Calls Active as Twitter (TWTR) Traders Place Last-Minute Bets

Twitter, Inc. (NYSE:TWTR) is up 4.5% this morning to reach $50.61. Looking back, TWTR has been a technical outperformer, with the shares up 41% year-to-date. Accordingly, call activity in the options pits has been elevated, and today's speculators are gambling on last-minute upside.

Drilling down, calls have been trading at over four times the average intraday rate, and are outpacing puts by a roughly 4-to-1 margin. Today's most active contract is the weekly 3/27 50-strike call, where it appears some of the action is of the buy-to-open variety. Simply stated, speculators are betting on TWTR to extend its climb north of the $50 mark by Friday's close, when the weekly series expires.

Despite today's appetite for short-term calls, put activity has been prominent in the options pits, as TWTR's Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) of 0.81 ranks in the 80th percentile of its annual range. In other words, traders have rarely been this put-skewed over the past year.

Although Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) has had an impressive start in 2015, the brokerage bunch is divided on the equity. Specifically, 48% of covering analysts rate the stock a "hold" or worse. What's more, the security's consensus 12-month price target of $53.43 is a chip-shot away from current trading levels, leaving the door wide open for a round of bullish brokerage attention to boost the shares even higher.