With a close at $9.06 holders of September $9 calls may have been in a bind to either purchase the shares for $9, or sell their calls at the last minute. I once spoke with Fidelity and was told that if I took no actions, if the call was in positive ground, it would be purchased and added to my portfolio. I'm really uncertain if 6 cents was positive enough to make it happen automatically, but I would suspect that at the last minute some scrambling might occur between investors who sold the calls, and those who purchased them.

Many years ago I had sold calls which went into the green for the buyer well before they were due to expire. Frankly I didn't want to sell the shares, but thought nothing would happen till near expiration, I was wrong. Fortunately, the stock did fall back in price and I was able to purchase it for a small profit, but I learned a lesson that some option buyers don't wait to near expiration to act. While I really don't understand why they don't wait, in that you can buy the stock for the strike price of the call at any time before expiration, at least one investor chose not to wait.

As I've previously indicated here, I currently hold a fair number of January $14 calls, and clearly I believe that technical conferences later this year will take the shares to new highs. It's not my intent to put all shares into my account, but if I'm right, I can sell some and move others into the account with no further cost to the funds available in the account. Certainly, I could use margin and buy them all, but it's not my intent to go into using margin, at least not at this time.

Gary