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from the archive

What we've been trading.

Issue

Jul 16

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0DTE

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Backwardation

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Options Trading

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Options Analytics

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SKHY Options: The Biggest Trades Leaned Bearish

SK Hynix options began trading Tuesday, and the opening session looked very different from what many expected. Rather than a wave of speculative call buying, Cboe LiveVol data cited by CNBC showed the most active directional flow was call selling, with the seven largest option prints of the session all classified as bearish. The biggest appeared to be the sale of more than 2,200 July 17 $180 calls at roughly $9 each, representing about $2 million in premium collected.

The stock has been a ride. Priced at $149, the ADRs opened at $170, surged more than 20% Tuesday as options and leveraged ETFs went live, then reversed hard. SKHY traded near $163 Thursday afternoon after Seoul closed 11.5% lower in an Asian chip rout, roughly 15% off Tuesday's close in two sessions. The bulls have not gone quiet: Barclays initiated at Overweight this week.

Five Weeklies, Two Days In

Volume was solid rather than spectacular. CNBC counted about 150,000 contracts by midday Tuesday, more than the VanEck Semiconductor ETF but under a third of Micron's, and the full session finished north of 218,000 by other counts. One explanation for the muted call buying: a dozen leveraged single-stock ETFs launched the same day and absorbed much of the speculative flow. Desks expected weeklies to be the next catalyst. They arrived fast, five of them, July 24 through August 28, hitting the board Thursday morning.

The Vol Cliff

We pulled ATM implied volatility for every listed SKHY expiration from the TradingBlock platform Thursday, hours after the weeklies listed, with the stock near $165. The front contract, then one day from expiration, quoted 179%, a ±$14 expected move into Friday's close. From there the curve falls off a cliff: the new weeklies priced the coming weeks between 93% and 117%, September near 113%, December near 104%, fading toward 90% by the end of 2027.

TradingBlock Now · Interactive

The SKHY Vol Cliff

ATM implied volatility across the SKHY board, snapshotted July 16, hours after five weekly expirations listed. Hollow points are the new weeklies. Tap any point for detail.

Source: TradingBlock platform, midday July 16, 2026, SKHY near $165. Hollow points are weeklies listed July 16; those markets are hours old, so quotes are thin and the kinks around the August monthly reflect that. ATM implied volatility and ±1 standard deviation expected move per expiration. Snapshot only; live values change constantly. Not a forecast or a recommendation. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors.

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A curve sloping down this steeply has a name: backwardation. Near-dated contracts price higher implied volatility than longer-dated ones, which means lower future implied volatility is already built into the further expirations. If implied volatility falls that way in practice, long premium positions face a second headwind on top of direction. IV crush is what traders call that, and it means a call can be right on direction and still lose if volatility drops enough. SpaceX offers a recent parallel. Implied volatility on its options fell from near 160% at launch toward 110%, and as vega worked against long positions, many buyers on both sides of the market saw premiums decline even when the stock moved their way. Outcomes still varied by strike, expiration, and timing.

Earnings Are Now on the Board

SK hynix confirmed its second-quarter results call for July 29 in Seoul, the evening of July 28 in US markets. That makes the July 31 weekly the first expiration to capture the print, making the new weeklies more relevant. In Thursday's snapshot the August 14 weekly quoted 93% implied volatility against 124% at the August 21 monthly. Kinks like that can reflect the thin liquidity typical of newly listed expirations. Treat weekly quotes, and weekly fills, with care until volume builds.

What Open Interest Says

One caveat first, because it trips up a lot of traders. Open interest is not live. The OCC publishes it once a day after processing the prior session, so the numbers on your screen this afternoon reflect positions through yesterday's close. Volume in the next column over is live. Two different clocks, side by side.

As of Wednesday's close, open interest was concentrated in downside puts and higher-strike calls. The July 145 puts held more than 37,000 contracts, by far the biggest line on the board, and the July 175 through 200 calls held several thousand apiece. That tracks with the debut session, where Bloomberg reported the $185 call was the single most active contract and the $145 puts were next. Open interest shows where contracts are open, not who is long or short them, so it says nothing about whether those lines are outright positions, spreads, covered stock, or dealer inventory. What it does mark is where the market has built. Whether those concentrations survived Thursday's slide will not be confirmed until the next OCC update, which is why volume against open interest is worth watching in a name this young. Read our option chain explained guide if those columns are new to you.

