It must be summer. It only took a bullish $2 options trade to set off a chain of speculation that ended with the suggestion IBM Corp was buying Sun Microsystems Inc. In fact that’s not something that’s ruled out as a long-term possibility by some of Wall Street’s finest. But yesterday morning an institutional buyer bought 15,000 of Sun’s September 50 calls – options to buy Sun shares a $50 a pop in September – while Sun was trading at around $47; hardly a massive premium. Coincidentally Sun and IBM were holding joint briefings on their latest Java collaboration (see separate story). Somehow two and two made five and Sun’s shares rose to $49.75 before settling back to close at $47.81 on the day, up $2.37. The trader was said to be bullish on Sun’s fundamentals, not on IBM’s interest in it.
