strike SMH puts expiring Nov. 20 for $129 million, according to data from SpotGamma and ThinkOrSwim.

Open interest in that contract was less than 50 at Friday's close, meaning the trade was almost certainly a new position.

Without any other trades of that magnitude at that time Monday, and with the fund trading at $594, the deep in-the-money put position is likely being used as a synthetic short bet against the group.

It was the single biggest options trade on the tape Monday and 3.5 times bigger than the second-biggest transaction, a $37 million leg of a multi-part trade in Sandisk, according to SpotGamma data.

"The further out you go in some of these semiconductor options, the dumber the options pricing gets betting on an upside crash," said Don Kaufman, co-founder of TheoTrade.