A person familiar with the company's trading says that while buying put options might have helped to prevent additional losses, it wouldn't have reversed losses that had already occurred.
"That would be equivalent to freezing a loss at a certain point," the person said. "If you have losing futures positions and profitable options positions, you don't get to take out that money. What some people do is use the options profit as collateral to borrow money against, but by that first week of December, they had already used up their line of credit, so I don't know who was going to loan them money on the basis of those profitable positions."