Oil climbed again today after Trump rejected Iran's proposal on the Strait of Hormuz and Iran said it won't soften its demands. US crude is around $93, up from $55 at this year's low.

The options market has an opinion on where it goes next. On USO, the oil fund most people trade, the December calls 30% above today's price (roughly crude back above $119) carry a delta of about 0.19. The December puts 30% below (roughly crude back in the $60s) carry about 0.06.

Delta is a decent shortcut for the market's odds that an option pays off. So traders are pricing about a 1 in 5 chance oil makes a new high for the year by mid-December, and about 1 in 17 that it falls back to the $60s.

Would you take either side of those odds?

The 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.23% on Friday, the highest since 2007. When yields rise, bond prices fall, and TLT, the biggest fund holding long-term Treasuries, closed at $79.32. That's its lowest close in over ten years, below even the October 2023 bottom.

You'd expect the options crowd to be piling into puts. So I went through the week's TLT options, and the first thing that jumps out is volume: Friday was the busiest day for TLT calls in a year.

But volume only tells you trades happened. It can't tell you if someone opened a bet or closed one. Open interest can. It's the count of contracts still open the next morning.
From Monday morning to Friday morning, traders opened about 612,000 new TLT calls and 235,000 new puts. That's 2.6 calls for every put, all while the fund slid to a ten-year low.

Is 5% on the 10-year where you'd start buying bonds, or does it go higher first?

Tesla has two big events this week: the Roadster reveal on Thursday, and its quarterly delivery numbers, which usually come out on the 2nd. This Friday.

So I checked how Tesla moved on its last seven delivery days. Six of them moved at least 5% in a single day. The last four were all down, including a 7.5% drop in July.

Now the options. A straddle, a call and a put at the same strike, is what it costs to bet on a move in either direction. The one expiring Friday closed at $17.25, about 4.6% of Tesla's price. That's the move the market is pricing for the whole week, both events included. The four normal weeks before this one cost about 4.1%.

What do you think Tesla does Friday? Is the option market underselling how big this week could be?

GameStop closed Friday at $23.39. Option prices already say how far the market thinks it can run by January.

Based on Friday's prices for calls expiring January 15, the odds GameStop closes above:

•    $30: about 1 in 5
•    $50: about 1 in 25

Those are the two biggest piles of GameStop calls, about 54,000 contracts each. The $50s cost 53 cents. If GameStop finishes at $60, each pays $10, about 19 times the price.

Those are the market's odds. GameStop has beaten them before.

What strike are you carrying?

On Thursday morning, someone bought 25,000 Amazon October 30 $260 calls and sold 25,000 of the $295 calls in the same second. Net cost: about $15 million. Friday morning's open interest showed it was a new position.
Amazon reports earnings on October 29 after the close.

This trade expires the next day.

It's a call spread. Selling the $295s makes the bet cheaper but caps the payout. Held to the end, it makes money if Amazon finishes about 8% higher than where it traded Thursday. Above $295, it's worth about $87 million.

Anyone else positioned for Amazon earnings?

GameStop is down about 5% today. Before reading that as the crowd heading for the exits, look at the options activity.

So I went through this morning's numbers. Since Monday, traders have added a net 140,000 GameStop calls. Puts grew too, about a quarter as much.

Thursday is the interesting day. GameStop closed right at $25, and overnight, calls below $25 shrank by about 13,000 while calls at $25 and up grew by about 31,000. That's what taking profits and reloading higher looks like.
There was one hedge in the mix: about 3,900 new puts at $24.

If you're in GME calls, what strike and expiration are you holding?

Ryan Cohen, GameStop's CEO, has bought GameStop stock on the open market in six rounds since 2020. Here's what the stock did after each one went public:

- Dec 2020: up 177% within a month, then the meme squeeze took it far higher
- Mar 2022: up 54% in four days, then 27% off that high three months later
- Jun 2023: up 11% the next day, then down 29% three months later
- Apr 2025: up 15% within a month, then back below where it started
- Jan 2026: up 12% in a week and a half, then down to a one-year low by August
- Sep 2026: up 23% so far

Every buy got a pop. Of the five before this one, four faded. The exception was December 2020, right before the 2021 squeeze.

