Options Volume Exploding on Rackspace (RAX)

Shares of Rackspace Hosting, Inc.

are higher in the session by 3.71%, currently trading at $26.30. Shares spiked earlier in the session, hitting an intra-day high of $27.94, but have since retraced lower on high volume. RAX is scheduled to report earnings after the bell on November 8th. Interestingly options volume is exploding in the name today, with the margin favoring the call side. Mid way through the session 15,000 calls have traded (roughly 5x the daily average) and 8,000 puts have traded (roughly 4x the daily average). The strikes seeing the heaviest volume are the November $29.00 call and the November $25.00 and $26.00 puts. Rackspace Hosting, Inc. operates in the hosting and cloud computing industry. The company offers its products under the Fanatical Support brand. The company's services are sold to businesses in more than 120 countries. During the year ended December 31, 2009, the company served more than 90,000 business customers and managed more than 56,000 servers, 1,600,000 e-mail accounts, and 259,000 cloud hosting domains.