Has anyone considered buying deep in the money call options and early exercising them right away, as is allowed for American style options, as a way to take guaranteed delivery of the shares without encountering any FTDs? This was previously discussed in this WSB post. The call options ask price + the strike price of the current deep ITM calls are typically pretty close to the current market price. The tax implications of this strategy are also no different than buying the stock at the market price, as the option premium price is added to the strike price to form the cost basis (which is pretty close to the market price) for tax calculation purposes, as described in this article. IMHO, this may be a strategy that can be used to avoid the price suppression via naked shorting that many stocks are all experiencing, right now, especially heavily shorted stocks like BBBY? What do you all say?
Full Disclosure: I have a long position in BBBY.
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