Well, I don't know since we don't know the full story. Might be GTAT made promises and failed to deliver. That makes more sense to me as a pure guess.

Here's a possibility, from Business Insider:

"At least one analyst Business Insider heard from after the announcement sees one possible reason for the sudden change from GT Advanced: Apple pulled the plug.

"Jeffrey Osborne, an analyst with Cowen & Co., wrote that Apple, which lent GT $578 million as part of a supply agreement last November, 'had the ability to call the interest free loan back and it appears they have done that.'"

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/gt-advanced-files-for-bankruptcy-oct-6-2014-10#ixzz3FOtJG1oL

There's been quite a bit of insider selling, up until about a month ago.

Yes the put/call scenario sounds accurate to me. I have to think actually walk through the different possibilities to understand how the whole thing turns out. My brain doesn't naturally work in terms of options--especially put options where everything is backwards.

I agree that we're going to see a sell-off triggered by something, but also think that the central banks are working hard to "print" enough liquidity to keep the markets high. Now that our Fed is stopping, the other central banks are kicking in, or continuing to. And interest rates are still low. Maybe I'm too used to what happened in 2008 to predict what might happen next.... What are the factors you watch, or chart.... this is probably a whole other article. :-)

Trevor, can you write about this too: "I would say that I'm a lot more concerned about the market crashing sometime soon." I'm curious!

Yes, you've already written a lot - might as well turn it into an article, most of the writing is done and I think this is very educational for people who are learning options, and even people who are trading them but don't know exactly what they're doing.

lets say you do your strategy with one of each option (corresponding to 100 shares of stock per option), how many shares of stock would you need?

Part 4: http://marketshadows.com/2014/06/27/glad-didnt-sell-may-go-away/ - that's the discussion on how to calculate returns. I thought Trent was making very good points I agreed with. Anyway, this is just for your amusement/thoughts. It's kind of complicated, and I'm just sharing the issues that were coming up with put-selling in particular.

Part 3: Here's the virtual put-selling portfolio: http://marketshadows.com/virtual-portfolios/put-selling-virtual-portfolio/. Did well--in a very good market where the "risk" was not confronted. Michael convinced me that this was too risky. Here's his article: http://www.bankers-anonymous.com/blog/options-trading-part-i-nfw-edition/. There was another interesting comment to Paul a while back about accounting for profits. Which made the point that risk and ROI has to include potential buybacks.