▶ Full Post Text
Everyone loves lottery options. Me included. So I track a board of the day's most-traded contracts under 50 cents, all short-dated junk on non-mega names, and today I pulled the actual minute bars instead of just looking at the closes. Because the close never tells you what actually happened in there.
https://preview.redd.it/p5obdjl351nh1.png?width=1070&format=png&auto=webp&s=a2ba8eec7d40c1cf758fd885e804c3b57408a942
GME's $19 call was the clean one. Opened at 13 cents, dipped to 10, ran to 32. That's +146% off the low and it actually held most of it, closed at 27. Somebody's having a good night.
But the RZLV $2.5 call is the one I can't stop thinking about. Opened at 15 cents. Crashed to ONE cent. Down 93%, basically dead. Then it ripped to 25 cents —
# 24x off that low —
and faded back to 6 by the close.
So if you bought the open and held, you lost 60% of your money. On a contract that was up 24x from its own low an hour earlier. Both of those people exist. They might be the same person. That's this entire corner of the market in one ticker.
Oh and MARA's $11 call printed at a penny today. A literal $1 lottery ticket. Touched 24 cents.
https://preview.redd.it/hqc49g9551nh1.png?width=1062&format=png&auto=webp&s=182c62502d4416d92fea9a28b1ac4660290ab423
# Here's the full board, ranked by contracts traded (price shown is current, not the intraday extremes):
|Ticker|Contract|Price|Contracts traded|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|HTZ|$2.5c 9/4|$0.04|35,782|
|MU|$1000c 9/2|$0.27|31,071|
|NIO|$4.5c 9/4|$0.02|25,793|
|SPCX|$155c 9/4|$0.19|22,324|
|PCG|$13p 9/2|$0.13|17,366|
|SOFI|$17.5c 9/4|$0.16|15,316|
|SOFI|$18c 9/4|$0.07|14,288|
|SOFI|$17p 9/4|$0.28|14,279|
|GME|$19c 9/4|$0.27|14,147|
|PLTR|$200c 9/4|$0.10|13,190|
|INTC|$87p 9/2|$0.44|13,171|
|F|$14c 9/4|$0.10|12,881|
Trimmed to 12 for length.
SOFI holders bought three different strikes including a put against themselves, which is honestly beautiful.
Real talk before anyone gets ideas. Those penny prints on RZLV and MARA are thin, wide-spread quotes — one odd lot went off there, that doesn't mean you were getting filled in size at a penny. The 24x happened, but probably not to anyone with more than a couple contracts. And high volume on a 4-cent strike doesn't mean smart money found something. It means it was cheap enough that a few thousand of us gambled on it. Most of this board expires worthless. That's not a flaw, that's literally what the board is.
Not a rec. Obviously. Look at it.