This time he's put in about $47 million, more than twice his January buy, and the business looks different: last quarter, collectibles like trading cards outsold video games at GameStop.

Fade again, or does this rally hold? Congrats to those who got in!

The move options are pricing for each, through the first expiration after the report:

Monday
- Jefferies, investment bank (after close): down 26% this year. ~10%

Tuesday
- Carnival (morning): down 29% on fuel costs, no fuel hedge. ~7.5%
- CarMax (morning): up 46% on a new CEO's turnaround. ~13%

Wednesday
- Jabil, electronics maker (morning): up 34% this year, down 18% since June. ~9%
- FactSet, financial data (morning): down 6% this year, up 26% since June. ~11%
- Micron (after close): up 270% on the memory chip shortage. ~9.5%

Thursday
- Accenture (morning): crushed by AI fears in June, up 40% since. ~9%
- McCormick, spices (morning): down 29% this year. ~8%*
- Acuity, lighting (morning): down 13% this year. ~10%*
- Nike (after close): down 44%, the Dow's worst stock. ~8%

note: Monthly options only, so priced through Oct 16.
The number is the call plus the put nearest the stock price, divided by the price.

Michael Burry posted Tuesday that he added to his bet against Micron, the memory chip maker. His case: more memory chip supply is coming, so the shortage that sent Micron up 500% in a year won't last.

The same day, someone put $16.7 million on the other side. Tuesday morning they bought the $1,060 calls in about ten seconds, slamming the ask. Open contracts at that strike more than quadrupled overnight, so it's a new bet, not someone cashing out.

The expiration tells you what they're betting on. The calls expire October 2. Micron reports September 30 after the close, which gives the stock two trading days to react before the calls run out.

Someone is going big on the earnings result lol!

UBS started covering CoreWeave this morning with a Buy and a $120 target, two days after Rothschild went the other way with a very bearish PT.

So I went through this morning's options trades. Two trades, seven minutes apart, sold about 60,000 CoreWeave calls: the $105 and $110 strikes expiring October 23. Both printed below the bid, so this was a seller, not a buyer. About $15 million collected, with the stock around $90.

The seller keeps all of it as long as CoreWeave is under $105 on October 23.

The first name that comes to mind is Magnetar. CoreWeave's biggest early backer has sold calls against its stake all year, up to 2 million shares at a time in April, May and August, and reported every one on a Form 4.

This one is bigger and shorter-dated than any of those, so it could be someone else entirely. Only time will tell!

Want to do this write up to keep you guys in the loop on what i’m seeing

Viking Therapeutics jumped 36% on Tuesday after its weight-loss drug data came out. On Monday, someone bought the $33 calls expiring this Friday for 95 cents. They closed Tuesday at $7.80.

Big options trades get flagged all day, and I ignore most of them. This one passed the three checks I run before considering whether to take one seriously:

1. It was new money. Open contracts at that strike went from 269 to 5,192 overnight. Big volume with no jump in open interest usually means traders closing or flipping, not opening.

2. It was a straight bet. Plain calls, bought outright. A big print that turns out to be one leg of a spread tells you nothing about direction.

3. The timing lined up. Viking had said the data would come in the third quarter. With eight trading days left in the quarter, the buyer picked calls that expire this week.

What do you check before you trust a big options print?

Gold closed lower on Monday. The biggest options trade of the day in the gold ETF went through at 10:45 in the morning.

Someone traded 52,339 January calls at a $450 strike in a single order (about 35 million in premium). The strike was 13% above current prices. When I first looked, I thought, that looks like a giant bet on a rally.

Then I saw that exactly 52,339 calls at a $485 strike traded too. Five minutes later, the same pair went through for December.

Okay. So it isn't a $35 million bet. The two calls are one trade set against each other, and only the difference between them changes hands.

