ARM Options Are Pricing a ±$32 Move Into August 7 — Our Read Leans to the Lower Half

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The options market implies a $206.40–$270.10 range into the August 7 expiration; here's what's driving it and three defined-risk ways to trade it.

Published Saturday, August 1, 2026 · Data as of 2026-07-31 close

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Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Slightly bearish
Options-implied range (into Aug 7)	$206.40 – $270.10 (±13.4%)
Major support	$230 (heaviest put open interest below spot); the 6-day expiration's own put wall sits far below at $200
Major resistance	$260 (the Aug 7 expiration's call wall)
Max pain (Aug 7)	$250
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Negative — one rough estimate suggests hedging amplifies rather than cushions moves; the same estimate puts the flip level near $145, far below spot
Volatility condition	Falling — IV rank 65/100 · premium roughly fair: options priced only ~0.2 vol points above delivered movement (post-earnings distorted)
Technical check	Confirms (bearish, 3-day and 6-day models)
Best-fitting strategy	Short Aug 7 $255/$265 call spread (conditional)
Analysis invalidated if	ARM closes above $250

1 · What matters today

ARM closed Friday at $239.69 after one of the wilder three-day stretches of its year: two large up-gaps, then a fade from a $258.95 open back to the close. Our read of the options data lands slightly bearish — put-heavy volume, put-side sweeps running unusually hot for this name, and a price trend that is down 7.8% over five sessions and 24.4% over twenty. The options market is pricing a move of roughly $32 up or down (that's the ±13.4% derived from what straddles cost) into the August 7 expiration, so the actionable map is $206.40 to $270.10.

One level decides it: a close above $250 — the Aug 7 expiration's max-pain strike — flips the picture, because that is exactly where expiring open interest would prefer price to end up. Both technical models we checked point lower too. Note that Friday, August 7 also brings the July employment report—nonfarm payrolls, unemployment rate and wage growth — 8:30 a.m., hours before these contracts settle.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The dominant change is a volatility reset. ATM implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much ARM will move, baked into option prices — sits at 86.6%, down 16.3% in five sessions and 17.6% over thirty, and now 17.9% below its own 30-day average of 105.4%. Some of that is simply the July 29 earnings report clearing the calendar (ARM reported $0.20 per share against a $0.18 estimate); the rest is a stock that has stopped guessing and started moving.

Positioning moved the other way. The put/call open-interest ratio drifted from 1.17 to 1.22 over five sessions — for every call contract held open there are now 1.22 puts, against a 14-day average of 1.06. Put/call volume printed 1.05 against a 60-day median of 0.65, so puts dominated the tape even though total volume was ordinary (1.01× its 20-day average). Yet the single biggest fresh positioning of the day was on the call side and inside our window: the Aug 7 $252.50 calls added 1,516 contracts (to 1,539) and the Aug 7 $260 calls added 1,498 (to 1,600). Day-over-day, call open interest grew 10,850 versus 4,746 for puts. That is the tension in this week's data — hedging and sweeps lean down, fresh open interest above spot leans up.

The short- and long-term trend reads mostly agree: bearish over the past week and past month, flat over the past two and a half months (price is still +6.8% over ~50 sessions), and a fresh momentum crossover turned back down on July 30. That crossover is why the near-dated flow and the price trend are on the same side today.

Expected move

Into August 7 the chain prices ±13.4%, or about $31.90 either side of the $238.25 chain-snapshot price. The ladder:

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $238.25
Fri Aug 7 (7 DTE)	±13.4%	$206.40 – $270.10
Fri Aug 14 (14 DTE)	±17.7%	$196.05 – $280.45
Fri Aug 21 (21 DTE)	±21.4%	$187.30 – $289.20
Fri Aug 28 (28 DTE)	±24.0%	$181.15 – $295.35

The rungs widen with time in the normal square-root fashion, but the rate per day falls: front-week ATM IV is 96.6% versus 89.1% at 21 days, making the August 7 tenor the most expensive part of the board. That is what a chain looks like two sessions after a pair of double-digit gap days, and a macro-dense week — ISM Manufacturing Monday, JOLTS Tuesday, ADP and ISM Services Wednesday, jobless claims Thursday, payrolls Friday — doesn't argue against it. There is no distinct volatility hump at any single rung, so the chain isn't singling out one date.

