Alibaba's Options Volume Jump Over Palantir's

$Alibaba(BABA)$  's options volume jumped above  $Palantir Technologies Inc.(PLTR)$  's, landing the Chinese ecommerce giant in the six most active stock options, as online retail sales in the Asian country expanded in the first two months of the year.

Shares of Alibaba jumped Monday by as much as 5.1% to $148.24, their highest intraday level since November 2021. The rally came after data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed China's online retail sales rose 7.3% in January to February to about 2.28 trillion yuan ($315 billion).

Online sales of physical goods rose 5% to 1.86 trillion yuan, accounting for about 22% of the total retail sales of consumer goods, state-run news agency Xinhua reported Monday, citing data from the National Bureau of Statistics.  

More than 514,900 Alibaba call and put options changed hands Monday, putting it ahead of Palantir’s volume of 507,240 contracts. The Chinese e-commerce giant that’s also JPMorgan's top pick in the sector, is on track to be the day's sixth most active stock option, behind $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$, $Tesla (TSLA.US)$, $Intel (INTC.US)$, $Apple (AAPL.US)$ and $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$ . 

“Accelerating YoY growth for online retail sales growth in Jan-Feb 2025 marks a good start to the year for the ecommerce market,” JPMorgan analysts Andre Chang and Alex Yao wrote in a note to clients Monday, even as they noted that the “tracking rate is still below the growth rate for 2025 expected by the market.”

While the JPMorgan analysts don’t think the online retail sales data is a strong indicator of ecommerce companies’ gross merchandise volume for the first quarter of 2025, they said Alibaba remains their top pick in the sector for its exposure to artificial intelligence. 

Alibaba is one of the world's largest ecommerce companies, with more than 40% of its revenue in fiscal 2024 coming from the sector. It is also China’s largest provider of public cloud services, with its Cloud Intelligence Group accounting for about 11.3% of sales.

Call options that give the holders the right to buy Alibaba shares at $150 each by Friday attracted the heaviest trading after the share price gains bolstered the odds that the contract could be in the money before it expires in four days. 

The second most active Alibaba contract was the call option with a strike price of $155 also expiring on Friday. That strike price is 5% higher than Monday's closing price of $147.57. 

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