Skip to main content

OptionSellers.com



Quite suddenly, a web based operation called OptionSellers.com went dark last month.A casualty of the spike in natural gas prices. More accurately, it was a casualty of hubris, as manifest in a failure to hedge against natural gas prices.

The suckers -- excuse me, its investors -- received an email November 15 with the subject line "Catastrophic Loss Event." 

The catastrophic loss was that OS.com had bet heavily that natural gas prices would NOT suddenly spike any time soon. As the chart I've pasted on to this blog post indicates ... nat gas prices spiked in a big way. 

This was part of the pitch that you might have encountered had you gone onto their website before the spike. "Stocks are great, until they aren't. Options are better, but most make the mistake of buying them." 

OOOOOh, I see, so the trick is to be on the SELLING side. Taking a small amount of money in return for a promise to pay off later if specified events happen in the market. It's easy to design the options so that the pay-off is unlikely. You get the money from risk averse investors. You never have to pay-off. Everybody is happy.

There's an old image still often used for strategies like this. They are all a bit like picking up nickels in front of a steam roller. Your bet is that you will be nimbler than the steam roller. Which brings us back to the now rolled-up suckers of OS.com. 

Now not only were OS.com's suckers wiped out of whatever they had on account. THEY are now liable for those bets. The Dear John email I mentioned above said that the clearing company, FC Stone, was sending out "a call to add funds to bring the balance back up to zero" on the red ink liquidated accounts. "We recommend balances be paid." 

Oops. That steam roller HURTS, doesn't it?






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more