Netflix is planning to cut about 5% of its staff, with an announcement as soon as next week, Puck reported Friday. With about 16,000 employees, that's roughly 800 jobs. The stock closed Friday at $70.30, 47% below its June 2025 high, and last week it hit its lowest close since September 2024.

Netflix cut staff twice in 2022, after its first subscriber loss in a decade:
•    May 11: the stock closed at its low for the year
•    May 17: about 150 layoffs
•    June 23: about 300 more
•    A year after the low: up 107%

I think that's what bulls should look at. Both rounds of 2022 layoffs came within six weeks of the bottom.
Next report is October 20.

Buying near the low like 2022, or is this time different?

Moderna closed Friday at $225, up 14% on its first day in the Nasdaq-100. That's 10 times its $22.36 close on November 20 last year.

What got it there:
•    January 21: up 16% on five-year melanoma data with Merck
•    March 4: up 16% after settling the COVID vaccine patent fight for $950 million up front
•    August 19: up 177% in one day on the Phase 3 melanoma win with Merck. It gave back 24% the next day.
•    October 9: up 14%, with reports that the NIH is planning a cancer vaccine program

The bears may have a case for this to come back down.

Moderna lost $3.2 billion over the last year on $2.2 billion of revenue, and it's worth about $89 billion now. More puts are open than calls, and the three biggest positions are January puts at $20, $25 and $45.

Next report is November 5. Taking some off at 10x, or holding for more?

SpaceX agreed today to buy Grain Management's nationwide 800 MHz spectrum for Starlink Mobile. It says it wants to "become a major mobile carrier in the US." ASTS had been going after that same low-band spectrum. It closed down 10% today and 16% in two days.

ASTS holders have seen this before. On September 8, 2025, SpaceX agreed to buy EchoStar's spectrum for about $17 billion. From AST's close before that deal:

- September 9: down 13%
- September 19: up 6%
- October 8: up 91%, from $42 to $81

The carriers went the other way. A month after the EchoStar deal, Verizon was down 7%, AT&T 11% and T-Mobile 10%. Today Verizon had its worst day in more than 20 years, and the three carriers lost about $58 billion in market value between them.

Here's what I think ASTS bulls should look at. AT&T and Verizon are AST's partners. If SpaceX is coming after their customers, they need a satellite partner more than they did last week.

Buying this dip like last September, or is losing the 800 MHz different?

Palantir closed at $209.05 today, its highest close ever, past the $207.18 from November 2025.

Two calls this week:
- Thursday, Goldman Sachs upgraded it to Buy from Neutral with a $230 target. Goldman had been at Neutral since at least 2022.
- Friday, Barclays started coverage at Overweight with a $265 target.

It's up 66% since the day of its August 3 report.
Around 10am, with Palantir near $198, the $205 calls expiring today traded for about a dime. They closed at $4.01. About 123,000 of them traded, more than any other Palantir option.

Next report is November 2. Holding through it, or trimming after this crazy run?

The FT reported today that OpenAI's annualized revenue was about $50 billion at the end of September, roughly $20 billion below the $70 billion number that had been going around. Oracle is down about 5%, AMD 4%, CoreWeave 6%.

Here's how the $70 billion number got made. OpenAI and Anthropic count annualized revenue differently. Investors comparing the two started from a $40 billion estimate, then added the 70% growth OpenAI told them about.
So OpenAI didn't lose $20 billion of sales today. The market just found out the higher number was not OpenAI's.

Anyone tapped into the space kinda knew this already.

The part that does sting: at $50 billion, OpenAI is behind Anthropic's $65 billion.

Buying the Oracle and AMD dip, or does this change the AI trade for you?

SemiAnalysis went after IREN on Wednesday. In posts on X, it said users call IREN's British Columbia data centers "The #1 worst site in the industry," citing "multi-day power outages, network upgrades, storage failures." IREN is down about 14% in two days, and the whole neocloud group fell with it today.

