NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Whalen Wong, and today it is the return of Ricky Mulvey.

Ricky is the co-host of the Finance and Investing podcast. This time is different. Hi, Ricky.

Hey, Whalen. Good to see you. Good to see you too. And you are here because you have been doing

some whale watching. Not belugas or narwhals. I have become obsessed with option whales.

These are traders, sometimes institutions, sometimes wealthy

individuals who place large bets using something called options. They're not necessarily buying a

stock itself. They're buying the right to buy an asset like a stock at a certain price with a set

expiration date. It's essentially a bet on what the

price will be within that time frame. And sometimes those bets are worth tens of millions of

dollars. A recent example, one whale placed a $74 million bet on one company's stock price.

I wanted to know, did this trader know something?

Were they making easy money?

But these questions grew into something larger.

I became obsessed with Options Whales.

I decided that I must find one, any whale for this story, to understand what they're doing.

I would find an Options Whale no matter the physical or mental cost,

no matter the toll it took on my relationships, no matter how many Cs I had to cross. Okay, Ahab,

so how did it turn out? Uh, the journey was significantly shorter than I anticipated and I quickly found one. Well, call me, Ishmael. Today on the show, we are going inside the world of option whales, who they are, what they're doing, and why these massive bets don't always pay off.

That's after the break.

You may have seen an option before outside the world of investing. If you're browsing for airline tickets,

...