Sunday, April 01, 2007

Beautiful BOT gapfill in progress

Fundamentals aside, this is a chart I would want to be heavily short right now. BOT closed Friday at is low of the day, which sets the upper end of a range of prices that BOT has never traded at before. The announcement by ICE a few weeks ago of their interest in merging with BOT sent the shares to new highs leaving behind a $20 gap from $165 to $185. Had this not occurred during a market meltdown and more importantly a CME and ICE meltdown the BOT gap may have held, but selling ensued and BOT has been filling the gap on high volume ever since $185 broke last Thursday. Kudos to ChicagoStock for bringing this trade to my attention and calling the $185 break early last week. I would expect BOT to reach the previous $176.89 high in no time, but maybe pause there as the range of never traded prices would be filled. The 50 dma should be at least tested (at $173.74 now) and eventually the compete gap filled (~$167). The only risk here is that a full scale bidding war ensues with ICE and CME raising their offers. I wouldn't expect this to happen but if it did you can bet both CME and ICE shares would sell off pretty hard and in both cases the offers are for almost all stock. In other words BOT should trade somewhat with ICE and CME. In fact, until recently BOT shares traded proportionally with CME as that merger was thought to be a done deal, although they have diverged as of late.

Disclosure: I own BOT puts.

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