Anavex Life Sciences Corp (AVXL)

[vg_future]

Steady_T, as you said, the buyer might have sold them to a different buyer
or even sold a higher strike price call on top of these (making them a spread) since there was lot of premium on the day of the big runup. Either scenarios would be transparent to you (your situation remains the same until you buy back the calls or the calls get actually exercised). As you are aware, exercising calls is still a choice until the last day at which time it happens automatically. The buyer might not even have enough money to exercise the calls and buy the shares. In this case, the probability of a short or a long or a regular trader being involved are same in my opinion. However, I did hear that shorts do use the strategy of buying the calls to limit their exposure (or else the exposure would be huge like GameStop or Tesla).

-vg_future