I agree that a 2600 option sweep should be normal for a medium company sized company like TEVA, especially given the fact that the overall transaction was less than 20k USD. However, probably the seller was an istitutional one, because the retail is not allowed to sell such an amount of options without providing huge warranties. On the other hand, I hope the buyer has some very good answers to give to SEC investigators, who will certainly open a case, pushed by the seller who probably already contacted them. I bet you the buyer was the judge of the trial!
i found the transaction on the tape and it looks like he sweeped the market. The market was .05x.7 29x500. clearly there was a lot more liquidity than posted.
So my question is: can retail trader actually sweep the market? I know if you have DMA, you can sweep equities, but with options I don’t know.
yes. If your broker allows it. There’s nothing that prevents you from putting your order on multiple exchanges.
K, please understand I'm not here to argue but to learn. Are you saying a retailer can send a sweep order and actually get filled for more contracts than displayed? Can you do it? What platform and what type of order? IB doesn't it seems. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/orders/sweep-to-fill.php
i can't do it... well, I can't do it intentionally. The broker decides if they should do it. However, if you have DMA then you should be able to do it. If i called the floor brokers at etrade, they could probably do it for me. But screen markets rarely represent the total volume. If you put a 7 cent bid, you will probably get filled much more than displayed and it might even feel instantaneous. This 2600 contracts was traded in lots of 10 and 20. This did trade over several exchanges but i wouldn't treat that as a reason it was an institutional trade. My guess is still that some one at the company or at the government did know and figured they could make a quick buck doing this.
Check out the Wolverine Trading Platform. You may have to subscribe to WEX's sweep algo to extend the functionality to WTP. @Robert Morse is very familiar with it.