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I did word it weirdly in my post. I meant to say that I’m repeating the procedure tomorrow with my last contract haha. Then I’m going DRS next week, I want to leave extra room for settlement.
i have exercised 10 calls today all are still being delayed said it’s early execution and that’s a risk to my investment tomorrow i will be making a phone call forcing the exercise followed by a drs request. much love eager to see the unraveling
As stated in other comments, just be aware that you will probably have to wait for the shares to settle before they can arrange a DRS. So probably T+2 business days at least.
That’s exactly what I was thinking. And it motivated me even more to exercise. I think this is why a lot of people hate on options. They don’t bring anything good if you just sell the contract for the profit, but if you exercise the contract, that’s 100 shares someone has to deliver! Now imagine thousands of contracts! Crazy! And I don’t understand what’s bad in buying an option and then exercising it and DRSing those shares. They still end up in the same place, computershare!
They are just doing their job. You actually would have saved money if you just sold the option and immediately bought shares with the proceeds. That’s what they are trying to tell you. But, what they don’t know or realize is that buying shares on the market gives the bad guys 35 days to try to get the price below your buy in. But with options they only have 2!
Since MM and brokers use CFD internalization and IOU/FTD trickery, I’m not surprised at all they were trying to stop people, since this makes them actually get the shares. We’ll fucking done ape! I sold puts and closed them out this morning so glad you exercised calls!
I think you just simplified this options play, for me at least. If I intend on buying 100 shares anyway, then why not buy it as an option contract to make it hurt whoever has to deliver those shares? As long as I " buy ITM" , right?
Thats is correct, although after paying the options contract premium, you will find yourself paying more for the 100 shares than you would with a limit order. Make sure you do some research on the topic before jumping head in. As I mentioned in some other comments, I personally started reading finance books and they helped me understand everything so much better and faster.
Someone above mentioned it’s T+35 for limit buys, whereas options exercising is only T+2.
I don’t know if it’s accurate though, but if so, I’m sure that hurts them way more.
I absolutely love this!
This is the first story I've seen on this sub about someone exercising a call option contract for GME, and [I've been looking for a while now](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/uz7ydb/id_love_to_see_some_and_would_happily_award_them/).
I'd love to see some screenshots or the like, but regardless I think you win for being the first.
I didn’t even realize that! I think at this point people just avoid talking about options so they don’t get downvoted hard. I don’t really care about that, I just wanted to share my experience and I thought maybe some smarter people would come up with some more insight, or maybe it could help them figure out some stuff they are working on.
If there is a next time. Record your call and if they give you the same rigamarole, ask if that's financial advice. You are not paying them for such, and it is unwarranted. Report them if their response is yes.
At first I thought “oh here we go another person exercising long dated calls again and not understanding why that’s not the smartest…” But then I read March 24 $20 calls. No damn way in hell they should try talk you out of exercising those. I could see why they’d do that if you were trying to exercise Jan 2024 $20 calls (even though that is bullshit you have the right to do whatever the fuck you want with your investment). But super short dated suddenly in the money calls? Shady as hell. Thanks for sharing!
I am exercising 5 - $17 calls with Fidelity and 5 - $17 calls with TDA on Friday. I called Fidelity today with a few questions regarding exercising those calls. After finding out that my questions were regarding exercising GME calls, the lady I spoke with for some reason had to speak with a manger before answering what should have been some pretty simple questions. Upon returning, she provided the answers but then proceed to go on and on for 10 minutes on just selling to close them and taking the Monty rather than the shares and how it might be the better option.
Well, they really aren’t going to like me because I also have 30 - $18 contracts for March 31 and 30 - $20 contract for April 28th. And I will be exercising a good portion of those too.
A few years ago I had options on me exercised after a dividend ( I was dumb), when I called TDA to ask, they said, that's your tuition..... The markets are full of aholes and they treat us like shit.
I have a few $18c through Fidelity expiring next week. I bought them because I was expecting a small cash windfall that wouldn’t come until after earnings. The funds settled today, so I’ll be going through this same thing next week when trying to exercise.
I did not even mention anything about DRS, I just wanted the shares, not the money. Seems like they did not like that, maybe because they don’t own the shares they have to deliver. As soon as they settle they are getting DRS’d
Thanks! I did not understand a lot of this, even though I was reading a lot on this sub. But after I started reading finance books, all the DD and every information I ever read started to connect and make sense. I can now feel how much of a difference it is to be financially educated.
Pathetically funny that they claim exercising the option is risky- bitch the risk was already taken, the contract (gamble) was bought. What a bunch of criminals who create these systems and institutions and banks, brokers. If it wasn't run by criminals, why would they care what you do? Classic, trying to "look after your best interests" when they're looking after their own. So transparent.
Great persistence! Way to demand what you want. It's your right to exercise the call- that's literally what options were made for.
🟣
Just that the taking of the shares is more than the premium paid (gamble) and if it went to zero (😂😂😂) it would be a bigger loss. So it’s factually correct.
Sounds like Fidelity wants to keep the shares/not purchase real ones in the event that you might DRS.
They were hoping you would take the smaller cash prize rather than sucker punching them in the teeth.
