Peek-A-Boo! I Track You Kicked Cans!
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| Author       | Source       | 
| :-------------: |:-------------:|
|  [u/WhatCanIMakeToday](https://www.reddit.com/user/WhatCanIMakeToday/) | [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/of1zn4/peekaboo_i_track_you_kicked_cans/) | 

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[DD 👨‍🔬](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/search?q=flair_name%3A%22DD%20%F0%9F%91%A8%E2%80%8D%F0%9F%94%AC%22&restrict_sr=1)

If you've been following along with my posts, you'll know I track deep worthless OTM puts which SuperStonk has suspected of being used for married puts to defer FTDs. If you're new, you may want to catch up with my previous posts:

-   [Historical GME 7/14/21 Options OI to see how many cans got kicked & how far](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/ocen11/historical_gme_71421_options_oi_to_see_how_many/). This was my original post when I realized we can see exactly which day options are opened. And, by looking at which expiration, we can see how far cans get kicked.

-   [Peek-a-boo! I see you 79M hidden shorts!](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/odsded/peekaboo_i_see_you_79m_hidden_shorts/) is where I start tracking these suspected hidden shorts by focusing on new opens during GME's Jan spike.

-   [Peek-a-boo! I see 103M hidden shorts! (Part Deux)](https://www.reddit.com/r/Superstonk/comments/oenvoh/peekaboo_i_see_103m_hidden_shorts_part_deux/) is where I learned to use delta to determine that a newly opened option is actually worthless which allows for a really good estimate of how many worthless options are opened to hide shorts during GME's Jan spike.

As we see those cans in Jan 2021 kicked down the road to various expirations, we're now going to see *where* those cans are kicked. We see many of those cans stacking up in the upcoming July options expiration so we'll start there.

I used the same GME Options data set from <https://www.historicaloptiondata.com/> for 2021 up to end of June (best $21 ever spent). I looked at the end of June (6/30) to find which July Put option has the most OI: July $0.50 Put with 148k OI. (The runner up is the $1 strike with 30k OI so I'm going to skip that for a cleaner chart.)

I extracted the daily open interest data for that July $0.50 Put and then calculated the new Open Interest for each day. This OI Change effectively shows you how many of those Puts were opened (or closed) that day. When we look at the July $0.50 Put line (blue), there's a noticeable spike in March.

So I did the same for the highest OI Jan 2022 leap puts (@ $0.50 strike) and the highest OI March 19 Puts (@ $1.00 strike). (Of course, for the options expiring March 19th, I had to get that data as of March 19th instead of June 30.) The second highest Jan 2022 leap put OI was the $1 strike with 29k OI and the second highest March 19 put OI was at the $10 strike with 37k OI. I'm setting these aside for now because you can see the trend with just the highest OI at the deepest OTM strike and this keeps the chart cleaner.

Have a nice chart:

![Put Open Interest Change per Day for March, July, and Jan 2022 Leap Options](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/82035192/124762045-73291b80-df00-11eb-9c0c-81ef5f99c7f5.png)

[Put Open Interest Change per Day for March, July, and Jan 2022 Leap Options](https://preview.redd.it/u3armgxwrm971.png?width=1452&format=png&auto=webp&s=85e3e66ebf404f7c9f2b3f02ab870b6ba3f5ace3)

Here we can see lots of March 19th $1.00 Put options (green line) being opened in January at the "Oh Shit" moment and again in late February (presumably soon after the Feb options expired). This suggests the March expiration was used twice for can kicking from Jan and then again in Feb.

As the worthless March puts expired worthless in mid-March, you see a huge spike of new worthless July $0.50 P options (blue line) being opened up. Effectively, we're seeing cans that were kicked only a couple months out to March being kicked out again to July.

As July expiration comes up, we see 148k (@ the $0.50 strike) and 30k (@ the $1.00 strike) options expiring which is a solid 178k deep OTM puts almost certainly being used to hide about 17.8M shares just at those bottom two strikes. As of March 19, the deltas for all July option strikes below $13 have been 0 which means upwards of 273k worthless puts (probably hiding over 27M shares) are coming due. (As of March 19th, delta is under 0.01 up to around the $26 strike so many people would probably consider those to also be worthless. Why open worthless options positions?)

[ToS showing deltas for options as of March 19th](https://preview.redd.it/yl58wsuk6n971.png?width=5000&format=png&auto=webp&s=53537adfaf50a915e3f1022c0c7fa083d8cbbf8e)

With this analytical approach, we can see which future expirations those cans get kicked to. *And*, we can estimate the number of cans by summing up the new OI for options with delta < 0.01.

I'm looking forward to doing another analysis towards the end of July! Thanks for reading!

Edit: Fully spell out SuperStonk. Credit [u/b_h_w](https://www.reddit.com/u/b_h_w/)
