Difficult to understand their mind aka some buddy really believes that the oil price will touch $30-40 at the mid of January. ************************************************************ USO - despite crude stabilizing without registering large gains, there appeared to be either some monetizing of hedges or closing bearish bets in the ETF that tracks the price of WTI oil The two most active strikes were the Jan 20 puts and the March 21 puts with 21,000 and 15,000 trading respectively much of the action looked like closing selling. There were two trades that caught my eye, not because of the premium commitment, but because of the choice of strikes. When the ETF was $20.95 there was a buyer of 5300 of the Jan15 $12 puts for .05 and 6300 of the Jan15 $11 puts for .05. These options have less than a 1% chance of being in the money in a month, but a trader spent $58,000 in premium for the potential that they could. Source: http://finance.yahoo.com/tumblr/blog-wednesdays-notable-options-activity-vix-got-142428909.html