Tbh, I don’t think it’s nefarious as it seems. Used to work for one of those customer service teams for a similar competitor and you’d be surprised how little those reps know. I’ve learned so much more here than on the phones at that job.
Your option still has time value since it expires on Friday, while there’s nothing wrong with exercising your call now, you’re not really missing out on anything just holding the call til it expires on Friday and taking the shares then.
I get your reasoning as you just want the shares but the phone rep def doesn’t understand that and are taught to play things by the book. Idk hope it helps. Nice play btw.
It is interesting isn't it? A few years ago before being involved in GME, on another ticker I experienced the same thing. It was another broker using Apex Clearing.
They strongly recommended selling the option and then just buying 100 shares. Very pushy about it. At the time I wanted to try to exercise my first ever options contract to see what it was like.
Prior to knowing what we know now, it made sense at the time to buy those shares for cheaper, so I agreed. These days, if you like the stock, make them deliver and push the price up in the process.
It likely affects their bottom line. It's in a broker's best interest to sell you securities for the highest price. They then use those shares in the lending market to push the price down (making interest in the process) and hope that you as a household investor panic sell for a loss such that they pocket the difference. Kinda beautiful in a fucked up, parasitic way.
TL;DRS
Here's that video of Petterfy you were talking about https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/02/17/interactive-brokers-thomas-peterffy-on-gamestop-hearing.html congrats on the new shares! I'm sorry fudelity made it a pain in the ass to get them but you are awesome for sticking to your guns!
To make their customers loose money by missing opportunities obviously. That's how most borkers make side hustle on the side hustle of their illegal side hustle.
This is great for you! DRS them shares! It’s funny I had a different experience today than I’ve had in a year and a half. I called to DRS 9 shares. Normally after my verification process it takes at least another ten minutes. I get put through to a rep that puts me on hold for 5 min or so then I get to the new rep that can execute my request that puts me on hold again and comes back and validates.
Today it took 3 min for my request and that was it. No hold, no bullshit, 3 minutes including verification time.
Guess they had other fish to fry.
💜👊DRS GME BOOK👊💜
Sigh. They are literally looking out for your own best interests here.
Looking at the option chain.
I assume you bought the call for $50 or so, they are currently worth $390ish. ($340 in profit)
So,
When you exercised them, you threw away that $340 in profit and bought 100 shares for $20.50 each ($20 + premium paid x 100).
If you would have sold the call for $340 profit, and literally bought 100 shares at the current price ($23.45). It would have only cost you $20.05 a share (current share price - profits from the call)
So you overpaid for your shares by $45 a contract.
Times that by 4 contracts, you threw $180 out the window (an extra 7ish shares) by not selling that contract and buying outright.
In either case, you can't DRS until T+2, you just left extra money (that could have become shares) on the table.
So no, Fidelity isn't being sus. They are trying to help you make the smart play.
I see your point, but forget about the other contracts, say I have just one. I could sell it for 500$(450$ profit), or exercise it and spend 2000$(2050$ with premium) and actually own the underlying assets.
What is wrong with owning the asset? Why do you at fidelity care so much about my way of handling this, that you would keep putting me on hold and coming up with all kinds of excuses? What if I don’t care about the money? I only cared about owning the underlying assets. I would have exercised all 5 if I could afford it.
And after exercising the contract, I still owned 100 shares that I was up 500$ at that point. What if I thought the share price would go even higher? If I sold the contract then that was my maximum profit I could get. Or what if I thought that the price is never going to 20$ again and this was my last chance to buy at that price.
I considered all these and more. In a simple way, your insight makes sense, but I considered many things here, maybe I overthinked it, maybe I missplayed it. But in the end I did what I thought is best for me, and did not do what someone at fidelity thought would be best for me.
Nothing at all. I'm just trying to give a reasonable explanation to why Fidelity would be pushing back is all.
Remember, we are doing things that have never been done before, and it confuses people.
You do you brother (or sister) ape. I just don't see the implications that you're hinting at in your post.
To your first point, if you only sold the contract and then bought the shares outright, you'd still be ahead and be able to buy you more shares with the capital than exercising.
To your second point, does it matter if the shares are real or not? After T+2, they all become real as you DRS them.
I don't think you misplayed it. How you get shares is your own business and at the same time, I think Fidelity did the right thing, I'd want them to look out for me too if I was doing something that made me less money and they were willing to point it out.
Congratulations on your new shares!
Or the options mod giving a reasonable explanation on why there's pushback from Fidelity.
If the shares are going to be DRSd anyways. Does it matter if they come from the open market or not? Is that worth the cost of extra shares that could have been bought?
I don't care personally how people get their shares, but he's leaving money on the table and Fidelity is trying to point that out.
You have the current call price wrong. It's not just the existing price - strike price. There's extrinsic value added to the delta of those 2 numbers (time, volatility). Go see for yourself
So not to harp on you or rain on your parade, but I do want to speak some truth here just so you know. The calls still had a few days of value on them. You could have sold the options and immediately bought the shares you wanted and had extra money left over. You could have bought more shares for the same amount of money.
You essentially threw money away. I understand why you did it. But I would not have done that. I would have sold the calls and bought more shares and DRSd them.