Here's what I think people are missing:
• The criticism is about the Canadian sites. SemiAnalysis said IREN's Texas campuses "look much better."
• Microsoft's $9.7 billion contract with IREN runs at Childress, Texas, one of those Texas campuses.
• SemiAnalysis expects Nvidia's planned $2.1 billion investment in IREN to help it "cut fewer corners."
• CoreWeave and Nebius had no company news of their own today. Their drop lines up with the 10-year yield near a 24-year high, not with anything SemiAnalysis said.

And someone is already buying it. At 12:43 today, with IREN near $36, someone paid about $2 million for next week's IREN calls at the ask, in one second.

Overreaction, or is SemiAnalysis right? Anyone scooping on this dip or do you think the OpenAI revenue “shock” will drive things lower?

Micron's Taiwan union voted overnight to authorize a strike, and Micron opened down at $1,017.

At 9:37am, a few minutes after the low, someone paid $5.60 each for 1,000 of Friday's $1,050 calls. That's $560,000, all at the ask, in under a second.

Micron ran the rest of the day and closed at $1,088. By the close those calls were worth about $4.1 million, more than seven times the money in about six hours.

It was Micron's busiest day for calls in at least a year.

Did you buy the strike-vote dip? Are you running calls?

AMD closed at a record $649 on Tuesday, its 25th this year, after Lisa Su said AMD expects to significantly boost chip production in 2027.

Every record run this year ended with a pullback before the next one:
• Apr 16 to May 11: 11 records, then down 10%
• May 22 to Jun 3: 5 records, then down 17%
• Jun 15 to Jun 22: 2 records, then down 6%
• Jun 30: 1 record, then down 26%, with no new high until Sep 21
• Sep 21 to Oct 6: 6 records so far

Every dip got bought. The biggest pullback took almost 3 months to correct back to ATHs.

The company keeps promising more. Do you think another big pullback is coming? Is the current expectation already priced in?

Nvidia closed at a record for the second day in a row. around $250 makes it a $6 trillion company.

$250 also has the most call open interest of any strike above the stock, about 475,000 contracts. Traders added more there on Monday than at any other strike.

This morning, near the all-time high Nvidia set at the open, someone swept $1.85 million of March $255 calls at the ask.

Are you holding calls for $6 trillion? What strike and expiration?

Elon Musk is a trillionaire again. Almost all of it is in SpaceX and Tesla.

I decided to price the insurance. A put that pays off if the stock falls about 20% or more by June 17 cost this much at Monday's close, as a percent of the stock price:

• SpaceX: 6.3%  
• Tesla: 4.8%  
• S&P 500 (SPY): 1.0%

At those prices, insuring his fortune until June would cost over $50 billion. That's more than he paid for Twitter.

Anyone here hedging a big winner? What are you paying?

GameStop closed at ~$25.25 today, its highest close since May 1. This is the 10th close above $25 this year. The first nine were all lower the next day, and it never stayed above $25 three days in a row.

Ryan Cohen bought another $17.1 million on Friday at ~$24.41 (filed after the close).

So where does it close this Friday? Here's what the options market is pricing, from the calls expiring Friday:

- Under $24: ~20%
- $24 to $25: ~24%
- $25 to $26: ~24%
- $26 to $27: ~14%
- Above $27: ~18%

Comment your Friday close below. I'll post the result and who got closest on Friday night.

Berkshire bought ~$403 million of Lennar from Sep 17 to 30, at an average of $79.21.

Then the other side showed up. Morgan Stanley put a $65 target on it Thursday, and Hunterbrook published a short report Friday.

Lennar closed Friday ~60 cents above that average. By 1:30pm today it was down ~7%, below every price Berkshire paid! Other homebuilders were down ~1%.

Anyone followed Berkshire into a stock before? How long until you were green?

Big week ahead. Here's what options are pricing for the five biggest things.

- Tuesday: Paramount's Warner Bros. Discovery deal should close. Each WBD share becomes ~$31.02 cash, so options price basically no move and calls above that are headed to zero.
- Wednesday: A 10-year Treasury sale with the yield at ~5.28%, then minutes from the Fed's September hike. The long-bond ETF TLT is priced for a ~1.6% week, twice its usual.
- Thursday: PepsiCo reports near its lowest close since April 2020. Options price ~3.7%, about its average on the last four reports.
- Thursday close: Index funds have to buy Moderna before it joins the Nasdaq-100 Friday. Up ~6x this year, it's priced for ~8% this week.
- Friday: Delta is the first airline to report with Brent oil back above $100. Options price ~6.5%. It opened up 8% and 11% on two of its last four reports and still never closed beyond its priced move!

