As we're all aware at this point, AllBirds has decided to pivot from a shoe company to an AI hardware company (news)
This has been described as a hail mary of a market move. Hail Mary implies risk, and option traders would love to be on either end of it if the pricing is right
However, AllBirds stock does not appear to have options …at all?
How is that possible? Is nobody writing options or is there some kind of rule against it I'm missing? How can a publicly traded equity not have options being sold around it?
Why are there no options available to buy/sell for Allbirds ($BIRD) stock?
byu/TurtleBlaster5678 ininvesting
Posted by TurtleBlaster5678
3 Comments
Because being publicly traded does not automatically make a stock optionable.
Right now, both Nasdaq and Yahoo Finance show no listed option chain for BIRD, so this looks like a case where there simply aren’t exchange listed standardized options available at the moment. The Options Industry Council flat-out says that not all listed U.S. stocks/ETFs have listed options. ([Nasdaq](https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/bird/option-chain))
The usual reason is some mix of listing criteria + exchange discretion + expected liquidity. The standard rule-of-thumb criteria are things like being an NMS stock, having at least 7 million publicly held shares, 2,000 shareholders, sufficient trading volume over the prior 12 months, and meeting minimum price rules. But even meeting those doesn’t force an exchange to list options the exchanges still decide whether to do it. So the answer is basically: it’s not that “nobody is writing them” on Yahoo; it’s that no exchange currently has a listed options class for BIRD. ([Investopedia](https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/04/072104.asp))
So yeah, a stock can be public and still have zero listed options. That’s normal. If BIRD keeps getting enough attention/liquidity after this AI pivot circus, that could change later but as of now, there just doesn’t appear to be an exchange-listed chain to trade.
Not all publicly traded companies have options. It’s all about the being registered with an options exchange. Exchanges like the CBOE are in the business of running an options exchange. Revenue in that business is based on volume. Excluding the crazy AI week BIRD just had, it traded 80k shares a day on average. Makes no sense for a company that trades so little to offer options to investors.
Lots of stocks don’t have options. One of the requirements is that the stock needs to trade above $3. BIRD has been trading for below $3 until April 15, when it had its big, bizarre pivot. If it shows that it can sustain those prices for some time with sufficient trading volume and float, exchanges can make the decision to list options for it.