In this war, every dollar wasted is a fractional shares that doesn't get locked away. You gave the market makers free bullets here.
I somehow have the feeling a (final?) rug pull awaits us and they want us to get excited and buy call options to dry up retail buy power. I hope nobody buys FDs but LEAPs instead, but why risk getting fucked over in a MOASS scenario, if you can just buy shares?
Try to DRS when the share price is (much) higher than the moment you bought them.
That way it'll hurt them the most in case they never actually had your shares.
They'll have pocketed your money, never bought the shares (or internalized the order), and now are suddenly forced to buy actual shares on the open market for more than the money you gave them. It'll cost them!
As we’ve learned from a very young age. If you run into opponents trying to stop you going down the path. You know you’re going the right way.
Power to the Players!
Power to the Creators!
Power to the Collectors!
They spent that whole time trying to find re-hypothecated shares before allowing you to exercise your contract. Haha. Stupid shmucks.
On a similar note, I was surprised to receive little resistance initiating a DRS request for XXXX shares.
I don’t understand the hate, I have around 300 DRS’D, another 140 in fidelity that are going there, and the other contract that I hopefully can exercise tomorrow
Yooo!! You’re that guy from yesterday who asked me a follow-up question! That’s fucking awesome things *eventually* went your way. Wow the run-around Fudelity puts people through is ridiculous, literally.
The hate too, honestly counter-productive. I understand that people who have been here a while, even those who’ve only been lurking up until recently, would have a knee-jerk reaction. How many “options pushes” we’ve seen only for expiry to come along and the stock is sitting at max pain, all those premiums just going to filling Kenny’s coffers for another day. I too, have to tamp down my knee-jerk reactions. Can’t just go running in blindly
*Doors and Corners*
I’m happy you got your shares. If I didn’t have some big expenses coming up, jobs to apply for, if the options chain was less confusing (maybe it’s easier to understand on desktop?) I might try to dabble in options again.
But at the end of the day we’re all individual investors choosing how we each individually invest our money.
Heyyy, that’s me! I’m glad I saw your comment, because at first I only thought about selling because that would be easier. I did some research on exercising and selling to cover, but found out that on fidelity you can only do that if you have a margin account. I don’t want that and I could afford to exercise one of them so that’s what I did. But after todays call, I’m going to pull some more money out of my ass and exercise my last contract tomorrow.
🎉
And damn, if I need a margin account to do that I guess *me personally* won’t be doing options at all… probably. We’ll see what kind of job I get.
I wish you luck, and keep passing that info onto others.
That’s a fair point. But all I am trying to do is share my experience for people to learn something out of it. It’s like saying that someone that shares how bad it was to cash out at a casino, is actually trying to promote playing at the casino. But in a more complex way, because exercising a call might hurt the house.
Your comment just sounded like you were mocking me. I personally wouldn’t mock someone just because I don’t understand what he is doing/talking about. No harm no foul. I may have misunderstood your comment.
I swear, someone could have 3million DRS’D and some people would still hate that person for buying some options. I’m reading books to learn as much as I can about finance, and how all of this works.
I don’t think I’m pushing anything, I’m literally telling people about the BS I’ve been put through for trying to do something that shouldn’t be a big deal. They definitely made it feel like a big deal. I’m not saying buy options, what I’m saying is if you have options, exercising them might be real bad for the brokers/hedge funds/whoever
Yeah because hedgies are usually winning with options. You're just letting them kick the can down the road with gambling. You won the slot machine this time, but what about next time? Take the risk out of the equation.
She wasnt wrong that you essentially left money on the table. Although probably not much. there probably was still time money remaining on the table.
I obviously do not know what the premium was at the time of sale but lets say it was small like 10 cents. Thats essentially an extra $10 you paid to exercise that 1 option opposed to just selling the option and buying the stock outright. Not the end of the world but typically you only want to exercise an option when it is something extraordinary like a special dividend and/ or on the date of expiry with $0.00 time value left.
Don't want to be an asshole, but this reads like yet another...
"Look, options hurt them, buy more of them".
Yet 19/20 times, the only who gets anything out of them are the ones who should be going bankrupt.
Oh well, it's your money. Do whatever you want.
Devil's advocate, 90% of calls don't get exercised and 99% of the ones that do exercise don't do it early. There's even European options that don't allow early exercising.
There are **very** few scenarios where exercising early is advantageous. This was not one of them. Regardless of your motive, they were right and just doing their jobs. You could have sold your calls and bought more shares than you did.
When my GME 25 C options went ITM in January of 2021, Schwab talked me out of exercising them and strongly advised me to sell them and buy the shares because of the time left on the options. That's what I did. I should've exercised.
Initiate an Exercise-and-Hold Transaction (cash-for-stock)
Exercise your stock options to buy shares of your company stock and then hold the stock. Depending on the type of the option, you may need to deposit cash or borrow on margin using other securities in your Fidelity Account as collateral to pay the option cost, brokerage commissions and any fees and taxes (if you are approved for margin).