Volatility

IV rank is 65/100: today's implied volatility is cheaper than only 35% of the past year's readings, so options are still on the expensive side of their own year even after the crush. Direction is unambiguously down — flat on the day, −16.3% over five sessions, −30-day change of −17.6% — and current IV now sits just under its 90-day average of 88.4%. The front-month term-structure read is unavailable today (Friday was an expiry day), so we can't compare front-month to 60-day pricing directly.

Two "vs its own norm" observations, meaning compared against ARM's own recent history rather than the broader market: 20-day realized volatility of 86.3% is actually below this stock's recent norm — an unusual sentence to write about an 86% number, and a reminder of what ARM's baseline looks like. Meanwhile the last five sessions have delivered movement about 26% faster than the trailing month, which is unusually accelerated for this name. Price is moving quicker while options get cheaper.

Premium rich or cheap? The volatility risk premium — the gap between how much movement options are priced for and how much ARM has actually delivered — is about 0.2 vol points, essentially nothing. When it's positive, option sellers have been collecting more than realized movement cost them; here they're collecting nothing extra. The percentile reads 73/100, meaning today's gap is richer than about 73% of this stock's own recent readings, which mostly tells you how negative that gap usually is for ARM. A week ago the same gap was over 30 vol points; it collapsed as the post-report IV crush met the July 29–31 gap moves entering the 20-day realized window. That flip is mechanical, not a trader signal — and with the July 29 report sitting inside the realized-vol window, some of what the percentile flatters is calendar arithmetic, not free premium. Stripped back to IV rank alone, 65/100 mildly favors collecting premium with defined risk rather than owning it outright — but it is not the layup the percentile implies.

Skew and sentiment

Skew measures whether puts and calls the same distance from the stock price cost the same — when puts are pricier, traders are paying up for crash protection. Here they barely are: 25-delta puts print 86.5% against 86.6% for 25-delta calls, so calls are richer by 0.2 vol points. That sounds complacent until you check the baseline — the 60-day median is calls richer by 0.6 vol points, and the three-session average was calls richer by 2.3 points. In other words, puts have clawed back almost all of that gap in a week, and our leading positioning read flags the 25-delta skew steepening 3.3 vol points over five sessions.

The flow tally agrees: 9 put contracts versus 5 calls cleared the unusual-volume bar, a put-side dominance that is unusually pronounced for ARM's own history. Against that, sentiment in short-dated options is the outlier — the 0–7 day bucket scores +32 (its 7-day average is +12) on call open interest building 2,406 contracts against 357 for puts, while the 7–30 day bucket is a mild +13 and the 60–120 day bucket is −7. The overall regime label is Mixed, and honestly so: the shortest-dated positioning leans call-side while volume, sweeps, and skew lean the other way. That disagreement is precisely why the composite lands only slightly bearish instead of firmly so.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
Whole chain's heaviest call strike	$300	19,207 calls and the biggest gamma pile in the book — well beyond this window's range
20-day moving average	$278.18	Price is 13.8% below it; the average is still falling
Top of the 6-day implied range	$270.10	The upper 1σ rail priced for Aug 7
Call wall (Aug 7)	$260	1,600 calls, the heaviest call strike at this expiration; also where 1,498 contracts were added Friday
Max pain (Aug 7)	$250	Where the most option value would expire worthless — expirations sometimes gravitate here; also a top-5 gamma strike chain-wide
Technical resistance	$247.50	The 6-day model's VWAP / EMA34 confluence — Friday's rally died here
Swing resistance	$243.12	Nearest price-structure pivot above spot (estimate from swing clustering)
Friday's close	$239.69	Starting point for the window
Swing support	$238.59	Immediately underfoot — a thin shelf
Heaviest put strike below spot	$230	10,296 puts chain-wide and a top-5 gamma strike; the first real floor of options positioning
Swing support	$228.68	Next structural level down
Technical support	$225.00	Lower Bollinger band / July 29 swing low per the 6-day model
Bottom of the 6-day implied range	$206.40	Lower 1σ rail priced for Aug 7
Put wall (Aug 7 and chain-wide)	$200	Only 774 puts at this expiration but 15,968 across the chain — the far rail, not a near-term barrier
200-day moving average	$189.88	Price is still 26.2% above it; the multi-quarter uptrend hasn't broken

Note the disagreement worth naming: the Aug 7 expiration's own walls are $260 and $200, while the whole chain's heaviest strikes are $300 and $200. The overhead barrier that matters this week is $260, not $300.

