APE/AMC Arbitrage

Haven't seen any discussion of this on here but it's pretty well publicized elsewhere. AMC (the movie theater company) had that big "meme stock" price spike in 2021/2022 when retail investors where clamoring to buy shares; AMC took advantage of that by issuing new shares to meet demand and recapitalize the company. This went well - almost too well, in fact, as they exhausted the number of shares that they could issue and needed their shareholders to vote to authorize more. The trouble with that is that retail shareholders tend not to vote, and shares that didn't vote didn't count towards the vote count that was needed to authorize new shares, so AMC couldn't issue new shares. 

In a clever loophole, AMC created a new class of preferred shares with equivalent economic rights to those of the ordinary AMC shares. They gave each shareholder an APE as a special dividend, then sold APEs into the secondary market. In principle APE and AMC should trade at the same price since the underlying economic rights are equivalent, but there is a huge gap between the two: APE trades at about $1.60 now, whereas AMC is closer to $5. AMC (the company) plans to convert APE into shares of AMC (the stock) soon. 

There's been a lot of drama along the way, and I will not go into the whole saga here, but right now AMC is waiting on court approval of a lawsuit that they settled with their shareholders. Shareholders didn't like the idea of APE conversion so they sued, AMC said "okay, we'll give you 1 share for every 7.5 shares of AMC you own", shareholders said "OK", and now we're waiting for the court to formally approve it. My understanding is that the court will not block the settlement; they might change the terms to ensure fairness, but at some point we should see APE shares turn into AMC. The court date is settled for late June. 

This seems like an obvious mispricing and an easy way to make a buck. I think it would doom the company if they went back on their word to convert APE into AMC, and my understanding is that the road to conversion now is pretty clear - you could probably even say conversion is imminent. Who knows what the AMC price will be after conversion, but there seem to be some ways to profit off of this that are independent (to some extent) of the final convergence price: 

• Short AMC at ~4.70 and long APE at 1.60 (you are subject to volatility of borrow rates and to margin calls, but you capture the entire spread; need to long slightly more APE than AMC to account for dilution from settlement);

• Buy some puts on AMC ($1, $2, $3 strikes all work well) and hold the APEs.

• Buy some puts on AMC, sell some ATM/OTM calls on AMC, hold the APEs. 

Personally I've loaded up on $2 puts - September $2 puts traded for about $0.30, so I was able to get (a share of APE) + (an AMC $2 put) for a cost of less than $2/share. I've also sold some AMC calls, but haven't been super aggressive with that since I don't want to blow up my account (as I am technically selling naked calls right now). 

Just wondering if there is anything I am missing here, or if this is a fairly easy way for all us monkeys to earn some extra bananas. It's not like this is really a secret - the whole conversion has been dragging on for months and has been discussed at length, so I'm trying to figure out who the sucker is in this trade - me or my counterparty. 

Cheers.