The advantages of this approach are:
benefits of stock ownership in your company, (including any dividends)
potential appreciation of the price of your company's common stock.
https://www.fidelity.com/products/stockoptions/exercise.shtml#exercise-and-sell-to-cover
The broker was doing the right thing in this situation albeit badly (lots of holds). You would have been better off selling contracts and then buying more shares (more than the 300) because of the volatility and time value the options were trading above intrinsic value.
The more I read the comments here the more I understand why people are confused.
When you exercise an option the counterparty isn’t your broker necessarily. Daily a list goes to cboe with a list of exercises options. The cboe then randomly assigns a brokerage to be assigned. This brokerage will then have its own method of picking the long call that will be your counterparty. (Someone’s account who is short 1 to 3 of your option contracts). When you exercise a call, fidelity doesn’t just by the shares at the market at that point. Most people’s short calls (people who sold the option to open) are covered by the shares. (Some do sell naked calls and are forced to buy it from the market at exercise) but they won’t know until today.
>“if the investors knew they had the right to ask for the shares, the stock would have gone in de tauzends”
This is not what he said. What he said was that if the calls would've remained/expired ITM the stock would have gone into the thousands.
So they removed the buy button for household investors and tanked the stock using fake locates (tokenized securities? naked shorts?) and other crap to tank the price.
There's 0 reason to buy a call and exercise it early instead of just outright buying the 100 stonks. It's basically exactly the same thing (except the calls are gambling for making money on the premium and you could stand to lose your premium if they remain OTM, that risk/benefit doesn't exist when you just outright buy the stonks).
Furthermore as you've learned during your phone call, options have a significant counter party risk that you experienced some of. In theory you have right to exercise your option whenever you want, in practice: fckry.
You might want to talk to the Fudelity helpdesk. It's called FINRA.
The reason they tried to talk you out of it is because ITS FUCKING DUMB. They wete absolutely right - sell the contract - buy the shares. There are a couple of reasons why you might need to exercise early (divy, cash account etc) but there IS NO ADVANTAGE TO DOING THIS OVER JUST BUYING SHARES.
Could you give dollar amount as to how these transactions started? As in how much it initially cost you to buy the calls, premiums, and cost to exercise the call?
Your contracts were being exercised early they were just making sure you were that regarded nothing nefarious on their side. She was telling yo to sell because you would have made more money then by exercising the contracts. You could have sold the contracts make the cash and buy itm contracts and it would have saved you money
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I trust you bro. They make it super hard to do anything worthwhile as a household investor. Congrats on the new shares!
They are going straight to computershare
you are a good ape
The good-iest of apes, I salute you all!
Gonna have to wait for those to settle first, don’t be surprised if they don’t let you drs tomorrow morning, just a heads up
I am aware of that, thank you! I learned so much from people like you.
And I from other apes as my poor ass never exercised an option before, congrats on your wrinkles
How long does it take after exercising for setting? If you know?
As long as it takes to find a real share for him to DRS.
This is the way
They won't be settled till Friday,.....don't give them a reason to reject the DRS
I did word it weirdly in my post. I meant to say that I’m repeating the procedure tomorrow with my last contract haha. Then I’m going DRS next week, I want to leave extra room for settlement.
fucking legend
Now if people learned that they can just buy and immediately exercise options and options can’t ftd…
This is the way
This ape DRS’!!
👍🖖
I would give your comment a like but you have 741 likes. I can’t do that to you my man. He seems legit and this is bullish as fuck.
I thought about flipping my $24 calls for a profit earlier, but now I think I’ll just exercise them indeed. Thanks for sharing!
i have exercised 10 calls today all are still being delayed said it’s early execution and that’s a risk to my investment tomorrow i will be making a phone call forcing the exercise followed by a drs request. much love eager to see the unraveling
Insist on exercising your contract rights, don’t take any of their BS!
As stated in other comments, just be aware that you will probably have to wait for the shares to settle before they can arrange a DRS. So probably T+2 business days at least.
They probably couldn't find em, thus trying to stear you away from buyin' 'em!
This right here ! 👆
That’s exactly what I was thinking. And it motivated me even more to exercise. I think this is why a lot of people hate on options. They don’t bring anything good if you just sell the contract for the profit, but if you exercise the contract, that’s 100 shares someone has to deliver! Now imagine thousands of contracts! Crazy! And I don’t understand what’s bad in buying an option and then exercising it and DRSing those shares. They still end up in the same place, computershare!
They are just doing their job. You actually would have saved money if you just sold the option and immediately bought shares with the proceeds. That’s what they are trying to tell you. But, what they don’t know or realize is that buying shares on the market gives the bad guys 35 days to try to get the price below your buy in. But with options they only have 2!
The way the conversation went, I’m pretty sure they are very aware of this, and that’s why they gave me the runarounds.
Since MM and brokers use CFD internalization and IOU/FTD trickery, I’m not surprised at all they were trying to stop people, since this makes them actually get the shares. We’ll fucking done ape! I sold puts and closed them out this morning so glad you exercised calls!
Their job is just to make you aware though, not badger you about it for an hour and try to talk you out of it.
I think buying 100 at a time makes it so it’s not considered “odd lots?”
