Bear raid on Bears Stearns

A very fascinating story in Bloomberg about how someone made an 1.7 million option bet on Bears going down 50% plus in a week and made 270 million on the trade.

Bringing Down Bear Began as $1.7 Million of Unsuspected Options
On March 11, the day the Federal Reserve attempted to shore up confidence in the credit markets with a $200 billion lending program that for the first time monetized Wall Street's devalued collateral, somebody else decided Bear Stearns Cos. was going to collapse.

In a gambit with such low odds of success that traders question its legitimacy, someone wagered $1.7 million that Bear Stearns shares would suffer an unprecedented decline within days. Options specialists are convinced that the buyer, or buyers, made a concerted effort to drive the fifth-biggest U.S. securities firm out of business and, in the process, reap a profit of more than $270 million.

Whoever placed the bet used so-called put options that gave purchasers the right to sell 5.7 million Bear Stearns shares for $30 each and 165,000 shares for $25 apiece just nine days later, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That was less than half the $62.97 closing price in New York Stock Exchange composite trading on March 11. The buyers were confident the stock would crash.

``Even if I were the most bearish man on earth, I can't imagine buying puts 50 percent below the price with just over a week to expiration,'' said Thomas Haugh, general partner of Chicago-based options trading firm PTI Securities & Futures LP. ``It's not even on the page of rational behavior, unless you know something.''

The 5.7 million puts that traded March 11 at the $30 strike price and the 1,649 that traded at $25 were collectively worth about $1.7 million, Bloomberg data show. Each put is equal to 100 shares of stock.

`Lottery Ticket'

``That trade amounted to buying a lottery ticket,'' said Michael McCarty, chief options and equity strategist at New York- based brokerage Meridian Equity Partners Inc. ``Would you buy $1.7 million worth of lottery tickets just because you could? No. Neither would a hedge fund manager.''