CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Shares of drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb Co (BMY.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) rose to a ten-year high on Wednesday ahead of results of an early stage trial for its new melanoma treatment, with heavy betting in the options market suggesting investors see more gains in the stock.

Bristol-Myers rose 4.5 percent to $44.15 on its busiest day of trading since August, ahead of the release of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2013 Annual Meeting abstracts Wednesday night. At one point the stock hit $45.59.

May 14 (Reuters) – A surge in option market bets on Sony
Corp just before a large hedge fund investor announced a big
stake and called for a major restructuring of the company has
raised concerns that some traders may have had advance word of
the news.

U.S.-listed shares of Sony Corp jumped 9.9 percent
to close at $20.76 after Daniel Loeb’s Third Point hedge fund
said on Tuesday it accumulated more than 6 percent of Sony’s
shares – a stake worth $1.1 billion – making it the largest
shareholder in Japan’s biggest electronics company.

By Doris Frankel

(Reuters) – A new “jumbo” option contract on the popular S&P 500 tracking ETF debuted on the BOX Options Exchange on Friday, but at least one rival has opted not to list the product for now because of concerns it will hurt liquidity in existing options on the fund.

The new product, known as the Jumbo SPY Options, is ten times the size of a traditional options contract on the fund, and is designed for institutional investors who prefer larger-sized contracts when executing their strategies.

CHICAGO/DETROIT, May 8 (Reuters) – Electric car maker Tesla
Motors Inc has a fervent core of believers that have
reaped a 67 percent gain so far this year, but it has also
attracted a legion of nay-sayers betting the stock is due to
fall sharply.

Bets on both sides will be tested on Wednesday when the
company reports first-quarter results after the market closes.
Activity in the options markets suggests a big share move is
likely.

CHICAGO/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A corrupt data file that disrupted the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s ability to telegraph what contracts could be traded led to the market’s half-day outage last Thursday, according to an options data provider briefed by a CBOE staff member.

“They had a corrupted data file load which is necessary to tell all the systems which options contracts are available for trading,” said Trade Alert President Henry Schwartz. He said the CBOE staffer briefed him informally at breakfast on Thursday on the sidelines of a CBOE-led annual industry conference in Las Vegas.

CHICAGO, April 26 (Reuters) – The outage at CBOE on Thursday
caused a 12 percent decline in overall U.S. index options
trading from the day before, while single-stock options activity
had a busier session as traders sought alternative venues to
execute their positions, data showed on Friday.

A software glitch shut down the Chicago Board Options
Exchange for half the day on Thursday, preventing trading in
options on two of the U.S. stock market’s most closely watched
indexes, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the CBOE
Volatility Index..

CHICAGO/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – A software glitch shut down the Chicago Board Options Exchange for half the day on Thursday, preventing trading in options on two of the U.S. stock market’s most closely watched indexes and delivering the latest blow to confidence in the way U.S. financial markets operate.

Coming just days after hackers attacked the website of stock broker Charles Schwab Corp and a false news report on the Associated Press’s Twitter account sent the stock market into a brief but steep tailspin, the incident brought attention to how technological troubles can roil the markets.

CHICAGO, April 25 (Reuters) – The Chicago Board Options
Exchange opened for trading Thursday after a
three-and-a-half-hour delay that prevented investors from
trading options on two of the most closely-watched instruments
in the financial markets, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index
and the CBOE Volatility Index.

The failure, which was resolved at 1 p.m. Eastern time when
the CBOE got its computer systems back up and running, raised
new questions about CBOE’s near-monopoly on stock-index options,
used by institutional as well as retail investors to bet on and
hedge against swings in the overall U.S. stock market.

NEW YORK/CHICAGO, April 21 (Reuters) – For years, Apple Inc
was a stock investor’s dream regardless of the market
environment. But now concern about the iPhone maker’s growth has
made many investors wary about a big share swing after its
earnings are released on Tuesday.

Options pricing on Friday suggested a post-earnings move of
about 7.5 percent by April 26. That is far more than in the past
and reflects the fact that Apple stock has become more volatile.

April 19 (Reuters) – Options trading volume on Friday turned
out to be in line with any given options expiration day as
trading picked up despite a lockdown in much of Boston, a major
U.S. financial center, as police hunted for a suspect in
Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings.

About 20.1 million contracts changed hands in the
U.S.-listed options market on Friday, according to options
analytics firm Trade Alert. That was in line with an average of
21.4 million contracts in equity, index and ETF options over the
past three expiration sessions this year.