Yeah, sorry if that wasn't clear - I was thinking that the manipulation you saw with the options on index was because they were cash settled. If they were physi

Yeah, sorry if that wasn't clear - I was thinking that the manipulation you saw with the options on index was because they were cash settled. If they were physically settled (somehow), then it doesn't help you to be the buyer at an arbitrarily high price of the underlying. You have to sell the underlying to profit off of the call options, you can't just support the price against all comers at the time of exercise.