It looks like we’re going to find out Caesars’ fate in about one week from now. The actual report determining what Caesars did, from a legal perspective at least, is going to be filed any day now, and it will be under seal until March 14 when a redacted version with a bunch of black lines through some of the content will be released to the public to feast on. In the following weeks, those black lines will be removed and we can all see the full report.

No one is going to read it of course because we’ll all know the basic answer seconds after the initial release. Not to mention, the report will be based on a review of 8.8 million pages of documents including interviews of 70 witnesses. It’s sure to be riveting I bet. If anyone ever doubted the efficiency of markets over red tape, think of 8.8 million pages of legalistic nonsense being compacted into a single market response in a fraction of a second. One market movement will tell us in less than a second what those 8.8 million pages ultimately amount to.

The question isn’t whether or not Caesars hid assets from bondholders in an underground financial nuclear fallout shelter while sticking all its debt on a toxic barge to sink in the middle of the Pacific. It’s obvious that is what they did, practically. The issue is whether they did it in a convoluted and legal enough way to get away with it. And that’s what we’ll find out in one week or so.

So far investors are betting on a bad outcome for the beleaguered casino. Options on CZR expiring on March 18th, about 4 days after the publication of the initial redacted report, show much heavier open interest on the Put side over the Call side. At the $7 strike (CZR is now trading at around $8.75, March 7) the Put/Call ratio is nearly 3 to 1. The full open interest ratio over all strikes for March 18 is 7708/3612, over 3 to 1. That ratio looks like it’s going to get even more skewed to the bearish side as the week progresses and the initial release of the report gets closer.