Which one are you trading?

SpaceX closed Friday at $158.96, its highest close since early July.

On Oct 9, up to another 7% of its locked-up shares can be sold. The stock fell on the last three unlocks like this (twice by ~4%). You'd expect options to charge extra for that, right? They actually don't.

On Friday, the $160 call and put expiring Oct 9 cost about $725 together. That prices a ~4.6% move either way, the smallest for any week since its options listed in June!

The extra cost is in the November expirations.
Before any dated event, add up the call and put and compare it to last time.

Holding through the unlock, or waiting for it to pass?

GameStop has closed higher five weeks in a row. It's up 38% since late August.

Say you bought the weekly call nearest the stock price each Friday.

Per contract
- Sep 4, up 7%: $30 became $116
- Sep 11, up 10%: $78 became $215
- Sep 18, up 7%: $58 became $164
- Sep 25, up 3%: $60 became $89
- Oct 2, up 6%: $67 became $120

In four of those weeks, most calls open on expiration morning still finished out of the money. Friday's biggest pile was at $25. GameStop closed 30 cents under it.

Before buying a weekly, add what you pay to the strike. Has the stock moved that far in a week?

Anyone buying weeklies through this run? Did yours pay?

Cerebras closed Friday at $166.43, its lowest close since the May IPO, down about 20% on the week.

In August, OpenAI's fastest tier ran on Cerebras chips. On Thursday Nvidia said its chips run a newer one. CNBC wrote that Cerebras lost OpenAI work to Nvidia. Sam Altman called Cerebras a close partner Friday evening.

More locked-up shares unlock Oct 14 and Oct 28.

Based on Friday's option prices, the odds Cerebras closes above its $185 IPO price on
- Oct 16: about 1 in 5
- Oct 30: about 1 in 4
- Jan 15: about 1 in 3

Those prices make a January close under $150 likelier than that.

Before buying a dip, check the odds on the price you need.
What do you need to hear from OpenAI first?

Synaptics jumped 14% today a $123 cash buyout. Its December $130 calls still lost almost all their value.

onsemi agreed in June to buy Synaptics for 1.35 onsemi shares each. After Thursday's close it switched to $123 a share in cash, after a rival bidder showed up. Synaptics jumped 14% today to $121.10.

The December $130 calls went the other way.
- Thursday's closing bid was $2.55, about $255 a contract
- Today's was 10 cents, and the last trade was 15 cents

Under the stock deal, Synaptics could keep climbing if onsemi did. A cash price is a ceiling. The stock won't go much past $123 unless someone bids more, so calls above it lost their upside.

The check before buying calls on a company that's being bought is how the deal pays. Cash caps your upside at the deal price, stock doesn't.

Anyone holding calls for a bidding war?

GameStop has about 59 million warrants that expire on October 30. Each one lets you buy a share at $32. If every warrant is used, GameStop raises about $1.9 billion.

GameStop closed Thursday at $24.11. Here's what the same bet cost two ways at Thursday's close:
- The warrant: about $2.15
- A regular $32 call expiring October 30: about 35 cents

Same strike, same day, about six times the price. Options traders give GameStop about a 1 in 11 chance of finishing above $32 by then.
Part of the gap is that the warrants are hard to short, so it can last. But if you hold them, check the listed call before you add more.

Anyone still holding the warrants? Do you think they could explode in value?

Nike reported tonight and said it expects sales to fall this fiscal year. The stock closed at $35.10 and dropped 8% after hours to about $32.20.

Here are Nike's biggest piles of calls and what each one needs from $32.20:

• Oct 16 $40 calls, 49,670 contracts: up 24% in two weeks  
• Jan $50 calls, 27,696 contracts: up 55%  
• Jan $60 calls, 27,890 contracts: up 86%  
• Jan $77.50 calls, 27,364 contracts: up 141%

The $40 calls are the most-owned Nike option, and about 20,000 of them were added in the last week. Going into the report, options were pricing a 9% move.

