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Google Expands Gemini Study Notebooks to Users of All AgesApple adds Captured by Me to iOS 27 Photos, expands RAW support, clarifies Texture and Grain limitsApple TV Releases Trailer for ‘The Sisters Grimm’ Season 2 Ahead of October PremiereDJI's Mic and Mic Mini Lines Now Cover Five Models, TechRadar SaysAnthropic Releases Claude Opus 5.5 as OpenAI Unveils GPT-6 Sol and LunaGoogle's Find Hub Can Track a Lost Android Phone From Any Browser
Markets

Options Traders Bet on New Highs for Indexes and Tech Leaders Despite Narrow Market Breadth

Options traders are piling into bullish positions in major indexes and technology leaders even as U.S. market breadth remains narrow, with call-to-put ratios rising and options pricing implying new records for Meta, Intel, Micron and Sandisk.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-23 04:05

Monday's rally was strong enough that there were signs even institutional market-makers were caught offsides and had to buy upside calls to keep up with momentum, CNBC reported, citing Barchart data. The volume ratio of calls to puts climbed to the highest since May, and for the State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) it reached the highest since the first week of August. For the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ), the ratio hit the highest in at least a year. Options pricing on trading platform ThinkOrSwim put the odds that the Nasdaq 100 touches a new high by the end of the week at more than 67%.

Options pricing in the key technology leaders driving the rally also carried a bullish bias. Market-makers priced in new records for stocks including Meta Platforms, Intel and Micron before the end of the year. Traders can assess those odds by taking a given options contract's delta, its responsiveness to changes in price, to extrapolate the chance the underlying stock will touch the contract's strike price before a given date.

In Meta, options volume for the week was upwards of four times the 30-day average, and implied volatility was higher for calls than puts across the options term structure, Barchart data showed. ThinkOrSwim pricing indicated a 52% chance the stock touches $790, its closing high from last year, by Oct. 2.

Intel, now up 35% in the past month, is the latest leader of the semiconductor trade and had an implied volatility of 69 as options trading picked up in the one-time laggard of the AI trade. Market-makers assigned roughly a coin-flip chance that Intel reaches above its closing high of roughly $140 between now and Oct. 30.

The rally got a new addition on Tuesday when memory stocks tracked by the Roundhill Memory ETF (DRAM) advanced 2%. Shares of Sandisk rose more than 6%, and Micron gained more than 3%. Options pricing pointed to a new high in Micron by Oct. 23 and for Sandisk by Dec. 18. For the DRAM ETF, whose implied volatility has plunged since the summer, market-makers priced just a 34% chance of a new high by Dec. 18.