Cisco and Splunk are both HQ'd in SF. If they were at the airport, it was coming back from Jackson hole or something.
The real trouble with 'maybe they were legit outsiders' is the options expired specifically today, which means you need to know _when the announcement_ is to profit.
I strongly suspect these trades are not legit. That said, the trader didn't necessarily KNOW that the deal would be announced today. Trading is a game of probabilities. It's possible that the trader used public information to figure out that Splunk could be acquired soon and there was a small but non-zero chance it would be announced today. In that case taking a $22k flyer on cheap options is a good risk-adjusted bet for a well-capitalized investor. (Although they'd have to factor in that this WILL result in a visit from the SEC, which is probably not fun even if you've done nothing wrong.)
Yeah, I don’t know, an investor sophisticated enough to predict that without insider information, I would have to hope that they would also be sophisticated enough to make the trade less blatantly obvious as a big bundle on 1 day expiration otm call options.
Fun fact: Cisco is actually headquartered in San Jose, but I believe that both companies have large engineering offices in both San Francisco and San Jose.
For those who don't know, they're both part of the same metro area (Bay Area) but they're 50 miles apart, anywhere from 1 to 2 hours apart depending on traffic.
The real trouble with 'maybe they were legit outsiders' is the options expired specifically today, which means you need to know _when the announcement_ is to profit.