Hard to Borrow, and It Matters

As of Thursday's board, SKHY was flagged hard to borrow. Shares to short are scarce and expensive, which props up put prices and makes the arbitrage that would normally pin the ADR to its Seoul parent more difficult and expensive. Rich can stay rich, and the ADRs have traded at a wide premium to the Seoul shares since the debut.

The Skew: What Protection Costs

Implied volatility is not one number per expiration. It changes strike by strike, and that shape, the skew, shows where premium is richest. In the same Thursday snapshot the expiring July puts were extreme: near 156% at the money, 182% at the 150s, and 217% at the 135s, about 18% out of the money. Implied volatility increased as strikes moved lower. One month out the effect nearly vanished, with August puts clustered between 119% and 123%.

TradingBlock Now · Interactive

The Price of Protection, Strike by Strike

Put implied volatility by strike for the expiring July contracts against the August monthly. The July curve climbs hard into the downside strikes. August barely slopes. Tap any point.

JUL 17 · 1 DTEAUG 21 · 36 DTE

Source: TradingBlock platform, midday July 16, 2026, SKHY near $165. Out-of-the-money put implied volatility by strike. Snapshot only; live values change constantly. Educational only, not a recommendation. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors.

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Read together, the curves show downside protection priced at a steep premium in the front expiration and close to flat a month out. That shape changes the math on nearly every structure. Outright puts are the priciest protection, because steep skew is a surcharge on exactly the strikes buyers want. Put spreads lean against it, since the put sold is relatively richer than the put bought. Collars finance a put by selling a call, though quoted call premiums here carry a hard-to-borrow distortion. And put sellers collect the higher premium associated with that skew, taking on the corresponding downside risk, which is why cash-secured put writers see such large credits well below the market. The surcharge reflects elevated demand for near-term downside insurance. None of this is a recommendation. It is how the curve prices risk, and knowing where skew sits is the difference between paying it and collecting it.

Bullish, Bearish, or Neutral: How Traders Are Framing It

None of what follows is a recommendation. It is a description of the structures traders use when implied volatility runs this hot: long, short, or the trade that dominated day one, selling the premium itself. Pick a stance and tap through. Premiums are illustrative, drawn from Thursday's August board.

TradingBlock Now · Interactive

Bullish, Bearish, or Neutral: The High-Vol Playbook

Nine ways traders frame a stock near $165. All structures use the August 21 monthly, 36 days out, near 124% implied volatility on Thursday's board. Pick a stance, tap a structure. Education, not advice.

Payoffs at the August 21, 2026 expiration, per share, before commissions. Premiums rounded from the August board, midday July 16, 2026. Short options carry substantial risk, including assignment and losses that can far exceed the premium collected. Educational only, not a recommendation.

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Two threads run through all nine. Sellers are paid extraordinary rent, but the expected move is priced that wide for a reason, and the risk taken to collect it varies enormously by structure: a covered call caps upside on stock already owned, while a naked strangle carries undefined risk on both sides. Buyers face the mirror problem: every long option pays for a huge move, then fights the implied volatility normalization priced into the curve. The straddle price at any expiration is the cleanest read on what a move costs, and across this board it costs a lot everywhere.

Bottom Line

The first week delivered a seller's market at extreme volatility, an inverted volatility term structure pricing lower future implied volatility, and a borrow-constrained stock still carrying a premium to Seoul. Weeklies are live, earnings land July 29, and the vol curve will tell the story from here. We will keep tracking it. For launch-week context, start with our SKHY options playbook. Newer to this? Our free options trading course covers expected moves, spreads, and volatility from the ground up, and option strategies breaks down every structure above.

