John Thain Takes the Top Spot at CIT Group

However, "There were a lot of good leaders that we interviewed but in the end, John Thain was the Olympic athlete," explained retired Vice Adm. John Ryan, a CIT director.

The 54-year-old Thain is scheduled to start work Monday at CIT Group. His salary will total $500,000, plus restricted shares that are currently worth $5.5 million. Roughly $2.5 million of those shares will be untouchable for a one-year period, and the rest of the shares will be held in limbo for three years. (In other words, Thain will have plenty of cash to finance a couple of handsome George IV chairs to decorate his new office.)

Controversial or not, traders have pushed CIT to an early gain of more than 3%. The stock has jumped above short-term resistance at its 10-day moving average, but is still facing pressure from its 20-day trendline.

Meanwhile, option volume has ballooned to three times the norm. Most active is CIT's July 32 call, where 12,309 contracts have changed hands so far. Open interest at this narrowly out-of-the-money strike currently stands at just 23 contracts, so it's safe to say that new calls are being opened at this strike.

However, with several large blocks trading at the bid price, it's likely that a healthy portion of these calls have been sold to open -- representing neutral-to-bearish bets on CIT's intermediate-term price action.

Elizabeth Harrow is a senior equities analyst and financial writer in the research department at Schaeffer's Investment Research. She is featured in the video series Schaeffer's Daily Q&A on SchaeffersResearch.com.