Marvell Jumps on Upside Options Activity

By Jon "DRJ" Najarian, co-founder of OptionMonster

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (TheStreet) -- Marvell Technology (MRVL) shares jumped along with upside option activity Monday ahead of the chipmaker's earnings report Thursday.

OptionMonster's real-time systems showed 14,335 March 20 calls trading in unusually large numbers, most of them bought for 70 cents to 90 cents. The volume was well over the existing open interest of 9,196 and dwarfed the average daily turnover of 875 calls at that strike for the last month.

Shares closed Monday up 3.9% to $20.08 and crept up another 6 cents in after-hours trading. The stock broke through its 50-day moving average and there are those who will use such a move to jump in.

Marvell's new platforms are the first of their kind to offer gigahertz-class processor speed for smart phones, providing computing power once reserved for stationary desktops. There was strong buzz at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona about the company's technologies, which promise to support full-HD 1080p encoding, 3D mobile gaming, full Adobe Flash, Android software, Windows Mobile, and other leading operating systems.

The stock would need to gain roughly 4% in the next three weeks for the purchased March 20 calls to turn a profit. Overall calls outnumber puts by about 2.7 to 1.

At the time of publication, Najarian owned Marvell.