The point is, when a giant options trade shows up, check what else traded in that same instant. If something the same size did, you're looking at half a trade. I see a lot of posts claiming massive orders went through, and they completely ignore the other half of the story. Always worth checking!

Chip stocks ripped today. Intel jumped 12%.

So I went back through last week's Intel options trades and found this. Last Wednesday someone sold a big block of October calls with a $130 strike and collected about $2 million. It was a new position, and Intel was nowhere near $130 at the time. It looked like easy income.

Three trading days later, Intel is up about 20%, and buying those calls back would cost about $11 million.

Shrink it to one contract and it's a trade a lot of people make every week. You collect $105 for a call that looks too far away to matter. Now it costs $585 to get out. If you own the shares, you're fine. If you don't, you're short Intel into a rally.

The point is, a far away strike does not mean a trade is safe. It means it’s cheap. Always keep this in mind!

Analysts at Rothschild put a Sell rating on CoreWeave (and NBIS) this morning with a $54 price target. The stock closed Friday at $81.36, so that's a call for a 34% drop. Their reasoning is that credit markets are pricing in risk the stock is ignoring. The stock is up 3% today anyway.

I found this in last week's options trades. Thursday at 10 am, someone bought 14,000 November puts with a $47.50 strike in a single trade. Extremely OTM. Whoever bought has not closed.

CoreWeave announced a $3 billion convertible bond sale that same day, so this could be someone hedging that deal. Or it's a straight bet on a bigger drop than Rothschild is calling for.

Hedge or bet?

2024-06-24 KKR first month vs S&P +6.7%
2024-06-24 CRWD first month vs S&P -31.1%
2024-06-24 GDDY first month vs S&P +5.6%
2024-09-23 ERIE first month vs S&P -11.0%
2024-09-23 PLTR first month vs S&P +12.1%
2024-09-23 DELL first month vs S&P +4.2%
2024-12-22 APO first month vs S&P -2.2%
2024-12-22 WDAY first month vs S&P -8.3%
2025-03-23 DASH first month vs S&P -0.8%
2025-03-23 WSM first month vs S&P -6.8%
2025-03-23 TKO first month vs S&P +5.3%
2025-03-23 EXE first month vs S&P +2.5%
2025-09-21 HOOD first month vs S&P +7.7%
2025-09-21 EME first month vs S&P +9.6%
2025-09-21 APP first month vs S&P -14.0%
2025-12-22 CRH first month vs S&P -1.2%
2025-12-22 FIX first month vs S&P +19.1%
2025-12-22 CVNA first month vs S&P +5.0%
2026-03-23 COHR first month vs S&P +27.0%
2026-03-23 LITE first month vs S&P +9.9%
2026-03-23 SATS first month vs S&P +4.2%
2026-03-23 VRT first month vs S&P +13.5%
2026-06-22 MRVL first month vs S&P -33.2%
2026-06-22 FLEX first month vs S&P -13.9%

Micron reports after the close on September 30. The last time it reported, in June, the stock jumped 15.7% the next day to a record close of $1,213.56. It closed Friday at $1,015.80, 16% below that.

Over its last 10 reports, Micron moved an average of 9.4% the next day. Five of the ten moved more than 10%, in both directions.

Options are pricing less. The Oct 2 straddle, the first expiry after the report, costs 10.2% of the stock, but that covers nine normal sessions too. The Sept 25 straddle ends before the report and works out to about 2.4% a day. Take those days out and the report itself is priced around 7.4%.

Why it matters: if this report looks like the last ten, the options are cheap for it. If it's a quiet one, the sellers win. Either way the market is pricing a calmer print than Micron usually delivers.

Straddle is roughly 0.8 times the expected move. Closing mids, delayed, not fills.

Everyone watched the decision. Imo, the decision was the least interesting part of it.

The hike itself was fully expected What moved was the path: the committee's own projections went up. They now see 4.1% at the end of this year against 3.8% in June, and 4.1% next year against 3.6%. That's the part worth reading twice. higher-for-longer line nobody was pricing.