Sources: CNBC, day-one options flow and volume via Cboe LiveVol · Seeking Alpha, debut activity in the July 17 expiry · Seeking Alpha, implied volatility and leveraged ETF dynamics · Bloomberg, debut session most-active contracts · CNBC, Seoul shares fall 11.5% in Asia chip rout · Reuters, single-stock ETF filings. SK hynix, Q2 2026 earnings call scheduling (Form 6-K). Volatility term structure, expected moves, skew, and borrow status per the TradingBlock platform, midday Thursday, July 16, 2026; all option figures in this article reflect that snapshot unless noted. Open interest per the same platform, reflecting the OCC's most recent daily update as of the prior session's close.

Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Prior to buying or selling an option, a person must receive a copy of Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options, available from your broker or at theocc.com. This content is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation.

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Options Trading

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Issue

Jul 10

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Derivatives

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Options Trading

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SK Hynix Options Start Trading Tuesday. Here Is the Playbook.

SK Hynix priced 177.9 million American depositary receipts at $149 on Thursday night. The stock opened at $170 on the Nasdaq Friday morning, a 14% pop. The $26.5 billion raise is the largest US share sale ever completed by a foreign company, topping the record Alibaba set in 2014. Demand ran more than seven times the shares available. The debut valued the company around $1.27 trillion, which slots it in as the 11th largest name on US markets, just above Eli Lilly.

That alone would be a story. Here is why it matters more to options traders: Reuters reported Friday, citing sources familiar with the plans, that exchanges including Cboe and Nasdaq expect to list options on the new ADRs two business days after the debut. Count it out and contracts could be trading Tuesday, July 14.

New listings normally make traders wait. This one will not.

The mechanics first

Get the ticker right before Tuesday. The ADRs trade in when-issued mode under SKHYV through Friday. Regular-way trading begins Monday, July 13 under SKHY, per Nasdaq's listing notice. Each ADR represents one tenth of a Seoul-listed common share. The offering itself closes July 14, and the newly issued shares underlying the ADRs list on the Korea Exchange July 29.

Why these options are different

SK Hynix is not just another semiconductor name getting a US listing. It is the world's leading producer of high-bandwidth memory, the stacked DRAM that feeds Nvidia's AI accelerators. The company's own SEC filing puts its HBM share at 56.4%. Nvidia is the biggest HBM buyer, and the two companies announced a multiyear partnership in June when Jensen Huang visited Seoul.

Until Friday, a US options trader who wanted exposure to AI memory demand had a short menu: Nvidia, AMD, Micron, Broadcom, or a sector ETF like SOXX. SKHY adds the dominant supplier of the memory layer itself. If volume builds, SKHY slots directly into the core AI options complex.

What to expect when trading opens

New high-profile option listings follow a pattern. Implied volatility prints high, markets start wide, speculative call flow shows up early, and dealer hedging of that flow can push the stock around. Expect all of it here. The debut also lands after a rough stretch for chip stocks, so the first prints in SKHY vol will double as a live reading on how much fear or greed is left in the AI trade.

The freshest comp is SpaceX. Its options launched last month and drew record volumes almost immediately, proof that a hot new name can go from zero to one of the most active options boards on the tape in days.

One more wrinkle. With no trading history, IV rank and IV percentile will be useless on this name for months. There is no one-year range to compare against, so every read on whether SKHY vol is rich or cheap has to come from comps like Micron instead.

Since nobody can quote SKHY implied volatility yet, we built a tool for the wait. Set an IV level and see what the market would be pricing in. That expected move is what an at the money straddle is priced to capture. When real quotes print Tuesday, check your guess.

TradingBlock Now · Interactive

SKHY Expected Move Explorer

SKHY options are not trading yet. Pick an implied volatility and see what the market would price in. Score your guess when live quotes print.

ADR price ($)

Implied volatility · 85%

Expected move = price × IV × √(days ÷ 365). Thick bar is one standard deviation (about a 68% range), thin bar is two (about 95%). Illustrative only, not a forecast or a recommendation. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors.

The premium is its own trade

Here is the part most coverage is skipping. The ADRs priced at roughly a 3.1% premium to the Seoul shares. At Friday's open near $170, against a Seoul close around $1,445 per common share, the premium was closer to 18%. HSBC thinks it can run to about 20%.

