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To: Mark Oliver who wrote (2484)	5/21/1998 9:11:00 AM
From: Kurthend	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3029

Mark, I saw the number of puts on the CBOE. I would like to know what is going on. I have to leave town again in a few minutes and will try to find out more info prior to leaving. Thanks for the reply. Kurt

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (2484)	5/21/1998 4:49:00 PM
From: Randy Tidd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3029

> Some companies even use puts to buy back shares. I heard this attributed to Intel and perhaps to Dell. How is this accomplished? Say a company writes puts. If the stock does well, they keep the premium income. If the stock does poorly, they need to cover the options, possibly by selling their own stock on the open market to raise the cash. How can they use puts to buy back shares? > On the other hand, it also means that someone has inside information > that the stock is in trouble and they expect it to go down. That's a bit of an assumption -- if someone is sure that the stock is going to go down, it doesn't necessarily mean they have inside information. With the rules for mutual funds changing these days, more and more of the big boys are getting into options to hedge risk, so this may just be someone with a lot of money to control hedging their risk. > These options won't make any money until the stock falls below 19. Sorry, one more question: how do you figure this? The options are at 20, so they will gain intrinsic value starting at 20. And because there is a secondary market for options, so these options will increase in value as the stock falls even if it doesn't fall to 20, and they can then be sold on the secondary market for a profit. Randy