Everyone expects it to go up to 100. There was strong investor sentiment and pressure to push it up all morning. Only, since everyone expects it there were more than 2x the number of calls sold as puts. Therefore, the HFT market makers with the large share of the market just wait until the big money runs out in the morning and then drops the price a dollar on negligible volume by flashing out quotes on one side of the book. Up, 100k shares traded 2 cents, up 250k shares traded 3 cents, up 50k shares traded 1 cent, down 20 cents 10k shares traded. Oh look, whoever sold those options just saved a couple million dollars. What a coincidence (not)
I have a suggestion for you. Every time you think about BUYING something, SELL it instead. And the same in reverse as well. Then you won't be complaining about it day and night....
Those who bought the options could've been doing any number of strategies. It's not certain they lost money, and it's not certain the sellers made money. "Tape-reading" is pretty much pointless for this exact reason. Hell I have 100s of options on and IDGAF what the UL on any of them does because I'm hedged and look at portfolio-wide risks.
(a) Are you saying that option sellers did not hedge the delta at the trade-time? (b) Also, if "they" are trying to paint the tape in favor of the sellers, why not just drop the implied vols and not even bother manipulating the stock price? (c) if you truly found this awesome market manipulation pattern, why not front-run it - observe the inside markets in options on your favorite stock, when MMs get taken offer-side in large size, sell the opposite delta. You can't lose, right?
Seriously? If there are 10000 calls out and 5000 puts then someone is losing if the stock goes down. Forex, the price of the option is less important than the issue of when they were sold. Investor sentiment drove up AAPL's price, Market Makers caused it to fall back down. They would rather lose a little money than a huge amount. And abs (douchiest name ever btw) the point is to bring attention to the price fixing not just to make money. How can I front run millions of dollars per minute trading at the nanosecond level...
Once again - option market makers hedge their delta exposure at the time of the trade. All they are left with is convexity exposure (theta/gamma, vega etc). So, in this case, the MM sells a call and instantaneously buys delta against it. Once that happends, it is in his best interest that stock does not move at all. Manipulating the stock down AFTER they bought the delta actually creates a loss. It is not a difficult concept, even for grade school.
What is not a difficult concept is the fact that someone has to take the other side of the position for you to hedge. Who? There are more calls outstanding than puts by a factor of 2 on this stock. They may hedge somewhat to stop a catastrophic loss, but they are exposed. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they know they have control of the stock price...