(Source: Business Wire)Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (NYSE: GS) has clearly held up better than its peers in the financial/banking sector, logging a year-to-date gain of 15%, compared to the Select Sector SPDR Financial's (NYSE: XLF) decline of nearly 35% for the same time frame. The company has also resisted taking part in this week's trend of proclaiming profits for the start of 2009. Unlike Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase, mum's apparently the word at Goldman, so far. The only big news for GS this week was yesterday's announcement that the company sold $5 billion in FDIC-guaranteed notes under the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program in a 4-part sale.

The lack of headline news hasn't slowed option bears, as more than 58,000 bearishly oriented put contracts have changed hands so far today. The activity more than doubles the stock's average daily put volume, and has placed GS on our Intraday Volume Explosion List. This negativity is old hat for the security, though, as its Schaeffer's put/call open interest ratio (SOIR) of 1.40 indicates that puts easily outnumber calls among near-term options. This ratio also ranks above 85% of all those taken in the past year.

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