Equivalent of Shares Outstanding for Options? by ChainsawDR

ChainsawDR

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For stocks there is the number of outstanding shares which, in conjunction with share price, shows the market cap of a stock (e.g. Stock XYZ has 1MM shares outstanding at $100 each, giving XYZ a $100MM market cap). Is there an equivalent view of shares outstanding for stock options? E.g. Company XYZ Call options of $110 Expiring on 12/7/18, there are 50k options outstanding (aka 50k of these options have been purchased).

I keep reading in various places that there is a lot of Short sell interest of stocks like Tesla, and various figures thrown around of how many $billions short sellers are set to lose if the stock price increases (aka doesn't drop to the put mark), but I haven't discovered what data is used to make these calculations.

Many thanks

ChainsawDR

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ChainsawDR

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SLPAdvisory

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https://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/openinterest.asp

Jing Wu

213.4k ,

Unlike stock trading, in which there is a fixed number of shares outstanding, Options whether issued or not are a right to buy shares. Options trading can involve the creation of a new option contract when a trade is placed in my view.

Open interest is the total number of option contracts that are currently open – contracts that have been traded but not yet liquidated by either an offsetting trade or an exercise or assignment. It might be a useful measure but it's hard to know whether the options are bought or sold from the open interest.

OpenInterest is a property of option contract. You can retrieve the OI data with contract.OpenInterest.

https://github.com/QuantConnect/Lean/blob/master/Algorithm.Python/OptionOpenInterestRegressionAlgorithm.py

ChainsawDR

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Thank you both for your help

Ernest Shaggleford

1.7k ,

One free source for high short interest. TSLA is currently 26%.

http://highshortinterest.com/all/

ChainsawDR

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