AMD and Xilinx will be meeting Wednesday to discuss the details of AMD’s proposed $35 billion acquisition of Xilinx, which is planned to close by the end of the year.
The big purchase, which has been in the works since October, is designed to help build out AMD’s data center capabilities in the years ahead. Options traders are betting that this meeting could get the companies one step closer to their merger.
Bullish options activity in the chip space is nothing new in recent weeks. The SMH semiconductor ETF has gained 10% in just the last month as supply shortages drive prices higher. In Monday’s session, though, plenty of activity was stock-specific, and AMD was a big winner.
“We saw calls outpace puts by [a ratio of] about 3-to-1 in AMD today, and the most active options were the 82-strike calls that expire at the end of this week,” Optimize Advisors CIO Michael Khouw said Tuesday on CNBC’s “Fast Money.” “Over 18,000 of those traded for about $1, and that means that the call buyers were risking about 1.2% [of the underlying stock price] to make bullish bets that the stock could go above that $82 strike by the end of the week.”
Those calls break even at $83, or just about 2% higher than where AMD closed Tuesday’s session. That is by no means an outlandish target for the stock to hit by Friday’s close and likely reflects the results of any positive outcome from Wednesday’s meeting.
AMD was trading slightly higher in Wednesday’s session.