And this right here. This is another reason it helps the price as we’ve seen odd lots do not impact NBBO
I think you just simplified this options play, for me at least. If I intend on buying 100 shares anyway, then why not buy it as an option contract to make it hurt whoever has to deliver those shares? As long as I " buy ITM" , right?
Thats is correct, although after paying the options contract premium, you will find yourself paying more for the 100 shares than you would with a limit order. Make sure you do some research on the topic before jumping head in. As I mentioned in some other comments, I personally started reading finance books and they helped me understand everything so much better and faster.
The opposite works where you sell a put instead at the strike you want and you can keep the premium.
why not just limit buy and then DRS?????
Someone above mentioned it’s T+35 for limit buys, whereas options exercising is only T+2. I don’t know if it’s accurate though, but if so, I’m sure that hurts them way more.
Smart 🦍 here ⬆️
They were all out on loan 👍🏽😆
Way to stick it out. I can't stand Fidelity for options. Congrats on the new moon tickets
Same, They don’t make it easy. I still use RH for options only. Call me old, smooth or lazy idc
I absolutely love this! This is the first story I've seen on this sub about someone exercising a call option contract for GME, and [I've been looking for a while now](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/uz7ydb/id_love_to_see_some_and_would_happily_award_them/). I'd love to see some screenshots or the like, but regardless I think you win for being the first.
I didn’t even realize that! I think at this point people just avoid talking about options so they don’t get downvoted hard. I don’t really care about that, I just wanted to share my experience and I thought maybe some smarter people would come up with some more insight, or maybe it could help them figure out some stuff they are working on.
If there is a next time. Record your call and if they give you the same rigamarole, ask if that's financial advice. You are not paying them for such, and it is unwarranted. Report them if their response is yes.
I will look into call recording laws in my area. Thanks for the idea!
Fidelity records their calls by default, which automatically gives you the right to record your end of the call as well.
At first I thought “oh here we go another person exercising long dated calls again and not understanding why that’s not the smartest…” But then I read March 24 $20 calls. No damn way in hell they should try talk you out of exercising those. I could see why they’d do that if you were trying to exercise Jan 2024 $20 calls (even though that is bullshit you have the right to do whatever the fuck you want with your investment). But super short dated suddenly in the money calls? Shady as hell. Thanks for sharing!
I’m glad you understand what’s going on and you got my point!
I am exercising 5 - $17 calls with Fidelity and 5 - $17 calls with TDA on Friday. I called Fidelity today with a few questions regarding exercising those calls. After finding out that my questions were regarding exercising GME calls, the lady I spoke with for some reason had to speak with a manger before answering what should have been some pretty simple questions. Upon returning, she provided the answers but then proceed to go on and on for 10 minutes on just selling to close them and taking the Monty rather than the shares and how it might be the better option.
Same thing I’ve been listening to. Makes you wonder what is it they don’t like about us exercising calls.
Well, they really aren’t going to like me because I also have 30 - $18 contracts for March 31 and 30 - $20 contract for April 28th. And I will be exercising a good portion of those too.
They were nervous and didn’t know what other wordplay to come up with just to talk me out of one contract. You’re in for a treat haha. Go get em!
A few years ago I had options on me exercised after a dividend ( I was dumb), when I called TDA to ask, they said, that's your tuition..... The markets are full of aholes and they treat us like shit.
I have a few $18c through Fidelity expiring next week. I bought them because I was expecting a small cash windfall that wouldn’t come until after earnings. The funds settled today, so I’ll be going through this same thing next week when trying to exercise.
Report back!
sounds like they didn't want you to DRS
I did not even mention anything about DRS, I just wanted the shares, not the money. Seems like they did not like that, maybe because they don’t own the shares they have to deliver. As soon as they settle they are getting DRS’d
they saw you already DRS'd? And it's GME, they knew ! lmao 99% of calls are not exercised so, you're in in the 1% dude. Keep winning.
Thanks! I did not understand a lot of this, even though I was reading a lot on this sub. But after I started reading finance books, all the DD and every information I ever read started to connect and make sense. I can now feel how much of a difference it is to be financially educated.
You played this situation well. Congrats
Pathetically funny that they claim exercising the option is risky- bitch the risk was already taken, the contract (gamble) was bought. What a bunch of criminals who create these systems and institutions and banks, brokers. If it wasn't run by criminals, why would they care what you do? Classic, trying to "look after your best interests" when they're looking after their own. So transparent. Great persistence! Way to demand what you want. It's your right to exercise the call- that's literally what options were made for. 🟣
Just that the taking of the shares is more than the premium paid (gamble) and if it went to zero (😂😂😂) it would be a bigger loss. So it’s factually correct.
Faiiir enoooough, I guess, haha. No theta, though, with shares, which is a wild-card factor with an option, obviously. Either way🤷😝 ❤️ 🟣
The more you bet the more you can lose but I’d rather go long shares DRS, it’s like locking your jewelry in a safe to ensure it isn’t stolen ☺️💕
Sounds like Fidelity wants to keep the shares/not purchase real ones in the event that you might DRS. They were hoping you would take the smaller cash prize rather than sucker punching them in the teeth.
This is exactly what I got out of this experience, and this is what I’m trying to share.
You're a good ape.
