Intersting story today about a quant model that blew up selling puts (?)

jimkliew

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(I thought this was interesting...)

BCS Mistake May Be Costly

Folks, pull up your option quote screen and take a look at the ADRs for BCS. See all those March 2011 puts trading? Any idea why?
Well our computers lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree as March 20, 19, 18 and 17 puts trade 40,000 apeice. Now we're hearing this was a massive quant mistake. MASSIVE. Of the 40,000 that traded at each strike, some 30,000 were accidently sold on the bid!
I know that this shouldn't happen, but we're hearing it did and we can see the prints on our time and sales folks!
If it's true that the ISE will NOT break the trades, then someone is long a heck of a lot of Barclays ADRs! Every 10,000 are 1 million shares, so we're potentially talking 16 million shares (160,000 puts = 16,000,000 shares) held by someone that is probably not all that happy at holding this much stock in one of the largest banks in the Eurozone.
Watch the skew in the at the money puts in Dec and Jan as I expect they may pick up steam if these trades hold.

By: Jon "DRJ" Najarian

BCS Options | Barclays PLC Common Stock Stock - Yahoo! Finance
 
Jim,
may be they closed all those puts. look at the open interest.
 

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