The Pre Market Tape

[admin]

And the upshot is simple. There is a limited supply of shares.

If the shorts, by shorting, buying puts and MM hedging this by shorting (or shorts excercising puts), they keep the price depressed. That works on two fronts:
- mechanically, in terms of supply and demand for shares
- value wise, as long as there is a considerable degree of uncertainty (or disagreement about) the value of the shares, they are getting away with it. In fact, shorting might help here as they can point to the depressed share price as some form of 'realism'

However, one cannot short unlimited amounts of shares for unlimited amount of time, the supply of shares is limited, and as soon as a deal removes a great deal of uncertainty about the value of the shares, a value gap (I'm assuming a positive one) opens up inducing more demand, and reducing the float further.

All the bag of tricks will ultimately be nullified once a sufficient amount of people willing and able to buy shares become convinced that IOC shares are worth substantially more than today's value assigned by the markets.

This is what happened with Tesla, FSLR, there is no reason to assume it won't happen to IOC..

[tarulestheday]

A HF contact tells me that the shorts have been selling DITM puts very recently. This is good news if true. This would also help explain the recent put to call ratio.

[jft310]

Looking at Friday puts and calls numbers , there were @ 2 puts per call. Many times we will sell twice as many puts as calls on IOC.
We want DITM strikes on both and puts and calls. Rarely do we buy out of the money calls. The Sept $105's looked good Friday though. Expensive.

[TxPm]

Looks like we are back above $90 in premarket...lets see how this day goes