Textbook arbitrage says a gap like that should close fast. This one may not, because the conversion mechanism only works freely in one direction. ADR holders can cancel their ADRs and take delivery of Korean shares. Going the other way, buying in Seoul and creating new ADRs, can require approval from Korean regulators. Discounts get arbed away. Premiums can stick.

That asymmetry matters for options pricing too. A persistent premium, and the possibility it compresses, is a source of ADR-specific volatility that has nothing to do with DRAM prices, the memory chips that drive SK Hynix earnings.

What comes next

The product wave is already forming. At least ten fund managers, including Direxion and ProShares, have filed to launch single-stock ETFs tied to SK Hynix. The market also widely expects the stock to join the Nasdaq 100 at the December rebalance, which would bring steady passive buying from index funds.

Then there is the valuation gap. FactSet data at the debut puts SK Hynix near 5.4 times forward earnings against roughly 6.7 for Micron, even though the market expects SK Hynix to grow revenue and earnings faster this year. Part of the bull case for the ADRs is that a US listing, index inclusion, and US-style coverage close that gap over time.

Bottom line

Tuesday is the date. Brand-new options on the dominant AI memory supplier, opening into elevated volatility, with an ADR premium dynamic underneath it that most participants have never traded. Know the mechanics before the first print. And if you want a refresher before Tuesday, our free options trading course covers everything from expected moves to spreads.

Sources

Nasdaq Trader, Data Technical News #2026-11 (ticker schedule and settlement) · Reuters, options expected two business days after debut · Reuters, single-stock ETF filings · Bloomberg, debut and offering size · SK hynix, listing announcement · CNBC, company profile and Nvidia partnership · Direxion, SEC prospectus for the Daily SK Hynix Bull 2X ETF. Market share per the company's SEC filing; valuation figures per FactSet data reported at the debut.

Options Flow

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Issue

Jul 9

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0DTE

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0DTE Options Just Set Records Across the Board

Cboe Global Markets reported record options trading volume for June 2026 in its monthly volume release published July 6. On June 5, 33.4 million contracts traded across the company's four options exchanges, a single-day total volume record. SPX options set a single-day record of their own that session, with 7.8 million contracts traded.

Behind the headline totals, the fastest-growing segment of the market is the contract with the shortest lifespan: options that expire the same day they trade.

Zero-days-to-expiration options, known as 0DTE, expire at the close of the same session in which they trade. The activity is not new: every option eventually reaches expiration day, and traders have always traded on it. What is new is the name and the frequency. A decade ago, same-day trading mostly meant expiration Friday, and nobody needed an acronym for it. Once expirations became a daily event, the industry adopted one. The June release included record monthly and quarterly average daily volume for SPX 0DTE, and since listed options have traded in the U.S. only since 1973, no earlier period has packed this much volume into contracts measured in hours.

The June Numbers

June's totals came in at 23.0 million contracts per day across Cboe's four exchanges, with the second quarter averaging 21.9 million, records on both counts. Multi-listed options, the standard equity and ETF contracts, ran 16.6 million per day against 11.8 million a year earlier, a 40.5% increase, while index options climbed 36.8% to 6.3 million.

AVERAGE DAILY VOLUME, CONTRACTS

June ADV vs. a year ago

Millions of contracts per day across Cboe's four options exchanges

11.8

+40.5%

16.6

4.6

+36.8%

6.3

Jun 2025multi-listed

Jun 2026multi-listed

Jun 2025index

Jun 2026index

Source: Cboe Global Markets, June 2026 volume report

Within the index complex, the same-day contract did most of the work. SPX 0DTE averaged a record 3.3 million contracts per day in June. For the second quarter it averaged 3.1 million per day against total SPX volume of 5.1 million per day, both records, putting same-day contracts at roughly 60% of SPX volume for the quarter.

Mini-SPX (XSP) options, the one-tenth-size version of the contract, set records of their own at 229 thousand contracts per day for the month and 195 thousand for the quarter. Records fell overnight as well: Cboe's Global Trading Hours session averaged 205 thousand contracts in June and 189 thousand for the quarter, both highs for the session.

How We Got Here

For most of the history of listed options, contracts expired once per month, on the third Friday. Cboe introduced weekly SPX expirations in 2005, added Wednesday expirations in 2016, and in 2022 began listing SPX expirations for every trading day of the week.

