I recently read a strong piece on GoPro focused on the company's valuation and decided to see what opportunities there are in the options market for the stock. A few days ago, I on unusual options and saw his mentioning of GoPro's unusual options activity for contracts expiring in mid-March: (Source: Jonathan Rose's webinar. The picture is a screenshot of the Thinkorswim platform) As you can see, there is some significant open interest in ATM calls. Also bring your attention to the large figure on $15 calls - the 14K+ options position (by the way, the open interested has increased to over 15.3K contracts as of February 23, 2016) is equivalent to owning 1.4M+ in stock (keep in mind that 1 options contract is equivalent to 100 shares). This ~$600K position encouraged to me to skim through the tables for all expiration dates in search of trades that are worth more than $1M. And here is what I got: (Source: Yahoo Finance) Exactly! I only found ONE trade that is worth over $1M, even though I skimmed through all expiration dates available (both puts and calls). None had an open interest in excess of 8K - 9K contracts. This particular trade was made on December 18, 2015 and originally had a size of "only" 12.8K contracts, which is equivalent to about 1.28M shares of GoPro. Now let us look at that stock chart to see whether the investors bought the calls to hedge his short position (i.e. synthetic put - this happens frequently) (Source: Investing.com) Although I do not have the exact timing of the trade because Benzinga does not provide it (and likely releases the news to the public with a delay for the benefit of its premium members), there are two things I would like the readers to notice: (1) The stock was up that day, and I do not see any above-average selling pressure throughout the day; (2) The initial position of 12.8K contracts has increased to over 31.0K contracts since then (although I do not know if it was the same person buying more calls). I do see some large buying activity at around 3PM on December 18, 2015, when the trade was made. Supposing that Benzinga immediately reported this trade to the public, it may be that the person sold far OTM calls to partially finance his/her purchase of the shares. However, this seems improbable to me because whatever he/she got from the sale would not likely even cover 10% of the overall trade. Besides, why go so far in terms of strike price? One could sell $30 or even $25 calls and get much higher proceeds without too much risk. After all, even if the stock shot up by over 25% over the tenor of the option, the person would not lose actual money. It is true that his/her shares would have been recalled but he/she would still pocket a nice gain in the underlying and some premium from the sale of the options (probably, some time value, as well). Hence, it looks like the person was buying calls to benefit from the upside. Currently, the probability of the underlying stock reaching $40 per share is about 12% even with the rather high implied probability of over 77%: (Source: option-price.com) The delta of the call/put option not only shows the sensitivity of the option to the underlying security but also the probability of it reaching the strike price. There are still over 47 weeks left in the contract. The investor was either crazy, had a stroke while initiating the trade, or knew something we do not know (not necessarily inside information, by the way). I think I may look deeper into the stock and gather more information before making a decision on this trade but I really like the idea of riding an institutional investor's tail. What is your opinion on this unusual options activity?