The number of puts, which is a bet the stock price will fall, is nearly three times as high as calls, a bet the stock will rise.
But Cox placed his hopes on a new and very far-reaching rule that makes it a crime to sell short, which is to bet on a stock going down.
This will work as long as the frequencies match, which is a good bet for quad-band phones.
By contrast, Mr Giddens's integrated political programme boils down to a list of conventional appeals to civic virtue, in which every bet is hedged and every hard choice ducked.
An established seller with good feedback is probably a safe bet, which a new seller with little or no feedback is risky.
There are also those in the wings with another product to flog: a foreign-exchange derivative which, because it is a bet settled for cash, also reduces Herstatt risk.
But this also is a treacherous time to make a big bet on the retail industry, which is battling headwinds from a weak economy, competition from online shopping and overbuilding during the boom years.
One is proprietary trading, in which they bet their own capital on movements in the markets.
' The Hangover, which is still proving to be a great bet going into its third week of release.
If it wants to work with multiple content providers on the other hand, there is a good bet it might work with a company like Education Elements, which is emerging as a leader in helping schools move to blended-learning models and offering a single sign-on software solution for schools so they can easily work with multiple content vendors.
The big exception, of course, is Finnish phone giant Nokia, which has bet its smartphone house on the Microsoft software.
Conversely, this is a big boost for Sanofi, which had bet that the Genzyme problems could be turned around in sufficient time to restore not only production, but investor confidence.
"The uncertainty around the draw is part of its magic, " says William Harrison-Allan, chairman of Salisbury City, which plays in the Blue Square Bet South and is the lowest-ranked team in this weekend's third round.
Compared with Realty Income's tenant base of convenience stores and casual restaurants, which is not disclosed to shareholders, Ackman's bet on CCA relies on pretty reliable tenants: criminals whose rent is paid by the U.S. government.
He says Gamesa, which also builds and runs wind parks, is a safer bet, since it has long-term contracts with the large Spanish utilities.
The fund is making a big bet on infrastructure, which Kalra considers his "raw material" because it gives him access to the precious commodity around it: land.
From a legacy standpoint, for which the time horizon is even longer, cash is an even worse bet.
My bet on recovery is BKIR Bank of Ireland, which is about as crazy as you can get.
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As you can see, your best bet is to build up an emergency fund, which experts typically say should be enough to cover at least 3-6 months worth of necessary expenses.
Such a turnaround would be awfully impressive, but investors would not be wise to bet that the company will meet or exceed those expectations, which is exactly what they are doing by owning the stock.
What makes the difference of opinion so intriguing is the vehemence with which those opinions are held--and that the winning bet could well reflect whether the credit crisis worsens or not.
It was a huge bet on a run-up in oil prices few saw coming, which is a story in itself.
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Not surprisingly, Donald Dewar, the Scottish secretary, who up to now had seemed a safe bet as Scotland's prime minister in the parliament which he masterminded, is rattled.
The stakes for quickly and decisively figuring out what is wrong with the Dreamliner are enormous for Boeing, which has placed a huge commercial bet on the aircraft's success.
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The author Mark Twain wrote a short story, The Million Pound Bank Note (later made into a film starring Gregory Peck), in which a penniless sailor is given the note, little knowing he is the subject of a bet between two brothers.
What makes the bet more compelling is that world growth has been shifting to Asian countries, which have been growing much faster than developed countries.
Additionally, TD-LTE is not supported by most of the mobile devices available in the market currently, which makes the bet on Clearwire even more risky.
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That's as sure a bet as there is in technology. (Think voice and visual data.) Which storage architectures win out is a current hot debate among bitheads.
My bet is that the entire franchise gets sold in a similar fashion to the process by which Chuck Greenberg and Nolan Ryan acquired the Texas Rangers and, as my friend and SportsMoney contributor Maury Brown pointed out to me, a new television deal with News Corp.
The bet against the dollar is buying the PowerShares DB US Dollar Index Down ( UDN), which moves higher tracking a basket of currencies including the euro versus the dollar.
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