Huntington released an 8k with their executive comp details and it looked pretty tame. I'll take a pass.
In other spinoff news, interesting to see John Malone's name crop up in the latest - as a major (indirect) shareholder in Expedia. Of course with his interest in it, there will probably be a lot of close analysis of the transaction.
It's quite interesting that the news was released on the same day as news of justice department approval of Google's purchase of ITA (travel data). I know almost nothing about these companies but that looks like it could be neutral news for the Expedia chunk (they could commercialize their Best Fare Search data, little effect on hotwire) but very bad for Tripadvisor (as it becomes easier to order tickets after searching Google and their Hotpot/Places rating system grows). Yet market and analyst reaction seemed to focus on the value that can be unlocked for Tripadvisor.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
A Small Put
I bought a few puts on Nomura ADRs (NMR). The main reason wasn't speculative; I wanted to see a trade all the way through on Interactive Brokers. I had recently been extremely gutted to find out I couldn't trade Japanese equities through them - their CSR said it was due to Japanese regulations but after poking around some message boards it looks like IB might be unique in their interpretation. I missed a couple thousand dollars on the trades I wanted.
The speculative reasoning was simple - I was looking for a large multiple payoff in the event of nuclear catastrophe. I had no special insight into the chance of that happening (I thought 1%-20%), but figured I wouldn't be trading against anyone who did - and option pricing models certainly didn't. So I didn't do any fundamental research and just looked over a few financial ADRs for some decent out of the money puts.
While the nuclear news has been mostly bad, it hasn't emptied Tokyo. I had mentally written the puts off as a 100% loss but got bailed out by the recent dip of the yen. Looks like I had lucky timing too; they were $5 strike 4/15 options I bought at $.20 and unloaded Wednesday at $.25
The speculative reasoning was simple - I was looking for a large multiple payoff in the event of nuclear catastrophe. I had no special insight into the chance of that happening (I thought 1%-20%), but figured I wouldn't be trading against anyone who did - and option pricing models certainly didn't. So I didn't do any fundamental research and just looked over a few financial ADRs for some decent out of the money puts.
While the nuclear news has been mostly bad, it hasn't emptied Tokyo. I had mentally written the puts off as a 100% loss but got bailed out by the recent dip of the yen. Looks like I had lucky timing too; they were $5 strike 4/15 options I bought at $.20 and unloaded Wednesday at $.25
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)