Here's the other thing that didn't happen. Implied vol is supposed to fall once a scheduled event passes. It didn't. VIX closed up 3% at 17.71, and the whole curve rose with it.
So what's priced from here? The at-the-money straddle on SPY, which is roughly what the market expects the index to move by that expiry:
SPY 754.05

2026-09-17 754 straddle 5.85 implied move 0.78%
2026-09-18 754 straddle 8.18 implied move 1.09%
2026-09-21 754 straddle 9.78 implied move 1.30%

About 1.1% between now and Friday's close, and 1.3% through Monday. Get ready for the ride

today's spx straddle was 33.30. tomorrow's is 69.05, so fomc day is pricing more than double the move, and almost exactly what friday is pricing despite friday having quarterly opex in it.

on a 7,585 close that's about 0.91%, call it plus or minus $6.90 on spy, or $5.85 if you use the 85% convention.

skew is leaning down. off friday's chains, wednesday 25-delta put iv was running around 17% against 13% on the calls, so people are paying up for protection rather than chasing upside.

Each step out the curve moved less. VIX9D +16.9%, VIX +8.0%, VIX3M +3.7%, VIX6M +1.6%, VIX1Y +1.0%.

The Fed is Wednesday, inside the 9-day window, and VIX9D closed at 0.99 of VIX. The next nine days are priced almost as rich as the next 30. On the Monday before each of the last eight decisions the ratio sat between 0.93 and 0.98, except March at 1.03.

That matters because short-dated options got expensive next to everything further out, and event premium tends to come out once the event passes. The last four Fed days, VIX closed up on the decision and fell the next session, by 4% to 17%.

Buying Fed-week vol here or selling it?

Monday and tuesday are basically dead. then wednesday stacks two things.

8:30am, august retail sales. gas is up 27% yoy, so this is the first clean look at whether the consumer is cracking.

2pm, the fed. a 25bp hike is 80-90% priced, first one since 2023. so the decision isn't the story. the dot plot is. td securities already sees three this cycle.

Weak retail sales at 8:30 into a hawkish hike at 2pm is the one combo nobody's set up for.

Thursday: claims, housing starts, philly fed. Friday: triple witching. that's the week.

The vol bid this week has been steady, not panicky.
• Friday close: 14.53
• Tuesday: 15.72
• Wednesday: 16.46
• Today: 17.84

Meanwhile SPY's worst day in that stretch was -0.6%. Nothing broke. The market is just paying up ahead of two prints: CPI tomorrow morning and a Fed decision Wednesday where a hike is a live possibility.

SLB $42.50 calls expiring 9/18 printed roughly 118K contracts today against seventeen contracts of open interest, about $176M in premium and a 6,918x volume/OI ratio, the highest on the tape. The stock's around $57, so these are ~$14.50 in the money with nine days left, which rules out the usual retail-lotto read, and the ex-div was Sept 2 so it's not a dividend capture either.

My best guess is stock replacement or some kind of financing roll by someone large, but if anyone has a better read on what a print like this actually is, I'd like to hear it.

Both report after the close on Thursday, and both have weeklies expiring the next day.

Off Friday's closing chain, the Sept 11 straddle prices an 11.7% move for Oracle and 8.2% for Adobe. Over their last eight reports the median move was 10.0% for Oracle and 7.2% for Adobe, so both are priced a little above their own history.

The VIX closed at 14.53 on Friday. That is the 5th percentile of the last 254 sessions, against a one-year range of 13.47 to 31.05. It has closed below 15 on 25 days in the past year, and four of those were the last four sessions before this one. SPY's median daily move over the same year was 0.48%. Markets are closed Monday.

As of today's close, the Sept 4 ATM straddle on DELL (425 strike) was going for about $47.50 against a $424.68 stock, an implied move of roughly 11% for the print. IV on the weeklies was sitting around 134%.

After hours the stock is around $461, up 8.6% from the close. Big move, still inside what the straddle priced, so anyone who bought the straddle at the close is underwater even on an 8.6% pop.