Calls Trade in Altera (ALTR)

Shares of Altera Corp. ALTR are lower on the session by 0.29%, currently trading $24.40. The stock has been drifting lower for the past five weeks, but has managed to hold the 200-day moving average. Calls are trading in the name today, but it is unclear whether these were purchases or sales. The June $25 call traded 3,600 times on open interest of 5,028 contracts. All contracts traded for $0.50, but this was occurring as the stock was gyrating wildly; this skews the time and sales data to show that half the position was bought on the offer and the other half sold on the bid. I would venture to say that these were sales, closing out a long call position in the name. Altera Corporation is a semiconductor company. The Company designs, manufactures and markets programmable logic devices (PLDs), HardCopy application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), pre-defined design building blocks, known as intellectual property (IP) cores, and associated development tools.