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High Yield Income Investing
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Trader makes million dollar bet against silverTrader makes million dollar bet against silver Lisi Niesner/REUTERS Bloomberg News Apr 11, 2011 – 2:49 PM ET | Last Updated: Apr 11, 2011 2:53 PM ET A trader’s almost $1 million bet that an exchange-traded fund tracking silver will plunge 37 percent by July was today’s biggest single options trade on U.S. exchanges as futures on the metal reached a 31-year high. The 100,000 options to buy 100 shares each of the iShares Silver Trust at $25 by July changed hands at the ask price of about 10 cents and exceeded the open interest of 6,054 outstanding contracts before today, indicating that a buyer of a new bearish position initiated the transaction. The ETF rose to the highest intraday level since trading began five years ago, $40.33, before erasing gains. It fell 0.5 percent to $39.67 at 12:54 p.m. It hasn’t closed below $25 since November. “It’s definitely a massive downside bet on silver,” said Henry Schwartz, president of Trade Alert LLC, a New York-based provider of options-market data and analytics. “It’s so far out of the money that the buyer is probably just looking for a moderate pullback because a $3 retracement to where it was in March could double the position to $2 million.” Silver for May delivery in New York climbed as much as 3.4 percent to $41.975 an ounce, the highest level since January 1980, when futures reached a record $50.35. It last traded at $41.33. Silver, where half of global consumption is industrial, has been rising because it benefits from a rebounding global economy as well as demand for a haven, according to UBS AG. The trade accounted for almost two-fifths of the 257,312 silver ETF puts changing hands today, the most since November and triple the four-week average. About 1.5 puts traded for each call. |
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