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Comment by alm0stn3v3r | Hacker News Reader

The almost never:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com#Acquisition_by_Y...

The much more fascinating part of that story is how Mark Cuban had the foresight to convert the all stock deal to an all cash deal (from his perspective) by engineering a sophisticated straddle hedge on the stock of the acquiring company. A scheme he created by collaborating with, you guessed it, Goldman Sachs.

Where can this fascinating part be read in more detail?

He alludes to it himself here: http://qr.ae/ROsdtD

And there are a bunch of technical explanations around, here's one: http://investmentxyz.blogspot.com/2006/05/cubans-collar-anat...

I remember seeing Cuban himself explain it in detail, that's probably out in the Google somewhere.

fascinating? fraud, you mean...

er, how so? as I see it, this is the case of options being used for their intended purpose, that is, to buy insurance.

Do you have a reference for this with more detail? Sounds interesting.

A few people have been asking how this worked:

He bought put options (his right to sell at a particular price) below the market price and sold call options (a counterparty's right to buy at a particular price) above the market price.

If you price them right you can use the money from selling the call options to buy the put options which makes it costless in net cash terms.

Market price was: $95 Put: $85 Call: $205

The reason the spread between the two is so high has to do with the time value of money and some other technical stuff, but those were the collar values.

Yahoo's stock went up to the $230s which was above the call option price, if the options had been exercised at that time, Mark Cuban would have lost out on the gain in price above the cap ($205). By the time they were exercised however, the stock was totally in the toilet and Mark Cuban was able to sell at $85.

It's not really an unusual deal but not many people were doing that in 1999, collar trades are much more common now because people remember the first crash.

That's about right. The other hedge he did prior to the collar hedge, where he shorted a fund containing Internet stocks but less than 5% Yahoo stock (to comply with the terms of his lock up period), was also quite creative.

i'm not familiar with options trading - can you confirm if this is the right intuition?

he basically sold an option on the high end to cap out his gains and used that money to buy an option on the low end to ensure a profit, which guaranteed that he ended up with stock that was guaranteed to be worth something?

i.e. he traded away an unlimited upside in order to gain a protected downside?

That's exactly right.

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