Dallas Morning News
... 10K" annual report, said Zale treasurer David Sternblitz. Zale's stock price declined 15 cents to $7.16 Friday. There was no change in after-hours trading.
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FormFactor Inc. (NASDAQ: FORM) is not a highly active stock by almost any measure for almost any stock exchange. It is also not an active stock in the realm of options trading. In our weekend review, this one stood out handily for a stock that has rarely, if ever, crossed our path for big weekend stock and options trading screens.    Yet we saw over 11,000 contracts trade hands on Friday, and it was sneaky because the trades were one-sided and all the way out to APRIL-2010 in the CALL options. Here are the trades in the APRIL-2010 CALLS:
CALL$Â Â Â Volume Op.Int.
20.00Â Â Â 6,880Â Â Â 25
22.50Â Â Â Â 125Â Â Â Â Â Â 25
25.00Â Â Â 5,592Â Â Â 96
What is odd is that those two trades were bigger than the open interest of all the seen CALL options from now until then combined. That even includes the SEPT-2009 options which expired.  This stock closed down 0.45% at $24.34 on 684,832 shares. That is barely above average of about 585,000 shares. Its market cap is $1.2 billion and the 52-week trading range is $11.36 to $26.08.
JON C. OGG
Mueller Water Products, Inc. (NYSE: MWA) priced a 32.28 million share secondary offering of common stock at $4.75 through BofA Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. This offering size was increased on demand as the original amount was to be 27.5 million shares. The $144.1 million in gross proceeds is to be used to purchase additional shares and to repay a portion of indebtedness outstanding under its credit agreement. Co-managers a At 8:47 AM EST we have seen 370,000 shares trade and the stock is actually up 2% at $4.95. Expect the volume here to blow though the 1.1 million share average as the opening gets closer. -JON OGG
Origin Agritech Limited (NASDAQ: SEED) announced that its Origin Biotechnology unit reached a worldwide agreement with the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Sichuan Biotech Engineering, Limited. Those two will jointly own the rights to an internally developed gene which is highly tolerant to glyphosate herbicide. This glyphosate-tolerance gene is entirely new to the consumer markets in that it has never been commercialized, and is protected by patents granted separately by China and USA separately. SEED is surging on the news. At the open we have a gain of almost 10% at $5.25 on 87,000 shares versus average volume of 120,000. The 52-week high is $6.31. -Jon C. Ogg
US Bancorp (NYSE: USB) is up but is surprisingly not getting as much attention as we would have expected. At 8:51 AM EST we have only seen 18,000 shares trade hands versus an average volume of 17 million shares. The gain is only 1.5% at $23.15. The news that is out is that Rochdale’s Dick Bove upgraded his old Neutral rating to a new BUY rating. The old $25 target was hiked to $28 as well. Shares are still up over 100% from its March lows, but we would be looking for stock upside and a volume spike here as the open gets closer. JON OGG