Here are the stocks seeing a bias toward call activity on Tuesday. This filtered scan is based on the International Securities Exchange (ISE) buy-to-open data. It looks for stocks where the previous day's call volume on the ISE is at least twice as great as the put volume. It then sorts the stocks based on the call volume. Since this is buy-to-open data, this can be a good source for finding stocks where optimism is emerging. Of particular interest to me would be situations where we see call activity on stocks that are still in intermediate-term downtrends. This would be a potentially cautionary sign from the contrarian perspective

Companies included in today's scan results: Citigroup Inc (C), Wyeth (WYE), Bank of America Corp (BAC), American International Group (AIG), Research in Motion Limited (RIMM), Ford Motor Co (F), General Electric (GE), Elan, plc (ELN), Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS), DryShips Inc. (DRYS), Cisco Systems (CSCO), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Target Corp. (TGT), Amgen Inc (AMGN), Alcoa (AA), Microsoft (MSFT), CIGNA Corp. (CI), EMC Corp. (EMC), Huntington Bancshares Incorporated (HBAN), Biogen Idec Inc (BIIB), Walgreen (WAG), Dell Inc (DELL), Medarex (MEDX), Exxon Mobil (XOM), Motorola (MOT).

Citigroup Inc, Bank of America Corp, and Research in Motion Limited are the situations that stood out to me -

• Citigroup tops today's list with nearly 85,000 calls bought on Tuesday. However, I still think the waters are too muddied here to get a good sentiment read and there is little encouraging about the near-term chart. The stock is oversold but so far there has been no sign of interest from buyers.
• Bank of America also saw relatively heavy call buys but at least the daily chart here shows an uptrend. Unfortunately, the stock has so far been capped at resistance near 15. I still don't think this is an environment to front-run breakouts.
• The weekly chart of Research in Motion is worth noting. In April, the stock broke above resistance near 60 and shot into the lows from early-2008. There has since been a pullback that leaves the equity in a wasteland of sorts. While the near-term action looks cloudy, the intermediate-term breakout still stands. As the "wasteland action" plays out, I will be keeping an eye on how the sentiment profile evolves. The most encouraging contrarian scenario would be for the shares hold above the former resistance near 60 amid an uptick in skepticism. For that to happen though, the stock would need to stop showing up on this scan.