Hedging Gets Frantic as Puts Soar Amid Stock Market Hammering
- Composite put-to-call ratio by Cboe reaches highest this year
- Buyers hesitant but ratio could be a contrarian signal
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After this week’s selloff that erased more than $1 trillion in value from the S&P 500, investors are rushing to add to their bearish bets.
A Cboe put-to-call ratio that tracks the volume of options tied to everything from single stocks to indexes, including the S&P 500 and the VIX fear gauge, reached 0.99 this week in its highest level since November. Short bets against the largest S&P 500 ETF, ticker SPY, have also spiked, as have those on the tech-focused Invesco QQQ fund.