Case study
Billions of dollars of puts in one afternoon. Is someone betting on a fall?
A list of the day's largest option prints can look like an alarm: put after put, hundreds of millions of dollars each, in some of the market's best-known names. Here is one path through it in Options Meerkat, a step at a time, from the list to one stock's blocks, Netflix (NFLX), and to what the next morning's open interest said about them.
The data: the prints of Thursday, October 22, 2026, and the chains of that day and the next, Friday's close. The answers the dashboard plays with each step were recorded then, from the same data; the dashboard around them is live. Quotes are delayed about 15 minutes, and a print's time is the round that saw it.
Recorded answers from the close of October 23, 2026, played on the live dashboard.
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Step 1 of 5 · The list
Look at the day's largest prints
“What were the largest option prints on Thursday, Oct 22, by premium? Show each one's strike against the stock price, size against open interest, and price against the bid and ask.”
Contract Premium Size / OI Strike vs stock LULU Dec 300 put $230M 11,604 / 1,700 300 vs 103 LULU Dec 350 put $167M 6,736 / 637 350 vs 103 ORCL Jan 220 put $93M 9,680 / 3,170 220 vs 126 SNDK Mar 3070 put $82M 450 / 142 3070 vs 1257 META Oct 23 760 put $62M 5,140 / 3,653 760 vs 648 Two things stand out before any reading of direction. The strikes are far above the stock: a put struck at 300 on a $103 stock is $197 in the money, and almost all of its price is that. And the sizes are several times the open interest, the contracts that existed that morning, which is the usual sign that a trade opened new positions. A tool that flags unusual activity by volume against open interest flags these first. (Unusual options activity)
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Step 2 of 5 · The pattern
See whether it is one trade or many
“Between 2:30 and 4 pm on Thursday, Oct 22, which stocks had large blocks of deep in-the-money puts, and how much premium was it in all?”
Counting every print of $5 million or more in a put struck at least 15% above its stock, in that last hour and a half: about $3.5 billion, in 26 stocks, from LULU ($886 million) and SanDisk to Lam Research, Micron, AMD, Oracle, Netflix, Meta, and Broadcom. (The recorded answer counts a narrower set, the largest prints, and comes to $1.9 billion.)
Twenty-six unrelated bearish bets placed in the same ninety minutes, all in options that behave like short stock, all deep in the money, would be a coincidence. A pattern like this is more often one kind of trade, run across many names at once by a desk whose reasons have little to do with any one company. The rest of the case checks that on one of them. (Options flow)
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Step 3 of 5 · One stock's blocks
Price the blocks against intrinsic value
“Show NFLX's deep in-the-money put blocks from Thursday afternoon, Oct 22: strike, expiry, size against open interest, and the price against intrinsic value.”
Put Size OI before Price Intrinsic Jan 100 11,273 2,939 33.06 33.26 Dec 95 12,138 3,232 27.80 28.26 Dec 90 10,928 2,952 22.45 23.26 Dec 107 4,715 1,210 39.71 40.26 Jan 95 5,123 1,348 28.20 28.26 Jan 96 4,160 1,093 28.65 29.26 With NFLX at $66.74, all of them printed in the same round, at 3:23 pm, with no quote side recorded, and within a dollar of intrinsic value: strike less stock, almost no time value. Sizes ran about 3.8 times the open interest in line after line. A put this deep moves nearly dollar for dollar with the stock (a delta near −1); owning one is close to being short 100 shares, and selling one close to owning them. Which side was which, the print does not say.
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Step 4 of 5 · The next morning
Check the open interest after
“Did Thursday's NFLX put blocks open new positions? Open interest is counted overnight, so for each line compare the open interest in Thursday's chain (before the blocks) with the open interest in Friday's chain (after them), against the block's size.”
Put Block OI Thu OI Fri Change Jan 100 11,273 2,939 2,678 −261 Dec 95 12,138 3,232 3,125 −107 Dec 90 10,928 2,952 2,551 −401 Dec 107 4,715 1,210 1,210 0 Jan 95 5,123 1,348 1,248 −100 Jan 96 4,160 1,093 335 −758 Nearly 50,000 contracts traded, and not one line ended the day with more open interest than it began with. If the blocks had opened positions, Friday's count would have risen by thousands in each. It fell or held. Contracts that open and close again within the session, or that one party opens as another closes, leave no trace overnight. The same check works on any of the 26 stocks, a line at a time.
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Step 5 of 5 · The edge of the data
Name what the prints cannot tell you
“What can't Thursday's prints and Friday morning's open interest tell me about who traded NFLX's deep in-the-money put blocks, and why?”
- Who. Options clear anonymously. Nothing in a print or in open interest names a fund, a dealer, or a market maker.
- Which side. A block at the middle of the quote leans neither way, and even one at the bid or the ask only suggests who was keen.
- What it was part of. Deep in-the-money puts are common legs of conversions and reversals, of trades around borrowing a stock, and of hedges. The shares or other options on the other side are not on the option tape.
- The netting. Open interest is one number per contract a day. It says the blocks left no new positions overnight, not how they were paired.
- Your situation. What the rest of your account holds, and how much of it you can lose.
The data narrowed “someone bought billions of puts” to “a batch of deep in-the-money puts in 26 stocks crossed in one afternoon near intrinsic value, and left no new open interest in the lines checked.” Whatever it was, it was not, on this evidence, a fresh bet that these stocks would fall.
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Your turn
Ask your own questions
The same checks work on any symbol of the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq-100. Open the dashboard, sign in free, press @, and ask Meerkat:
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