Are those puts on the price?
That is someone selling puts to the MPEX bot. They are going
short 25,000 PUT contracts that are deep in the money. Note, that the contract is for the price of 0.1BTC. So they are shorting puts with at strike price from $4100 - $5000 / BTC
About an $8,000,000 notional value on those contracts now. Looks like a pretty smart play actually. Current BTC price is $847. It is extremely expensive to
purchase calls or puts on MPEx due to the huge volatility premium. But you can sell to the market maker for more reasonable mark up if you have additional backing capital deposited to cover the short risk.
Let's run the numbers :
If expiry happened today, simplifying calculations as if all contracts were P500Ts...
(5000-847)/847*.1BTC = .490 price, or break even.
But expiry in end of month, so by then,
If BTC drops to $700, (5000-700)/700*.1BTC = .614, or about a 25,000*(.49-.614) =
3100BTC lossIf BTC rises to $1000, (5000-1000)/1000*.1 = .4, or 25,000*(.49-.4) =
2250BTC gainLove or hate MPEX, it is the only place in the world that has proven it can handle this sort of exposure. In fact, this is a pretty small position in BTC terms compared to what people were throwing around in march 2013. I believe they paid out
19,407 BTC that month to people that bought calls, of which 15,000BTC was personally covered by Mr. Popescu, which appears to have wiped out all of the profits he made from the first 2 years of operations of MPEx.
He's deep under the water right now.