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Strategies & Market Trends : Zeev's Turnips - No Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Smart_Money who wrote (96605)	7/21/2002 12:29:44 AM
From: Amots	Respond to of 99280

Look at UPS too.

To: Smart_Money who wrote (96605)	7/21/2002 12:59:39 AM
From: Jack T. Pearson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 99280

I don't think the GS close at 77 was a scam. But your post made me curious, and it would be interesting to find out what happened. Here is what I have been able to find out: The last trade shows 24,500,000 shares at 77.00. That's a $1.9B trade. Given that the previous trade was at $72.50, someone would have paid $122.5M more than necessary. People with that much money aren't stupid. According to my info, GS traded a total of 55.362M shares Friday. Their average is 4.608M shares per day. Even without the last trade, Friday's volume would be high. The biggest trade earlier in the day was probably around 750,000 shares just before 1PM EDT. I don't know what the price was on this trade, but it didn't have any effect rest of the market for GS--trade prices on both sides of this trade were the same. Big blocks like these are pre-arranged trades. The are not listed as offers or bids on any exchange, but after the trade is concluded, the trade is recorded on an exchange. There may be a considerable lag between the time of the trade and the time it is recorded. Might be related to the expiration of options on Friday. Actually, options expire at 5:00 PM on the Saturday after the third Friday of the expiration month. Public holders of option contracts have until 5:30 PM on Friday to indicate their desire to exercise. But I don't think this was a publicly traded option. There was no publicly traded GS option with a strike price of $77. Also, too many shares were involved. I've never any option volume on any stock as high as 240,000 (100 shares per option). I suspect an insider or some group of insiders exercised options at the $77.00 price, but I don't know for sure. Was GS added to the S&P 500 after the market closed on Friday? If so, this may have been an arranged trade for one of the index funds.