For Some, It’ll Be a Super Trading Day : Games: Clients of a French investment bank will be at play during the Super Bowl on a trading floor for a ‘football options market.’

They’ll be running option plays during the Super Bowl--on Wall Street.

Societe Generale, a big French investment bank, is setting up a mock trading floor for a “football options market” during the big game.

About 100 of the firm’s corporate clients will gather for trading in a hotel ballroom carpeted with synthetic green turf and painted like a football field. Goal posts will be placed at either end, near big-screen TVs.

Options trading is, to the uninitiated, more complicated than American football is to the French.

The idea, though, is fairly simple: The trader with the most points wins. It helps to decide whether you expect the victor to be the Washington Redskins or the Buffalo Bills.

Players bet against a Super Bowl “index” calculated by subtracting Buffalo’s score from Washington’s score--because Washington is favored (by seven points)--and adding 100.

First, though, a player has to understand the options market. That can take years, but here is a three-paragraph primer:

Options are the right to buy or sell a security (a stock or a commodity such as pork bellies, orange juice or football indexes) at a specific price some time in the future. Call options are options to buy. Put options are options to sell.

Options traders bet that the underlying stock or commodity will rise or fall in price. If it rises, holders of call options can cash in at higher prices. If it falls, owners of put options can sell at lower prices.

The “strike price” is the price (or football index level) one trader bets will be achieved and another bets won’t. Call options increase in value as the price rises above the strike price. Put options are worth more as the price falls below it.

So in the football market, the trader who buys a Super Bowl 106 call option is a winner as long as Washington is ahead by seven points or more. A 106 put is valuable if Buffalo is down five points or fewer. Traders buy or sell depending on the current score and their hunches as to what will happen.

Every player starts with 200 points of capital. No money changes hands, but the winner will get a trip to Paris.

The Wall Street Journal suggested a high-risk strategy predicated on a Washington rout: A Redskins rooter could buy a 120 call option early in the game, when the index is quoted at 102 to buy and 105 to sell. That might cost half a point. With 200 points to spend, a trader could buy 400 such options. Washington would have to win by at least 21 points for the strategy to work. If it beats Buffalo 47-20, the trader would be seven points up.

Deduct costs for a profit of 6.5 points, and multiply by 400 options for a hefty point total of 2,600.

“It is not a game of chance,” said Renaud Vielfaure, head of sales for Societe Generale’s options group. “The winner will be the person who can use his ability to think and to trade.”

The options game was devised by a Societe Generale staffer in Australia for a big Australia-France rugby game two years ago. It was played again in Paris last October, and adapted for football.

Vielfaure, who left the French Riviera for New York four years ago, admits he prefers tennis to football, but he insisted that “on Monday nights, it is my cup of tea.”

“It’s a fabulous game. It’s extraordinary to watch,” he said. “I discovered that here. I didn’t broadcast that in Europe.”