By Christopher Faille, Reporter
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
WASHINGTON (HedgeWorld.com)âThe Securities and Exchange Commission issued an interpretive release intended to close a loophole in the so-called âuptick rule.â
The SEC said Nov. 17 that it had become concerned that the abusive use of âmarried putsâ allows some trading strategies that evade the application of that rule. A married put is a transaction in which an investor simultaneously buys a stock and a put option. The subsequent sale of the stock portion of this pair can be part of an effort to drive down the value of the stock, enhancing the value of the put. Until now, such actions have not been considered âshort salesâ and so an investor with such a strategy has not had to await an uptick.
The interpretive release listed some characteristics of the transactions that concern them:
The purchase of an at- or in-the-money non-standardized put option with a brief (one to five day) expiration period;
The contemporaneous purchase of an equivalent number of shares of the same security;
The contemporaneous sale of the stock acquired with a married put, in essence divorcing the stock position from the put option;
The repeated use of a facilitator that sells both the puts and the long position, often by selling the stock short to the counterparty;
The netting out of the transaction between the facilitator and the counterparty, often at the end of the day the married put was purchased; and
The payment of a standardized fee, not calculated in accordance with a standard options pricing model, to the facilitator for the transaction.
The SEC now takes the position that married puts with these characteristics are sham transactions that do not give rise to security ownership. Accordingly, investors who use such puts will have to wait for an uptick before selling the underlying security.
The SEC said that it recognizes that married puts are also used âas part of a legitimate hedging strategy, and we do not want to discourage their use for that purpose. Rather, we are calling attention to abusive married put transactions that have characteristics described above and are used in a scheme to create sham long positions in order to evade [SEC] rules.â
The uptick rule has long been controversial Previous HedgeWorld Story. Its opponents believe it interferes with the price-discovery function of markets, while its defenders believe it is a valuable protection against market manipulation and panic sales.