r/ShortStocks

ASTS trade card · OptionWhales daily thesis

The bull case for AST SpaceMobile has always run through other people's subscribers: carrier deals with AT&T and Verizon instead of a retail land grab. SpaceX getting FCC authorization to build a 15,000-satellite direct-to-cell network on its own spectrum attacks that from the one angle the model can't route around, which is why ASTS slid harder than the rest of the space group on Friday, October 9, 2026 (Investing.com, https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/why-is-ast-spacemobile-stock-sliding-today-93CH-4941319). With the stock at $48.42 at 13:08:13 ET, a 3,518-contract put calendar printed in one burst at the $65 strike: 1,759 October 30 puts sold against 1,759 October 16 puts bought, netting a credit of $43,975. Selling the back month and owning the front puts the package short volatility, and the two deltas offset, so there is no directional tilt left in it.

The damage predates this week. A $1B convertible note offering announced July 15 plus a filing that pushed the 45-satellite target into next year took the stock down 33.6% over July (Motley Fool, August 6, 2026). Kaplan Fox announced a securities class action on October 9 covering purchasers from March 4, 2025 through July 15, 2026, with a November 13 lead plaintiff deadline; the complaints lean on slow user adoption in the U.S. and Japan and dilution from three separate $1.0B convertible raises. Clear Street called the FCC's meeting agenda mixed for the name on October 8 (Yahoo Finance).

The pricing is the whole story here:

- October 16 $65 put, bought at $16.54 a share, against $16.58 of intrinsic
- October 30 $65 put, sold at $16.79 a share, 86.5% implied vol, 0.90 delta

The front leg went off under parity, which is why our implied-vol field on it reads as essentially zero and its delta pins at 1.00, there being no time value left to measure. Prior open interest at the October 30 strike was 102 contracts against 1,759 traded. At the October 16 strike it was 5,415.

Open versus close isn't determinable for the package: only half these contracts sit in a leg that can be signed, and the October 16 buy went into open interest three times its own size, so it could have closed a short or opened a long. What the economics do say is that a fresh non-directional vol trade almost never looks like this. Two deep-ITM puts of the same type both settle near intrinsic, and after October 16 the front leg vanishes and leaves a bare short $65 put standing. The shape that fits is a roll: an obligation at a strike set when ASTS traded far higher, pushed fourteen days out for 25 cents a share. The live alternative is that the leg sides are tagged wrong, since the side read on the front-month buy carries only 0.25 confidence, and flipped it becomes a $0.25 debit rather than a credit.

My read is that this position behaves like rent on deferral rather than a view: with the strike 34% above spot, the $65 line keeps acting like fixed-price stock exposure, and a quarter a share is what two more weeks of it cost. What changes that is a recovery that drags $65 back toward the money and gives the short October 30 leg actual gamma.

Nothing scheduled sits inside the contract's life. Yahoo Finance lists the next ASTS earnings date as November 9, 2026, TipRanks estimates November 16, and the class action deadline is November 13 - all past October 30. The three weeks this structure covers are governed entirely by unscheduled news: FCC follow-through, launch cadence, whatever the carriers say. The question I'd watch is whether the October 30 strike gets rolled again.

*Education, not advice. Flow data from optionwhales.io.*

An interesting point I just noticed now: 3 millions less shares available for shorting on IBKR. It was not the case 30 minutes ago.

What are your thoughts ??? Will it ever rise atleast to the 1.5 $ level without R/S ? $DVLT

800k short shares available 8 a.m 400k shorted last 2 hours down from 1.2 million. Can retail take it back? Is Russian plague spreading?

ASML trade card · OptionWhales daily thesis

ASML's 52-week high is $1,999.96, close enough to a round number that most of what gets written about the stock now is some version of whether it covers the last few percent. On Tuesday, October 6, 2026, with the ADR at $1,847.24, a trader sold 100 of the October 9 $1,980 calls and bought 100 of the October 9 $1,985 calls in one burst at 09:56:04 ET, taking in $2,100 net. That is a single five-dollar-wide call spread with three sessions to live, and it is direction-neutral: net delta across the two legs comes to about negative 83 shares of ASML, which is nothing. The per-leg side tagging came back weak on both, so I hold the sign of that credit loosely, though the package printed as cash received.

The name has been giving that strike reasons to look reachable. Yahoo Finance reported on October 2 that ASML rose about 3.5% intraday as Samsung pulled High-NA EUV toward DRAM, with the close at $1,867.31, and that was the stock's whole session rather than anything to do with this order (https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/asml-stocks-surge-3-5-194703151.html). Q3 results come Wednesday, October 14, before the open, per ASML's investor page (https://investor.asml.com/quarterly-results), five days after these contracts stop existing.

The strikes sit 7.2% and 7.5% above the $1,847.24 spot at the print, deltas of 5.4 and 4.5, implied vol 44.9% on the short leg against 44.3% on the long. The five dollars between them caps what the structure can lose at $47,900 against the $2,100 collected. The credit is 4.2% of the width, almost exactly what the 1985 call's own 4.5 delta says about finishing through both strikes, so there is no obvious pickup in the geometry itself. Prior-day open interest was 143 contracts at 1980 and 119 at 1985, so 100 lots a side is a large fraction of what was already sitting there, which leans opening without settling it: whether this adds exposure or retires something already on the book is not established.

For a package like this to make sense, 44.9% implied on a five-delta wing three days out has to be rich, and the reason it might be is on the calendar. The October 9 weekly contains no scheduled ASML event, while the quarter prints the Wednesday after, and earnings vol leaks backwards into front weeklies. The credit here is coming out of the strike the $2,000 conversation has made busy, in a window where the stock would have to cover 7.2% on drift and sector tape alone. The competing reading is that $2,100 gross on a structure priced at its own model value is thin for an income trade, and fits better as three days of cap on a long that already exists, or one component of a book I cannot see. I find that second one more convincing, because the geometry gives up nothing and a 27-basis-point strip of share price is an odd thing to own on its own.

Where it leaves me: this position cares about one thing, where ASML closes Friday against a five-dollar band sitting 1% under the 52-week high. If the stock stays near where it printed Tuesday morning, three sessions is a short clock for 7.2%, and what breaks that is an unscheduled move, since the Samsung news lifted the whole name roughly 3.2% in a day and you would need about two of those back to back. ASML reported $7.92 EPS last quarter against $8.68 expected, per TipRanks (https://www.tipranks.com/stocks/asml/earnings), and this structure is settled and gone before anyone learns whether that repeats. The live question for next week is whether the same wing gets sold in the expiry that actually covers October 14.

*Education, not advice. Flow data from optionwhales.io.*

I am not suggesting any kind of action here. I saw on a forum that the short interest on $SOFI was pretty high (over 10%). Some people like to use that as a line in the sand for potential short squeezes.

I tweeted a post about why that isn't always a good idea. $SOFI may have reasons to propel higher, but the short selling may have less to do with it than maybe some of the business's initiatives.

Another is possible, of course. But it won't really be that easy to tell (other than what the financial spin doctors suggest.) It's not impossible to know, but the data will lag (FINRA reports) and people will have already declared their narratives before the real reasons emerge.

https://x.com/YouGetPaidNow/status/2107194666152321267