The 2022 expansion is where the curve steepens. 0DTE trading accounted for about 5% of SPX options volume in 2016. By 2023 the share had crossed 40%, and by 2025 SPX 0DTE was averaging 2.3 million contracts per day, or 59% of all SPX volume. The pattern held beyond SPX: across the broader U.S. options market, 0DTE reached 24.1% of total listed volume in 2025, up from 21.5% in 2024 and nearly double the 2022 share.

SPX 0DTE, CONTRACTS PER DAY

Average daily volume, by averaging window

Overlapping windows, not a timeline. June 2026 is the final month of Q2 2026.

2.3M

3.1M

3.3M

2025full-year average

Q2 2026quarterly record

June 2026monthly record

Source: Cboe Global Markets; 2025 average per Cboe year-end data

June's 3.3 million contracts per day sits well above the full-year 2025 average of 2.3 million, and the 2025 figure itself capped more than five-fold growth over the prior three years, a pace more consistent with a structural change in how the market trades than with a passing surge.

Who Is Trading 0DTE

Critics have tended to describe the boom as retail speculation. The exchange's own trade data complicates that reading. Cboe can see every SPX transaction, since all SPX options trade on its exchange, and its trade-level research puts retail at roughly 50% to 60% of SPX 0DTE volume.

What that retail flow looks like is the surprising part. More than 95% of 0DTE trades are executed in defined-risk formats, long options or spreads with a known maximum loss, and only about 4% of the volume involves naked short options. Typical structures include iron condors in low-volatility sessions, put spreads ahead of economic data, and call spreads on directional moves. Institutions use the same expirations to trim exposure around Federal Reserve decisions and other scheduled events, which keeps the flow moving in both directions.

That balance matters for market stability. With buyers and sellers roughly offsetting, net market maker gamma hedging has stayed near 0.2% of SPX daily liquidity, by Cboe's analysis, which helps explain why repeated predictions that 0DTE would destabilize the broader market have not come true.

Why Now, and What It Means

Part of the answer is cost. Commissions have fallen to near zero and SPX markets have tightened, which makes a same-day round trip cheap to execute. Part is precision, since daily expirations let a trader isolate a Fed meeting or an inflation report without holding exposure past the event. Analytics that were institutional-only a decade ago now ship standard in retail platforms. And cash-settled index options such as SPX and XSP are European-style with no early assignment, which removes one of the operational complications of same-day trading.

The segment's footprint now reaches well past the people placing the trades. Dealer hedging of same-day flow shapes intraday support and resistance, short-dated activity changes how implied volatility behaves in the final hours of a session, and each record month pulls more of the market toward shorter timeframes and defined-risk structures. June set a high bar. On the current trajectory, it may not stand for long.

Sources: Cboe Global Markets, June 2026 Monthly Volume and RPC Report (July 6, 2026); Cboe Insights, 0DTEs Decoded; Cboe and OCC year-end volume data as reported by Traders Magazine.

Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Before trading options, read The Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options. For educational purposes only; not a recommendation of any strategy or security.

Options Trading

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Issue

Jun 29

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Options Trading

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SPCX Options Are Pricing Moves Nearly Double NVDA's

SpaceX went public on June 12 under the ticker SPCX, and the first two and a half weeks have been a roller coaster: an open near $150, a close near $161 on day one, an all-time high of $225.64 on June 16, and an all-time low of $147.11 on June 23. As of June 29 the stock is trading around $156. The more interesting number is what the options market is quoting for where it could be a month, a year, and two years out, and those numbers are big.

For most of my career as an options broker I was constantly watching implied volatility and expected moves across hundreds of names. You develop a feel for what normal looks like at each expiration. SPCX stuck out. The premium on this chain runs well above what I am used to seeing on a stock this liquid. For context I pulled NVDA, a stock everyone accepts is volatile, for the same expirations. It isn't close. A month out, SPCX prices nearly twice the move the market wants on NVDA, and stays richer all the way out to two years. This is a brand-new listing, and the chain is telling you the market has very little settled about it.

