Some stuff I read online 3/17/08

Here is today’s list of interesting articles I have read online. I will add that there is a crush of stuff written today and I have not even scratched the surface on what is out there. I actually opened up the e-mail from Seeking Alpha and was a bit overwhelmed.

I read an article late last week that for the life of me I cannot find again but will summarize here. A savvy investor bought 17,000 March $25.00 put options on Bear Stearns on Wednesday for about 0.25 (17,000 X 100 X 0.25 = $425,000). So for a little less than half a million, this investor had positive exposure to BSC as it fell. This trade was entered when Bear was trading for around $60. These options traded as high as $7.10 on Friday as Bear dropped to about $30 (making the position worth about $12MM). Not bad for 48 hours work. If this investor held through the weekend (which I suspect they might have) they would have had the chance to sell those puts for around $21 or a position value of $35,700,000 or an 8,300% return in 5 days.

Mark McQueen runs Wellington Financial in Toronto, Canada. Wellington is a boutique investment firm in the venture space that specializes in debt financing. Mark runs a near daily blog and has a great analysis (including a bit of humour) of the Bear take under.

JP Morgan inks the deal of the year

Matt Cooper from Conde Naste has an interesting piece on privatizing Fannie and Freddie.

Memo to the Next President

Thanks for reading…