Wow, it got ugly into the close.  The sh…

Wow, it got ugly into the close.  The shorts we’ve been scaling into save the daily profit and loss on the sheets, but we’re still down on the day.  I got the follow question after my last post about Riverbed:

Portfolio amount was great.  Don’t know what low $30’s mean and next few months mean!  Which one or ones?

The part of the previous post that he is confused about is this part:

I threw a tiny bit of capital at some Riverbed calls at strike prices in the low $30s that will expire over the next few months.

In other words, I bought a tiny bit of Riverbed calls with strike prices at $31 and $32 a share or so. Most stock options move in $2.50 increment strikes– say with strikes at $30 and $32.50 per share instead of $31 and $32 strikes as are available in Riverbed’s case.  And there aren’t usually options offered that will expire this month, next month and every month for the next few months.  But there is a lot of interest in Riverbed options apparently and thusly there are many more options with our options (so to speak).  But I would look at calls that expire in April, May and June and buy any of them with a strike price from about $30 to $35.  And again, be careful on such short-term trades, because if the stock just sticks around there, we can lose most of the capital invested on these options as the time value slips away as the date of expirations come closer.

Hope that clarifies everything, but if you’ve got more questions, let me know at cody@clwillard.com.

I also ended up shorting some LYV at the close today, as the company tries to pretend it has the financial flexibility to pick up some label assets on the cheap by buying part of Warner Music. I bet Live Nation wishes they had the hundreds of millions of dollars they paid out to Jay Z, Madonna and a handful of other artists — EACH — just a couple years ago.

See ya manana.