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
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