IMC-Chicago, LLC ownership in MFC / Manulife Financial Corporation

In addition to reporting standard equity and debt issues, institutions with more than 100MM assets under management must also disclose their put and call option holdings. Since put options generally indicate negative sentiment, and call options indicate positive sentiment, we can get a sense of the overall institutional sentiment by plotting the ratio of puts to calls. The chart to the right plots the historical put/call ratio for this instrument.

Using Put/Call Ratio as an indicator of investor sentiment overcomes one of the key deficiencies of using total institutional ownership, which is that a significant amount of assets under management are invested passively to track indices. Passively-managed funds do not typically buy options, so the put/call ratio indicator more closely tracks the sentiment of actively-managed funds.