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Strategies & Market Trends : Canadian Options -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: waitwatchwander who wrote (822)	1/21/1998 10:28:00 PM
From: Porter Davis	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1598

Options update for 1/21...Welcome to 'TSE Titanic'... ...and the rats are going over the side. Maybe they're the smart ones. I had the dubious pleasure of attending a TFE board meeeting after the close; they are full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, committed to automating derivatives. It may take them a little longer, which provides just a glimmer of hope, but I don't think so. When a board member asked what if anything was going to change under automation, I tried to explain that we are going to go from an open-outcry auction to a dealer market similar to NASDAQ. This is not progress. In a delicious irony, it came across the wire today that a seat on the CBOE went for an all-time record price of US$730,000. Keep in mind the CBOE is an auction market, and the best in the world. We should be trying to emulate this but nooo, we're going to nintendo-trading. What's truly disgusting is the fox is building the chicken-coop. Clients will get screwed. Did anybody notice that the SEC forced seven major US brokerage firms to repay their clients $750 million to settle one class action suit stemming from NASDAQ trading? Collusion, price-fixing, self-dealing, undeclared principal transactions, the whole laundry list of unethical practices, and this is the system they plan on implementing here. (Remember, this is all IMHO). Isn't anybody even a little upset about this? I'm going to stop now before I say any more. Believe me, though, these upstairs guys who are actively supporting the exchange in this lunacy couldn't pass a first-year ethics course if you graded on the curve. House-keeping: Northface, we use a modified American Black--Scholes model for pricing Leaps. I've got a book somewhere here in my den which has it, but I can't put my hand to it right now. It basically retards the time-premium decay curve much longer than the normal B-S. Someone asked me last week about Bell Mobility options...they were listed but came down in '92 or so due to lack of interest. Ole 49er, good to hear from you. How you been keeping? Any action over on the Bre-X thread? Let me know where I sign up to sue somebody--I did end up long 10,000 when the music stopped. I guess the last two days just proves the saw 'markets will fluctuate'. Barrick drew right to the button - $24.85 - before backfilling. I think it will take some work to get through the 30-odd million shares Munk unloaded. The installment receipts will be worth watching as a possible play; see what kind of volatility the market puts in them. Retail is getting a little too comfortable about writing the 120 line naked on Ballard; a spike up wouldn't surprise me. Inco has reverted to being a piece of crap after one or two interesting days. BCE wouldn't go up much yesterday and wouldn't come down much today, so it's hard to get a feel for it. This is all my personal opinion and is not intended...yadda, yadda, yadda. Happy trading. Porter PS: I'm really biting my tongue on a few issues...Fearless Fleming, Andrew Willis...but I'm going to wait until I'm sure I'm sufficiently composed to talk about it without going over the line. Heh, like I care. Maybe I'll retire and set up a fish farm or try to become a roadie for the Stones. Whatever. I took my older daughter to the premiere of a modern dance show last night and my younger one tobogganing tonight. That's what should be important, not wasting my pyschic energy on these clowns at the TSE. I really wish I could shrug it off.