I should be writing about derivatives and I promise I will, but my son told me that nobody writes anything important on Friday 'cause nobody reads anything over the weekend. I'm not sure he's right but for a relatively slow Friday there is one wonderful story which hopefully will see some traction in the coming days. Indeed, it damn well better see some traction!
Anybody ever heard of options? I'm sure most of you have. Options are essentially bets made on the direction of an individual stock or market which are extremely popular with professionals as a tool for leveraging directional moves or hedging positions already taken. Options are terrific financial tools in the hands of the right people. I am not one of those; I have never made a bean.
The two most common forms of options are puts and calls. A put option gives one the right--but not the obligation--to sell a certain stock within a certain time frame. A call is the opposite of a put. The form of the transaction is a contract between two parties and puts and calls are quoted on exchanges around the world. If the subject of either form of contract acts as expected WITHIN THE TIMEFRAME a lot of money can be made because each contract controls 100 shares of stock for a fraction of the outright cost. If the timeframe runs out, the contract is a total loss.
Well, it came to pass that yesterday, after the close of business, it was announced that six insurance companies had been made eligible to enter into the TARP program. No big deal 'cause everybody had expected that this announcement would be made at some point but the identity of the companies was still and object of speculation. But on the way to the close, a funny thing happened. The six companies that were to be announced saw a dramatic rise in the volume of call contracts traded. One of them, the Hartford, saw a volume of over 120,000 call contracts (that is a bet in the rise of the stock) as against an average daily volume of 20,000 contracts. The five other to be mentioned names also saw a remarkable increase in contract volume. What made this action even more remarkable was that ALL of the contracts were for May and ALL had two days to the expiry date. Today, the contracts were sold assuringly at a very substantial profit based on the after-hour release of the Treasury's decision.
Now one can explain away this kind of sudden movement in one name, but in SIX...and the very SIX that were to be the subject of the Treasury's decision? Somebody dropped a dime and tipped off someone or somebodies on the Street...or somewhere...what was about to occur. Our Hero may have one hell of a problem on his hands for the first place the SEC and whoever else is about to get involved will look is inside the Treasury for that is the logical place from which the info on all six names could emanate. It was either a deliberate leak from a single source or a monstrously stupid act of informing the involved six individually of all of the collective names. Pay peanuts, you get monkeys...or crooks. I don't mean to constantly berate the guy but before we start talking about putting together plans to regulate world-wide markets, let's convince a few more people that we have our arms around the job at hand? I may be wrong in my concern but every day I keep asking myself, "Self, who's in charge here?"
Have a lovely weekend.
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