For those unaware, a stock related to Russia that got some traffic here was halted at the end of last week. $RSX, a Russia ETF from VanEck stopped trading just after VanEck themselves released a press release saying that "trading continues". The halt, according to VanEck was initiated by CBOE, the exchange $RSX trades on, however, CBOE refuses to give guidance on why they chose to halt it considering its a US based ETF and is not subject to sanctions.

Since the halt, VanEck has been blatantly liquidating the ETF. Their cash as a % of net assets has gone from roughly 3% at the end of last week to over 76% today. Yet, they've refused to announce it as an "official liquidation" despite their average cash holdings usually only making up about 0.2% of their other ETFs.

This is where it gets slightly nefarious. $RSX has weekly options and a lot of people were placing bets on the direction of the ETF, many of them retail investors like you and I. Because of the halt, a large chunk of those investors have found themselves unable to sell their options contracts which is essentially forcing a chunk of people to watch options expire worthless through no fault of their own. Those who had puts are being told by their brokers that in the best case scenario, the margin requirement to short the shares to exercise is between 300-500%. Some brokers are even tacking on a hard-to-borrow fee of, I shit you not, 39% DAILY. This of course comes with the warning that if you choose to do this, you're completely locked into these fees and cannot get out of them until RSX unhalts. In the worst case, many brokers are flat out rejecting exercise requests because they can't find any shares to borrow.

All of that means that the average retail trader who didn't probably have enough money to exercise these options in the first place has almost no hope of exercising these options even if they wanted to. This of course also means that the market makers who sold these options are about to pocket 100% of the profit and that ladies and gentlemen is theft. This is a theft that is being enabled by VanEck, CBOE & The OCC.

VanEck, by refusing to publicly announce liquidation of their ETF as they are morally obligated to do is preventing The OCC from setting these options from being set to cash settlement as they should be so that all the holders can fairly exercise their options. CBOE is enabling this by keeping the ETF needlessly halted and giving VanEck the opportunity to freely liquidate while options holders are held hostage.

Should we cross the 4PM threshold today without an announcement from VanEck, CBOE or The OCC that enables options holders to rightly exercise and sell their options contracts, a class-action lawsuit will have to take place. We cannot allow these entities to steal from people in this manner. So sign up and show your support and willingness to support the legal fight to make sure trading is fair for everyone.