M&A News Brings Bulls to Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ)

Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) has seen an uptick in call volume this morning, as speculators react to the company's agreement to purchase Aruba Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:ARUN). The contracts are crossing at a 21% mark-up to the normal mid-morning pace, and have outnumbered puts by a nearly four-to-one margin.

Buy-to-open activity has been detected at the weekly 3/6 35.50-strike call. These speculators are hoping for HPQ to move above $35.50 by the close this Friday, when the contracts expire. At last check, the shares were 0.2% higher at $34.93.

The equity's call options were popular even before today. HPQ's Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) comes in at 0.49, an annual low. This means option traders have preferred calls over puts more than at any other point in the past year, among options expiring in three months or less.

Reinforcing this sentiment is the stock's 10-day International Securities Exchange (ISE), Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), and NASDAQ OMX PHLX (PHLX) call/put volume ratio of 4.07. This reading is only 4 percentage points from an annual high.

So far in 2015, though, Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) has been a letdown for these seemingly bullish option traders. Since the start of the year, the shares have lost nearly 13%.