Friday, November 13, 2009

A Bullish Bet on Clean Energy Fuels: Is Nancy Pelosi a Better Derivatives Trader than Hillary Clinton? (CLNE)

No.
If you recall, the Secretary of State ran a grand to $100,000 in a ten month period, October 1978 to July 1979. Newsweek had the best quote: "This is like buying ice skates one day and entering the Olympics a day later," 'says Mark Powers, editor of the Journal of Futures Markets. "She took some extraordinary risks."

The Speaker on the other hand bought her stake in CLNE on the IPO at $12.00, in May 2007.
The stock traded up twenty cents yesterday but was recently at $11.96, down twelve cents on the day and four pennies below the IPO price.
Oh well, maybe this is her trade, from Schaeffer's Research (Nov. 10):

Put players pummeled Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (CLNE: chart, options) on Monday, after the firm reported a wider-than-anticipated loss in the third quarter. During the course of the session, the security saw roughly 4,350 puts cross the tape – almost six times the number of CLNE calls traded, and more than 10 times the stock's average daily volume of fewer than 450 puts.

However, digging deeper into the data reveals that most of the activity consisted of fresh bullish positions on CLNE. The stock's December 12.50 put saw 3,152 contracts traded on open interest of about 900 contracts, suggesting a healthy portion of the volume was attributable to new positions. However, 99% of the puts changed hands at the bid price, indicating they were sold.

By writing the December 12.50 put, the seller is implying that he or she expects the shares of CLNE to finish at or above the $12.50 level by December options expiration. In this instance, the puts would expire worthless, allowing the put writer to pocket the initial premium received from the sale....MORE