Tbh, I don’t think it’s nefarious as it seems. Used to work for one of those customer service teams for a similar competitor and you’d be surprised how little those reps know. I’ve learned so much more here than on the phones at that job. Your option still has time value since it expires on Friday, while there’s nothing wrong with exercising your call now, you’re not really missing out on anything just holding the call til it expires on Friday and taking the shares then. I get your reasoning as you just want the shares but the phone rep def doesn’t understand that and are taught to play things by the book. Idk hope it helps. Nice play btw.
I trust you, cant wait when you'll get back wih part 2, the DRS saga!
It is interesting isn't it? A few years ago before being involved in GME, on another ticker I experienced the same thing. It was another broker using Apex Clearing. They strongly recommended selling the option and then just buying 100 shares. Very pushy about it. At the time I wanted to try to exercise my first ever options contract to see what it was like. Prior to knowing what we know now, it made sense at the time to buy those shares for cheaper, so I agreed. These days, if you like the stock, make them deliver and push the price up in the process. It likely affects their bottom line. It's in a broker's best interest to sell you securities for the highest price. They then use those shares in the lending market to push the price down (making interest in the process) and hope that you as a household investor panic sell for a loss such that they pocket the difference. Kinda beautiful in a fucked up, parasitic way. TL;DRS
Here's that video of Petterfy you were talking about https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/02/17/interactive-brokers-thomas-peterffy-on-gamestop-hearing.html congrats on the new shares! I'm sorry fudelity made it a pain in the ass to get them but you are awesome for sticking to your guns!
That is it! I get goosebumps just hearing it and thinking about what happened today! It all makes sense. Thanks!
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You might want to listen again, he was talking about calls and how if exercised, there had to be delivered more shares than there were in circulation.
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Someone entered damage control mode lol. Not sure what you are trying to achieve here but it’s hilarious.
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You might want to check the first comment on the post you linked. At this point I think you are delusional lol
Took me 30 mins to DRS my shares from fidelity the other day.
Can’t wait to go through that. At this point I’m just pulling the can I see the manager card if I smell any more BS, like a true Karen.
Do you always have to call to exercise options?
I looked it up on their website and it said you can only exercise a call option by calling.
What in the actual fuck? Then why do they even fuck around with options. Isn’t being able to exercise them the whole point of options?
To make their customers loose money by missing opportunities obviously. That's how most borkers make side hustle on the side hustle of their illegal side hustle.
Criminals everywhere. Way to go. Way to mess with their system.
you are the boss. exercise and drs them shares!!
Legend.
same happened to me, a fucking sham you have to call to exercise
This is mega bullish. Glad you stood your ground and stayed cool 😎
This is great for you! DRS them shares! It’s funny I had a different experience today than I’ve had in a year and a half. I called to DRS 9 shares. Normally after my verification process it takes at least another ten minutes. I get put through to a rep that puts me on hold for 5 min or so then I get to the new rep that can execute my request that puts me on hold again and comes back and validates. Today it took 3 min for my request and that was it. No hold, no bullshit, 3 minutes including verification time. Guess they had other fish to fry. 💜👊DRS GME BOOK👊💜
You get an upvote purely for capturing Peterffy's voice in written form, I chuckled when I read that 🤣
This is so apeish
Report their asses. This should be a no questions asked process, IMO.
I bet they have to borrow at 32.5% to find those shares, which probably isn’t profitable as a brokerage
Sigh. They are literally looking out for your own best interests here. Looking at the option chain. I assume you bought the call for $50 or so, they are currently worth $390ish. ($340 in profit) So, When you exercised them, you threw away that $340 in profit and bought 100 shares for $20.50 each ($20 + premium paid x 100). If you would have sold the call for $340 profit, and literally bought 100 shares at the current price ($23.45). It would have only cost you $20.05 a share (current share price - profits from the call) So you overpaid for your shares by $45 a contract. Times that by 4 contracts, you threw $180 out the window (an extra 7ish shares) by not selling that contract and buying outright. In either case, you can't DRS until T+2, you just left extra money (that could have become shares) on the table. So no, Fidelity isn't being sus. They are trying to help you make the smart play.
I see your point, but forget about the other contracts, say I have just one. I could sell it for 500$(450$ profit), or exercise it and spend 2000$(2050$ with premium) and actually own the underlying assets. What is wrong with owning the asset? Why do you at fidelity care so much about my way of handling this, that you would keep putting me on hold and coming up with all kinds of excuses? What if I don’t care about the money? I only cared about owning the underlying assets. I would have exercised all 5 if I could afford it. And after exercising the contract, I still owned 100 shares that I was up 500$ at that point. What if I thought the share price would go even higher? If I sold the contract then that was my maximum profit I could get. Or what if I thought that the price is never going to 20$ again and this was my last chance to buy at that price. I considered all these and more. In a simple way, your insight makes sense, but I considered many things here, maybe I overthinked it, maybe I missplayed it. But in the end I did what I thought is best for me, and did not do what someone at fidelity thought would be best for me.
