Options Trading News

Shares of Research In Motion are at eight-year lows, but one trader is looking for limited gains.

RIMM is down 1.62 percent to $7.27 this morning after plummeting on weak earnings last week. The BlackBerry maker's shares have traded lower from their 52-week high above $33 on Sept. 1 and are now at their lowest level since 2003.

optionMONSTER's systems show that a trader bought 6,000 March 9 calls for the ask price of $1.08 while selling 10,000 March 11 calls for $0.61. The latter was done against open interest of 10,552, so it could have been a closing transaction.

If the March 11 activity was a closing transaction, this was a trader rolling down the long calls and reducing the size to limit the cost. This could also be a vertical spread, with the trader looking for RIMM to potentially rise to that $11 strike price in the next nine months.

That ratio spread would limit potential downside losses to almost nothing, but the trader does carry the potential risk of being short shares above that price level if assigned on the additional short calls. (See our Education section)