With the stock market becoming increasingly intolerant of companies that miss earnings or revenue expectations by even a little bit, this may be a particularly good time to look at our Smart Tech 50 portfolio table to identify attractive short sell candidates. To do that, I filtered that table by looking at the stocks with lowest IDEAL ‘Total Score’, and found four companies that currently earn a score of 0 points for dividend yield, cash flow and relative valuation: Global Payments (GPN), Symantec (SYMC), Visa (V), and Yahoo! (YHOO).

Of those, Yahoo! Has already agreed to a buyout offer from Verizon, so there isn’t much potential for unusual volatility in its share price. And Visa and Global Payments just reported earnings recently, so the near term probability of a major negative surprise has been reduced. But Symantec is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings report after this Thursday’s close, so of the four it is the one that may be the first to take a quick dive if those numbers come up short.

To the extent insider trading is an indication of the company’s near term prospects, then the nearly 27 million shares of SYMC sold by its institutional owners during the previous quarter does not bode well for the stock. And the company’s officers and directors were net sellers of more than 95,000 shares as well, suggesting they don’t see the point in hanging in there for this report, either. But of the two, the huge dump by some of its mutual fund and pension account investors is more disconcerting since they have no reason to sell other than they just don’t feel comfortable holding the shares any more.

From a purely statistical perspective, Symantec looks pretty solid on paper. It boasts a profit margin of 70%, and 15% growth in quarterly earnings (year over year). But there is also danger lurking on its income statement; total revenue declined by 3% in the previous quarter, and the company had negative operating cash flow of $276 million. So it does not look like a train wreck in the making, but if Symantec disappoints this Thursday then I think its share price could easily drop 5 – 10%.

That’s not enough of a drop to risk shorting the stock, but I think buying a put on it as a flyer might be the better way to go. And I wouldn’t go too far out of the money, if at all given the very short time frame of this trade. At the moment, the $25 put expiring on November 11^th can be bought at a price of 70 cents, meaning a 5% drop in SYMA from its current share price of $25.15 would bring it down to $23.90, resulting in $1.10 of intrinsic value, or 57% higher than the cost of the put. The fact that the expiration of this option is just a few days after the U.S. presidential election may add further volatility into the mix, which is more likely to be negative than positive.

Buy the SYMC November 11 $25 put option (161111P00025000) for 70 cents or less.