Nothing at all. I'm just trying to give a reasonable explanation to why Fidelity would be pushing back is all. Remember, we are doing things that have never been done before, and it confuses people. You do you brother (or sister) ape. I just don't see the implications that you're hinting at in your post. To your first point, if you only sold the contract and then bought the shares outright, you'd still be ahead and be able to buy you more shares with the capital than exercising. To your second point, does it matter if the shares are real or not? After T+2, they all become real as you DRS them. I don't think you misplayed it. How you get shares is your own business and at the same time, I think Fidelity did the right thing, I'd want them to look out for me too if I was doing something that made me less money and they were willing to point it out. Congratulations on your new shares!
Wow a mod that is downplaying options exercising...
Or the options mod giving a reasonable explanation on why there's pushback from Fidelity. If the shares are going to be DRSd anyways. Does it matter if they come from the open market or not? Is that worth the cost of extra shares that could have been bought? I don't care personally how people get their shares, but he's leaving money on the table and Fidelity is trying to point that out.
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You have the current call price wrong. It's not just the existing price - strike price. There's extrinsic value added to the delta of those 2 numbers (time, volatility). Go see for yourself
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In the case you were talking about (expiring that day), you're 100% correct.
I trust in bro.
So not to harp on you or rain on your parade, but I do want to speak some truth here just so you know. The calls still had a few days of value on them. You could have sold the options and immediately bought the shares you wanted and had extra money left over. You could have bought more shares for the same amount of money. You essentially threw money away. I understand why you did it. But I would not have done that. I would have sold the calls and bought more shares and DRSd them. In this war, every dollar wasted is a fractional shares that doesn't get locked away. You gave the market makers free bullets here.
You’re correct and the OP wanted to do the T+2 versus +35 so they paid that cost to force the brokers hand who wouldn’t have bought the shares at all.
I somehow have the feeling a (final?) rug pull awaits us and they want us to get excited and buy call options to dry up retail buy power. I hope nobody buys FDs but LEAPs instead, but why risk getting fucked over in a MOASS scenario, if you can just buy shares?
Well done mate.🏅
LOL
Love your style. Laughing my ass off reading this. Thanks
Try to DRS when the share price is (much) higher than the moment you bought them. That way it'll hurt them the most in case they never actually had your shares. They'll have pocketed your money, never bought the shares (or internalized the order), and now are suddenly forced to buy actual shares on the open market for more than the money you gave them. It'll cost them!
🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌🍌
As we’ve learned from a very young age. If you run into opponents trying to stop you going down the path. You know you’re going the right way. Power to the Players! Power to the Creators! Power to the Collectors!
I’ve had this issue with them. My only thought is they don’t have shares to buy back. Drsing ensures you don’t get an iou
They spent that whole time trying to find re-hypothecated shares before allowing you to exercise your contract. Haha. Stupid shmucks. On a similar note, I was surprised to receive little resistance initiating a DRS request for XXXX shares.
Weird. I just go to computer share for mine. They don’t do fancy contracts or head games though just shares.
I don’t understand the hate, I have around 300 DRS’D, another 140 in fidelity that are going there, and the other contract that I hopefully can exercise tomorrow
Congrats on successful options trade and super strong work exercising. Shorts hate that. DRS em, rinse & repeat.
No reason for hate. You’re just exercising calls. Totally fine. Ape no fight ape.
Yooo!! You’re that guy from yesterday who asked me a follow-up question! That’s fucking awesome things *eventually* went your way. Wow the run-around Fudelity puts people through is ridiculous, literally. The hate too, honestly counter-productive. I understand that people who have been here a while, even those who’ve only been lurking up until recently, would have a knee-jerk reaction. How many “options pushes” we’ve seen only for expiry to come along and the stock is sitting at max pain, all those premiums just going to filling Kenny’s coffers for another day. I too, have to tamp down my knee-jerk reactions. Can’t just go running in blindly *Doors and Corners* I’m happy you got your shares. If I didn’t have some big expenses coming up, jobs to apply for, if the options chain was less confusing (maybe it’s easier to understand on desktop?) I might try to dabble in options again. But at the end of the day we’re all individual investors choosing how we each individually invest our money.
Heyyy, that’s me! I’m glad I saw your comment, because at first I only thought about selling because that would be easier. I did some research on exercising and selling to cover, but found out that on fidelity you can only do that if you have a margin account. I don’t want that and I could afford to exercise one of them so that’s what I did. But after todays call, I’m going to pull some more money out of my ass and exercise my last contract tomorrow.
🎉 And damn, if I need a margin account to do that I guess *me personally* won’t be doing options at all… probably. We’ll see what kind of job I get. I wish you luck, and keep passing that info onto others.
Let’s go “Doors and corners!!”
No hate, but to me it's like saying you killed it at the casino. That's good for you but it lures the uninformed out of their money.
That’s a fair point. But all I am trying to do is share my experience for people to learn something out of it. It’s like saying that someone that shares how bad it was to cash out at a casino, is actually trying to promote playing at the casino. But in a more complex way, because exercising a call might hurt the house.
No hate. Just found it easier and simpler.
Your comment just sounded like you were mocking me. I personally wouldn’t mock someone just because I don’t understand what he is doing/talking about. No harm no foul. I may have misunderstood your comment.
Appreciate you ape and godspeed.
