Allow me to answer your theoretical question: ie, "Would a large owner of 1,000,000 shares of MANU be willing to burn 10K or 100K in an options position just to generate buying interest to boost the shares up a few dollars?"
While it is certain possible for that to occur, IMO, someone who owns over 1M shares of MANU or any other large account balance would likely not burn the money to generate buying interest unless that individual had the support of other co-conspirators.
Now, IMO it is certainly possible to "rig" markets and keep a stock trading at artifically high levels, but the SEC frowns on the practice and while they do a horrible job of investigating complaints filed by John Q. Public, they're generally pretty good where large sums of money and alleged improprieties are involved as long as they don't have one of the larger institutions or billion dollar, mega wealthy individuals overseeing their investigation - something akin to the fox guarding the henhouse.
That 500 lot of the 17 1/2's (I believe that was the strike) was so far out of the money, offered so little in the way of premium, and was so unusually large relative to volume in other strikes that it certainly gave one pause to ask the question, "Who did it and why?"
Because of the vaguaries of any proposed acquisition and the related acquisition premiums involved, I would be less inclined to believe it was an individual acting on some set of analytics that prompted the buy for the strike was approximately 70% above the trading level of the stock and that's a hefty acquisition premium in anyone's book.
This is just my opinion, of course. Good trading to you.
Mark A. Peterson |
