Weighing the options, finding them lacking

The Chicago Board Options Exchange, which has been phasing options contracts on all manner of listed symbols that previously did not trade options, has added options on REFR starting today.

What seemed at first blush to be an intriguing twist in the trading strategies surrounding this tightly-controlled stock, however, has, at least in the early going, proven to be a complete bust. The spread between bid and ask on all contracts, excepting those with zero bids, is at least 75 cents, and volume is a flat zero across the board.

There had been hopes on both the bullish and bearish side that the listing of options might add some much needed liquidity to this stock, but clearly the verdict today is, not so much.

Until Yahoo! add options for REFR to its quote pages (shouldn't be more than a couple of days, based on other recent CBOE option listings), you can check activity on the CBOE site here. For now, at least, there's very little to see. We'll be checking back later to see if a day of greater stock activity has any residual effect in the option exchange.

Update: The first trade in REFR options came just over two hours into the first trading day, a trade (presumably a purchase) of two August 15 calls at 65 cents each. As options represent 100-share blocks, that's a $130 trade. The following two hours have been silent on the options front, presumably to recover from that blistering flurry of activity.