Once upon a time, a guy bought tickets for a basketball game on Stubhub. Some months after he bought the ticket, superstar Kobe Bryant announced that it was goi

Once upon a time, a guy bought tickets for a basketball game on Stubhub. Some months after he bought the ticket, superstar Kobe Bryant announced that it was going to be his last game. Ticket prices shot up and the buyer was thrilled that he still had a ticket. However, the seller was equally unenthused by the idea of having sold his ticket at so much under its now-increased value. So he cancelled the sale. There was a big fuss, and Stubhub gave the one buyer a ticket to the game. If you give someone a put option for some quantity on something, they then get the power to sell that amount of that something to you at a specific price. Usually, you want to get money in exchange for giving someone that power. In the markets, this is called selling someone a put option. This chap's point is that you could agree to buy a ticket for $150 to see Kobe Bryant on Stubhub. This doesn't mean you get a ticket. This just means you gave someone on Stubhub the option to sell you a ticket at $150 because if the price rises to $1500, he's going to choose not to sell you that ticket by doing what the seller did in the previous case. Since you get no money for giving the seller the power, you're not selling the option, you're giving it away for free. That's probably the context to his comment. I neither agree nor disagree with it.