Liah, found this on another message board and thought you would be interested in reading this since you have been asking a lot of questions regarding options. It's over my head but hope you find this informative.
May $5 calls and puts
Yesterday, 2 large block options trades consisting of a 3,000 block and a 4,169 block of both the May $3 calls and $3 puts were executed. The stock was at $5.12 and $5.15, respectively, when these 2 trades were printed. This morning's open interest (OI) decreased by 6,949 in the $5 calls and by 7,129 in the $5 puts from Yesterday's OI. This decrease likely confirms that Yesterday's 2 large trades were a partial closure of the reverse conversion trades executed on April 8 (over 10,000 contracts that day).
Today's 3,000 contract block trade in both the $5 calls and $5 puts is probably the final closing piece of that April 8 reverse conversion trade. The stock was at $5.21 at the time.
To summarize, on April 8 when the stock was at $3.75 or so, the 10,000+ $5 puts were bought at $1.43 each and the $5 calls were sold at $0.08 each for a net $1.35 cost or $1,350,000 (assuming only 10,000 contracts). Yesterday's roughly 7,000 contract trades were sold to close at an average of $0.05 for the $5 puts and bought to close at $0.20 for the $5 calls for a net $0.15 cost. Today, the 3,000 contract trade was executed at $0.01 each for the $5 puts and $0.21 each for the $5 calls for a net of $0.20 cost. The total cost to close the 10,000 contracts from Yesterday to Today thus far is $165,000. In total, the "roundtrip" reverse conversion trades resulted in a possible loss of $1,515,000 which is essentially the same as the change in the stock price from $3.75 on April 8 to $5.12-$5.21 from Yesterday and Today (when the trades were printed).
It's nice to know that this was an "equal opportunity" loss whether shorting was done via stock or deep in the money puts (and sale of deep out of the money calls).
Thus far Today (and from all of Yesteday), there does not appear to be any reverse conversion trades, whether new or rollouts of prior ones.
