$10 Million Doesn’t Mean As Much As It Used To
Despite the market’s reaction
to the benign GDP numbers, there has been precious little to do down here on the
US option trading floors. Even Sun Micro
(
SUNW |
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PowerRating),
a stock that we are the options specialist in at the CBOE, has had a dearth of
volume ahead of tonight’s much ballyhooed conference call. Where we might
normally see 20,000 — 30,000 at-the-money calls trade, we’ve seen barely
1/10 of that figure, something that has traders scratching their
collective heads and wondering what they will do if the market stays this dull
for much longer.
Musings:
Chairman and founder Charles Wang of Computer
Associates
(
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PowerRating) has beaten back an attempt by Texas billionaire
Sam Wyly to throw Wang and several board members out of CA. As of this writing,
nearly 80% of the votes had been counted, and barring some late news from Florida
(just kidding), it seems Mr. Wang can continue to run CA as he sees fit.
That of course, is not the way Mr. Wyly wanted it, as his numerous full-page ads
in the world’s financial papers would attest. Apparently, Wyly’s sale of his
software company to Wang and CA for just a tad under $4 billion left the
billionaire with both time and money on his hands, and he thought he (or a team
of his choosing) could do a better job running the mainframe computer software
company than Mr. Wang. While I applaud Mr. Wyly for pushing his cause, I think I
could have found a better home for the $10 million he spent on ads and mailings
to get a forum for his issues with Mr. Wang and CA.