My purchase of EUS CA at .55 is speculative, and I wouldn't encourage my mom to buy it. Either as a takeover candidate, or as an attractive brokerage that must have hit bottom already, it has good potential. The downside is limited to "0" but the upside is great. It will be highly volatile to the whims and tears of Mr. Market, who today again reared his head.  EUS CA went down today, but settled at .45, with a lot of open interest.  EUS CA's March expiration still gives some time to see-saw. Currently, it's underlying ETFC is still overbought. I would still buy more EUS CA if the price goes down tomorrow to anything like .35 -- provided my funds are not all used up in the wrong place.

In order to write this Trade Note on the TradeKing blog -- which I love -- I opened another IE window and logged onto my account at ETrade.com, as it really rocks and their charting utilities are GRRReat! There's a lot of quality there, and if they can convey that to others, either share price growth or takeover offers would seem possible. I haven't heard any rumors, it's just my play at the matter.

Whether that will happen by the March options expiration date is another matter.  At today's closing price of $4.49, ETFC would have to go up more than 20% (to about 5.55) to start an uphill snowball effect! One could have bought it for $2.10 per share on January 8, and now only 27 days later we are looking at more than a 100% increase from that. Thus, it seems that in the time we have remaining until the March options expiration, there would be room for ETFC to go back up to and somewhat beyond it's February 1 high of $5.48, and thus for EUS CA to shoot up once it gets "in the money." Of course, the effect of the passage of time will hurt my play, there.