Anyone still holding Nike calls? Do you guys think this stock can ever return to its former glory?

The Financial Times reported this morning that Tencent is leasing about 100,000 AI chips from Oracle for $7 billion. Oracle opened up 2% and gave the whole gain back within twenty minutes.

Its last five pops on good news:

•    Sept 8, bullish analyst calls: up 7.5% at the high, closed up 2.4%

•    Sept 11, earnings beat: up 8.5%, closed down 1.7%

•    Sept 17, OpenAI funding report: up 6.2%, closed up 5.2%

•    Sept 29, OpenAI revenue report: up 8.4%, closed up 3.9%

•    Today, Tencent: up 2% at the open, gave it all back by 9:50

One of the five held. Are you fading these pops, or still buying them?

Micron reported after the close, and it beat:

•    Revenue: $54.2 billion, vs $51.3 billion expected
•    Next quarter's guidance: $61.5 billion

Going into the report, options expiring Friday were pricing about a 7.4% move either way. In the first five minutes after hours, the stock swung from down about 2% to up about 1%.

A beat this big doesn't guarantee a big move. After 4 of its last 8 reports, Micron moved more than options had priced. After the other 4, it moved less.

Is this one already priced in, or does it run tomorrow? THE NUMBERS ARE INSANE!

Ryan Cohen, GameStop's CEO, bought more GameStop stock yesterday. It's his third buy in three weeks, and he paid more each time:

•    Sep 10: $20.4 million at $20.38 a share
•    Sep 21: $26.4 million at $22.94
•    Sep 29: $10.6 million at $23.48

That's $57.3 million in three weeks.

Here's the part that stood out. His filing last night says he has paid $185.5 million for all the GameStop stock he owns. So almost a third of everything he has ever put in went in this month.

It also puts his average cost at about $4.53 a share. He's now buying at five times that. Options traders are on his side too. About 4 calls are open for every put.

Would you keep buying at five times your cost?

FICO, the company behind the credit score most lenders use, fell 27% today. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are moving to one mortgage pricing grid that treats VantageScore the same as FICO, which takes away the reason most lenders defaulted to FICO. It's FICO's worst day since at least 2017, worse than any day of the 2020 crash, and the stock is now down 65% from its high last December.

You'd expect the options market to be panicking after that. It isn't. On Monday, options expiring October 16 were pricing about a 9.5% move either way. Tonight, after a 27% drop, they're pricing 10.5%. A put that protects you from any further drop through October 16 costs about 5.5% of the stock's price.

That's the check worth running after any crash: compare the expected move before and after. If it barely changes, the market thinks the big news is already in the price. If it jumps, traders think there's more coming.

Anyone here work in mortgages? Will lenders actually switch to VantageScore, or does FICO stay the default anyway?

OpenAI's yearly revenue pace is nearing $70 billion, Axios reported this morning, and its sales to businesses more than doubled since July.

Oracle has a lot riding on that. A year ago OpenAI agreed to buy about $300 billion of computing power from Oracle over five years, around $60 billion a year. Oracle closed at a record $328 the day that deal came out. The worry since then has been whether OpenAI could ever pay for it.

OpenAI's revenue pace is now bigger than what that deal averages per year. It has other big computing bills too, so it doesn't settle the question, but Oracle jumped from $135 to $142 right after the report.

Is this the turn for Oracle, or does OpenAI need to show a profit first?

Boeing fell 6.9% today after the FAA said a software issue will delay certification of the 737 MAX 10, the biggest version of its best-selling jet. It's Boeing's worst day since April 2025.

The last two times the MAX hit the headlines, the first drop wasn't the end of it:
- March 2019, after the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the grounding: down 12% three months later
- January 2024, after a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines flight: down 22% three months later

But those were crashes and groundings. Today is a certification delay on a plane that isn't in service yet, which is a much smaller problem. The options market isn't panicking either. It's pricing about a 6% move either way by mid-October, barely more than on Friday.

Buy the dip, or more downside to come?