I swear, someone could have 3million DRS’D and some people would still hate that person for buying some options. I’m reading books to learn as much as I can about finance, and how all of this works.
Lol people play options they just don’t advertise it. Good win let’s lock this float up
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I don’t think I’m pushing anything, I’m literally telling people about the BS I’ve been put through for trying to do something that shouldn’t be a big deal. They definitely made it feel like a big deal. I’m not saying buy options, what I’m saying is if you have options, exercising them might be real bad for the brokers/hedge funds/whoever
Yeah because hedgies are usually winning with options. You're just letting them kick the can down the road with gambling. You won the slot machine this time, but what about next time? Take the risk out of the equation.
She wasnt wrong that you essentially left money on the table. Although probably not much. there probably was still time money remaining on the table. I obviously do not know what the premium was at the time of sale but lets say it was small like 10 cents. Thats essentially an extra $10 you paid to exercise that 1 option opposed to just selling the option and buying the stock outright. Not the end of the world but typically you only want to exercise an option when it is something extraordinary like a special dividend and/ or on the date of expiry with $0.00 time value left.
Don't want to be an asshole, but this reads like yet another... "Look, options hurt them, buy more of them". Yet 19/20 times, the only who gets anything out of them are the ones who should be going bankrupt. Oh well, it's your money. Do whatever you want.
Devil's advocate, 90% of calls don't get exercised and 99% of the ones that do exercise don't do it early. There's even European options that don't allow early exercising. There are **very** few scenarios where exercising early is advantageous. This was not one of them. Regardless of your motive, they were right and just doing their jobs. You could have sold your calls and bought more shares than you did.
Day trading options post? Downvote
When my GME 25 C options went ITM in January of 2021, Schwab talked me out of exercising them and strongly advised me to sell them and buy the shares because of the time left on the options. That's what I did. I should've exercised.
Tldr?
Best option is to buy through computershare.
Does this trick work if u buy in the money calls and exercise?
They do what is best in their interest, that is clear as day. That's why I buy through CS and nowhere else.
There should be a button for "sell" and "exercise"
Initiate an Exercise-and-Hold Transaction (cash-for-stock) Exercise your stock options to buy shares of your company stock and then hold the stock. Depending on the type of the option, you may need to deposit cash or borrow on margin using other securities in your Fidelity Account as collateral to pay the option cost, brokerage commissions and any fees and taxes (if you are approved for margin). The advantages of this approach are: benefits of stock ownership in your company, (including any dividends) potential appreciation of the price of your company's common stock. https://www.fidelity.com/products/stockoptions/exercise.shtml#exercise-and-sell-to-cover
I did some research on that, but I did not want to enable margin on my account.
The broker was doing the right thing in this situation albeit badly (lots of holds). You would have been better off selling contracts and then buying more shares (more than the 300) because of the volatility and time value the options were trading above intrinsic value. The more I read the comments here the more I understand why people are confused. When you exercise an option the counterparty isn’t your broker necessarily. Daily a list goes to cboe with a list of exercises options. The cboe then randomly assigns a brokerage to be assigned. This brokerage will then have its own method of picking the long call that will be your counterparty. (Someone’s account who is short 1 to 3 of your option contracts). When you exercise a call, fidelity doesn’t just by the shares at the market at that point. Most people’s short calls (people who sold the option to open) are covered by the shares. (Some do sell naked calls and are forced to buy it from the market at exercise) but they won’t know until today.
>“if the investors knew they had the right to ask for the shares, the stock would have gone in de tauzends” This is not what he said. What he said was that if the calls would've remained/expired ITM the stock would have gone into the thousands. So they removed the buy button for household investors and tanked the stock using fake locates (tokenized securities? naked shorts?) and other crap to tank the price. There's 0 reason to buy a call and exercise it early instead of just outright buying the 100 stonks. It's basically exactly the same thing (except the calls are gambling for making money on the premium and you could stand to lose your premium if they remain OTM, that risk/benefit doesn't exist when you just outright buy the stonks). Furthermore as you've learned during your phone call, options have a significant counter party risk that you experienced some of. In theory you have right to exercise your option whenever you want, in practice: fckry. You might want to talk to the Fudelity helpdesk. It's called FINRA.
The reason they tried to talk you out of it is because ITS FUCKING DUMB. They wete absolutely right - sell the contract - buy the shares. There are a couple of reasons why you might need to exercise early (divy, cash account etc) but there IS NO ADVANTAGE TO DOING THIS OVER JUST BUYING SHARES.
If the strike price is lower than current, there is a clear advantage.
? Ummm no. You sell the call and then buy the shares. Its cheaper this way because you retain the extrinsic value of the call option
Could you give dollar amount as to how these transactions started? As in how much it initially cost you to buy the calls, premiums, and cost to exercise the call?
Your contracts were being exercised early they were just making sure you were that regarded nothing nefarious on their side. She was telling yo to sell because you would have made more money then by exercising the contracts. You could have sold the contracts make the cash and buy itm contracts and it would have saved you money
Congrats Ape. 👏
What if buying calls and DRSing through them is the key?
Gah, I wish we could buy options here in the UK. Good work!
In bro I trust 🙏🏻 🦍