Surprise, Surprise: Sketchy Options Trading Ahead Of Temple-Inland Buyout Offer

Bloomberg is reporting that an option trader's bullish bet on Temple-Inland TIN may have paid off to the tune of around 267% when International Paper IP made a $30.60 per share offer to purchase the company. On May 25, the trader bought 6,425 January $25 calls while selling the same number of January $30 calls for a paper gain of $1.54 million today when TIN shares rose 40.36% to $29.49. The trade accounted for the majority of volume in the stock's options on May 25, where option volume was 24 times the four-week average and 654 times as many calls traded as puts. “Any time we see an unusually large directional trade that immediately precedes a deal you have to wonder what drove the customer to pull the trigger,” said Henry Schwartz, president of Trade Alert LLC, a New York-based provider of options-market data and analytics. “It definitely worked out incredibly well.”