Today's Unusual Options Activity (ABX, CAT, EXPE, JAVA, CS)

These are today’s unusual options trading patterns seen late in the afternoon.  We have provided links over to VSInvestor.com for more details on each situation:

• There have been two large options transactions in Barrick Gold Corporation (NYSE: ABX).
• Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) is seeing some longer-term bullish recovery bets that may have been profit taking on a prior trade.
• Someone is making a big pre-earnings options trade in Expedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE).
• Traders are placing bets both for and against a Sun Microsystems Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) buyout by Oracle Corp. (NASDAQ: ORCL) now that there are 3,000 more layoffs after the company keeps losing more and more money while the kids running the European Commission figure out that a money-losing company should not require a deep review of this sort for anti-competition.
• OptionsHawk.com notified us of nine-times options volume in Credit Suisse Group (NYSE: CS).

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JON C. OGG
OCTOBER 21, 2009