“For options trader Tim Biggam, yesterday was the day he was waiting for in shares of Apple Inc,” Callie Bost reports for Bloomberg. “The iPhone maker’s minute-long swoon starting 20 minutes after trading began contributed to the biggest jump in the Chicago Board Options Exchanges Apple Volatility Index in two years. The stock plunged almost 5 percent during one 60-second stretch and at its lowest point was down 6.4 percent from the previous close, the largest retreat since January.”
“Prices on bearish Apple contracts soared as much as 400 percent, a rare payday for traders who have added to such positions in the options over the past month. Before yesterday, Apple had rallied 48 percent in 2014 and was up 24 percent since global equity markets bottomed in mid-October,” Bost reports. “‘I was very happy to have a day like today,’ Biggam, chief options strategist at TradingBlock, a brokerage firm at CBOE, said by phone yesterday. ‘In a stock that goes up every day, when everyone’s on the wrong side of the boat, it falls a lot quicker.'”
Bost reports, “‘When things get stretched in one direction, taking a counter-trend position is a great use of options strategies,’ Biggam said. ‘I happened to get lucky and catch it bigger than I thought.’ Steve Dowling, a spokesperson for Apple, declined to comment on the options trading.”
Read more in the full article here.
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b.f.d.
short term greed-heads looking to swiftly line their pockets
it is a great company and will continue to dominate and grow far into the future.
maybe not like the good old days when we bought in at ten and it went to 700, but what the heck.
still and all despite the ups and owns (which i doubt will ever rival what we had to go through a couple of times) it will grow, plus it pays dividends.
hard to lose in the long run under those circumstances
This dude is a lot like a gambler. He remembers his wins and conveniently forgets his losses. He got “lucky” on a very temporary blip resulting from a suspiciously massive dump of AAPL stock. But how many years of losses did he experience shorting AAPL and other stocks to get that win.
For these short term greed-heads to make money someone has to lose.
Where did those 6M shares come from? A hedge fund or perhaps an investment fund using money from customer’s 401k?
For these guys to play with these stocks they do not use their own money, instead they get cohorts to drop the stock when they need it.
Shorting encourages brokers to cheat because it is so easy to manipulate the system.
Manipulation is not possible in an open market, which is what we have. If you believe in manipulation, just take the other side and profit from it.
I don’t think it’s that easy for mom and pop investors to compete with the hedge funds who have all the latest electronic trading mechanisms. Personally, I have no interest in supporting short-term greed. Invest in a company you like and back it. I don’t believe in betting on companies to fail. It just seems counter-productive to the economy to me. What these people do may be legal but it also seems somewhat immoral from my standpoint. Maybe I’m simply not smart enough to understand the “big picture.”
Yes, I understand that’s how the world is, but I don’t back it. I feel that those tricksters would cause good businesses to fail for their own benefit and that would increase market instability. I know they’re not really hurting Apple because Apple will make money no matter what these so-called market geniuses do. I think it does confuse average shareholders and makes them wary about investing.
I’m getting my Apple dividends every quarter, so whatever the tricksters play with on a day to day level doesn’t much affect me at all. I suspect a lot of collusion among hedge funds is happening but that’s just my gut feeling and can’t prove anything.
Doth one believeith the fixith, is inith?
Should be called the ‘schlock’ market. It’s a big scam.
What the hell is all this talk about greed? That is why we invest in stocks. Do you clowns think people buy stocks thinking to not make a profit? The reason for Apple to exist is to make stockholders gain. Apple is not a church, it is the largest business in the world and wants to be even bigger. Who are you people?
This was clearly, DIRECT AND PLANNED manupulation of the stock and the company owners (shareholders). The individual responsible should be required to forfeit any profits gained from this illegal transaction. They should be expunged from eligible individual pools globally that can participate in any other transaction involving Apple or any of it’s various business entities, punishable by imprisonment.
Asinine:
In a stock that goes up every day, when everyone’s on the wrong side of the boat, it falls a lot quicker.
Tim Biggam, chief options strategist at TradingBlock, a brokerage firm at CBOE: So you’re betting on the single best and biggest company on the planet to FAIL. What does that make you? A parasite.
Hey Tim: How about the SERIOUSLY bloated stocks, like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, Samsung, Facebook, on an on…. Are you going to follow your logic and bet against THEM? Now, that might actually make sense.
Dear Humanity:
If you make your livelihood on DAMAGING others, you’re busy DAMAGING yourself. That’s what we call ‘self-destructive’. Congratulating yourself for shooting yourself in the head doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it.