The expected move, three ways

The cleanest way to read what the market expects is the at-the-money straddle: buy the call and the put at the strike nearest the stock price, add up what you pay, and that is roughly the move the stock has to make by expiration to break even. It is the price of the expected move, in dollars you would actually spend.

For SPCX, currently trading at $156:

The ~1 month expiration (32 days out) prints an at-the-money straddle of about $26.50, the 155 call plus the 155 put. That is roughly 17% of the stock's value in a single month. A buyer needs the stock to move more than $26.50 in either direction to break even. Note this expiration lands in late July, just before the company's first earnings report on August 6, so the biggest known catalyst sits just outside this window.

The ~1 year expiration (353 days out) prints a straddle of about $77, or roughly 49% of spot. The market is not expressing a view on direction here. It is saying the range of plausible outcomes a year out is very wide, wide enough that a near-50% round trip in either direction is on the table.

The ~2 year expiration (718 days out) prints a straddle of about $99, or roughly 63% of spot. That is a large number, but worth being precise about. It does not say the stock is a coin flip between zero and double. It says owning both sides of this name for two years costs you nearly two-thirds of the share price, which is what happens when you stretch a 60%-plus implied volatility across that much time. The takeaway is the width itself: a low-confidence view of where this lands two years out.

Why the number is this big

Three factors help explain the premium.

First, implied volatility on SPCX sits in the 70% to 80% range across the curve. NVDA, by comparison, runs in the low-to-mid 40s. SPCX is carrying roughly twice the implied volatility of one of the most volatile megacap names on the board.

Second, the float. This matters most for a new listing, and it is the real engine behind the number. Only about 4% to 5% of SpaceX shares trade publicly right now. The rest is locked up. A tiny float magnifies every move, because a small amount of buying or selling pressure swings the price hard. That is exactly what produced the run to $225 and the slide back to $147 inside two weeks. The options market sees that realized volatility and prices implied volatility to match.

Third, a calendar full of known catalysts, all of them mechanical. SpaceX joins the Nasdaq-100 on July 7, which forces index funds to buy the stock into that thin float regardless of price. First earnings land on August 6 and trigger the first wave of insider unlocks. From there, lockups release in stages through the fall, with a large block freeing up in December. The market is pricing a stock whose supply is about to change dramatically, on a known schedule. That is a recipe for rich premium at every expiration.

There is a second-order point worth its own sentence. As those lockups release and the float grows, day-to-day volatility in the name is widely expected to come down. A bigger float is harder to push around. So the elevated long-dated premium on this chain is priced against a supply picture set to loosen considerably. Whether the curve is pricing that correctly is exactly the debate an options trader should be having.

The NVDA comparison

I used NVDA's chain for the same three expirations as a benchmark, because NVDA is a stock everyone already understands is volatile. Same method for both: the at-the-money straddle as a percentage of the share price.

At ~1 month, NVDA's straddle is about $17 on a ~$196 stock, or about 9%. SPCX is at 17%.

At ~1 year, NVDA's straddle runs about 33%. SPCX is at 49%.

At ~2 years, NVDA's straddle runs about 47%. SPCX is at 63%.

Put it in a single ratio: at one month SPCX prices about 1.9 times NVDA's move, at one year about 1.5 times, and at two years about 1.3 times. The premium is widest now and compresses further out. That fits the story. The near-term chain is loaded with float-squeeze risk and a maiden earnings report, the exact things that should fade as supply unlocks and the company builds a track record. The market is paying up most for the part of the timeline it can see the least into.

SPCX is not being priced as a permanently wild stock. It's being priced as an unusually uncertain one right now, with that uncertainty expected to ease, just slowly, and never quite down to a name like NVDA even two years out.

What an options trader does with this

None of this is a recommendation, and the structures cut both ways.

If you like buying premium (long straddles, long calls, long puts) you are paying for that rich implied volatility. The expected move is wide, but wide because the options are expensive. The stock has to actually deliver moves larger than what is already priced for a long-volatility position to win.

If you like selling premium (covered calls, cash-secured puts, spreads) that same rich implied volatility is what you collect. The risk is the other side of the same coin: in a name that can move this much, a short option carries real tail risk, and defined-risk structures exist for exactly that reason. With known event dates on the calendar, a short premium position is short those events too.

