August 26th, 2013, 4:01 pm
atm in equity land just means strike = current spot. so, to be precise, you are asking for and getting a 6m atm call. the verbiage matters depending on the market that you're in...now, this call's strike does happen to be higher than its forward price (so, it would be an ITMF put, not call), but it is what it is.the reason equities are quoted this way is that there is not always agreement about what the forward price should be (future dividend streams are not always necessarily known, especially for longer-dated options). think about microsoft back in the days before they started paying a dividend. while they had never paid one before, option markets made "bets" about a possible div (both timing and magnitude) for quite some time before the div actually came into existence, so it would be difficult to talk about the msft forward price in that context.