The honest read is that SPCX's chain is not so much mispriced as uncertain-priced. The width of the expected move is the market admitting it does not know, against a float and a catalyst calendar both still unresolved. Your job as an options trader is to decide whether that uncertainty is overstated or understated, and to structure the position so that being wrong does not end you.

The bottom line

The options market is currently pricing SPCX to move about 17% in a month, 49% in a year, and 63% over two years, running 1.3 to 1.9 times the implied move of NVDA depending on the expiration. That is not a forecast of direction. It measures how little is settled about a two-week-old listing with a tiny float and a calendar full of supply-changing events.

For traders, the expected move is the price of admission either way. Whether you are paying it or collecting it, the first step is reading it correctly.

Sources

Figures sourced from live option chains as of June 29, 2026, with the underlying marked at $156.02. Implied moves are quoted as the at-the-money straddle, the combined cost of the nearest-strike call and put, expressed as a percentage of spot. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. This article is for educational purposes and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security or to employ any specific strategy.

Options Trading

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Built by a quant. Tested by a broker.

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Michael "Dr. Data" Rechenthin, PhD

Chief Innovation Officer

Michael "Dr. Data" Rechenthin, PhD, is Chief Innovation Officer at TradingBlock, where he leads the firm's quantitative research, AI, machine learning, and data analytics initiatives. Before TradingBlock, he was Managing Director of R&D at tastytrade, Chief Data Scientist at Small Exchange, and co-founded Quiet Foundation (acquired by IG Group). Earlier he was a specialist and market maker on the Chicago Stock Exchange.

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Michael Martin

Vice President of Market Strategy

Michael Martin is Vice President of Market Strategy at TradingBlock, where he focuses on options trading, market analysis, volatility, and investor education. A Registered Options Principal with nearly 20 years of industry experience, he previously worked as an options broker at thinkorswim, TD Ameritrade, and Charles Schwab before moving into financial media and content leadership roles.

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The content provided by TradingBlock Media LLC ("TBMLLC") through its TradingBlock Now platform is intended for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as trading or investment advice. We do not recommend any specific security, futures contract, transaction, or investment strategy. Trading securities involves a high degree of risk, and you could lose your entire investment. TBMLLC is not a licensed financial advisor, registered investment advisor, or broker-dealer and does not offer personalized investment or financial advice. The information provided does not take into account your individual financial situation, experience, or risk tolerance. TBMLLC will provide supporting documentation for any claims, statistics, or technical data upon request. Before trading securities, options, or futures, you should review the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options and the Day-Trading Risk Disclosure documents.

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What we've been trading.

SKHY Options: The Biggest Trades Leaned Bearish

Five Weeklies, Two Days In

The Vol Cliff

The SKHY Vol Cliff

Earnings Are Now on the Board

What Open Interest Says

Hard to Borrow, and It Matters

The Skew: What Protection Costs

The Price of Protection, Strike by Strike

Bullish, Bearish, or Neutral: How Traders Are Framing It

Bullish, Bearish, or Neutral: The High-Vol Playbook

Bottom Line

SK Hynix Options Start Trading Tuesday. Here Is the Playbook.

The mechanics first

Why these options are different

What to expect when trading opens

SKHY Expected Move Explorer

The premium is its own trade

What comes next

Bottom line

Sources

0DTE Options Just Set Records Across the Board

The June Numbers

How We Got Here

Who Is Trading 0DTE

Why Now, and What It Means

SPCX Options Are Pricing Moves Nearly Double NVDA's

The expected move, three ways

Why the number is this big

The NVDA comparison

What an options trader does with this

The bottom line

Research you'd pay for. Sent free, every week.

Data-driven trade ideas

Market structure decoded

Strategies you can actually trade

Built by a quant. Tested by a broker.

Michael "Dr. Data" Rechenthin, PhD

Michael Martin

20+Years in the businessBuilt by Chicago options traders. Backed by a U.S. trade desk that actually picks up.

One email a week. Zero fluff.

Leaving?

20+
Years in the business
Built by Chicago options traders. Backed by a U.S. trade desk that actually picks up.