Positioning and unusual flow

Market makers hedge the options they've sold, and one rough estimate reads ARM's book — both chain-wide and at the Aug 7 expiration specifically — as negative gamma, a regime in which that hedging tends to amplify moves rather than dampen them. Treat it as an estimate, not observed inventory: the same model puts its pivot near $145, roughly 39% below spot, so the fragile-acceleration zone it flags isn't anywhere near current prices.

Three live flow items stood out. The Aug 7 $240 calls traded 1,289 contracts against 139 open — a 9× turnover and about $1.6 million of premium, the biggest single print in our window and a straight bet on a bounce back through Friday's open. The Aug 7 $235 puts traded 562 against 226 open (~$582,000), with the $230 puts adding another 460 contracts — the downside side of the same argument, clustered exactly where the heaviest put shelf sits. Further out, the Sept 18 $290 calls saw 952 contracts (~$1.2 million) — real money paying for upside, just not inside this week. For retrospective context only: into Friday's expiration the $240 puts churned 2,853 contracts before settling.

3 · Technical check

Both technical timeframes read bearish, and both confirm the options bias: direction matches, and each target sits comfortably inside the options-implied range. The 3-day model (target date August 4) targets $234.50 with a $228.50–$244.00 range; the 6-day model (target date August 7) targets $232.50 with a $226.50–$246.50 range. Their reasoning is consistent: price closed below both short EMAs and below VWAP after being rejected at the $247–$248 confluence, and money flow has stayed deeply negative (CMF −0.40) through the entire bounce — a divergence suggesting the run from $224.57 to $249.32 was short-covering rather than accumulation. ADX at 29.7 still shows a strong trend, but its bullish directional spread has compressed fast, which the report reads as a decaying up-thrust.

The interesting gap isn't direction, it's magnitude. The options market is pricing a $64-wide range into August 7; the technical model expects a $20-wide one. That's a chain still charging for gap risk against a model that expects a grind — and it's the main argument for defined-risk premium selling rather than buying long options here.

The 6-day model's own kill switch — a sustained close above $248 — sits just under our $250 invalidation, so both readings fail in the same place. TA nudged strike selection only mildly: it kept the short call strikes at or above $255, above the $247–$248 rejection shelf.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $206.40–$270.10 into August 7; the 6-day technical model targets $232.50. The market is paying for a gap the model doesn't expect — which favors structures that get paid for time passing over structures that need a big move.

Full technical write-ups: 3-day report → · 6-day report →

4 · Three ways the next six days can go

If ARM pushes above the call wall ($260): that strike carries the heaviest call open interest at this expiration and gained nearly 1,500 contracts on Friday alone; the heaviest overhead positioning tends to slow rallies as it is defended. A clean break through leaves comparatively thin positioning until the $270 upper rail, and the next real pile isn't until $300. This branch would also break the $247–$248 technical ceiling on the way, so it invalidates the whole read well before $260 prints.

If ARM drifts between the walls: this is the max-pain case, and it argues against our lean. The $250 strike minimizes what expiring option holders collect, and it sits about 5% above Friday's close, so any pin-style drift into Friday's settlement pulls upward rather than down. Expect chop between the $238–$243 swing shelf and the mid-$250s, with the payrolls print Friday morning as the last chance for a shove either way. The technical models' second scenario says much the same thing, calling for a $232–$244 oscillation.

If ARM breaks below $230: that's the heaviest put shelf below spot and a top-five gamma strike, with the $228.68 swing pivot immediately behind it. Below there the chart's next reference is $225, then thin air down toward the $206 lower rail — the Aug 7 put wall at $200 holds only 774 contracts, so it's a marker rather than a barrier this week. The dealer-gamma estimate reads negative, which would argue for amplification on the way down, but note the same estimate's flip level sits far below current prices, so the model isn't flagging a nearby acceleration trigger.

5 · Three defined-risk structures

Prices are end-of-day midpoints as of 2026-07-31. All structures are hypothetical. Verify live prices before trading — these will be stale by the open. The earnings feed shows no ARM report scheduled inside this window; the July 29 print is already behind us, so no structure below carries earnings-gap risk. All of them do carry Friday's 8:30 a.m. payrolls print, which lands hours before settlement.

If you lean bearish: short call spread

• Trade: Sell the Aug 7 $255 call / buy the Aug 7 $265 call
• Credit: $2.53 ($253) · Max profit: $253 · Max loss: $747.50 · Break-even: $257.53
• Why it fits: The short strike sits above the Aug 7 max-pain strike ($250) and just under the expiration's call wall ($260), 7% above spot, with a 0.34 delta. You collect a credit for ARM failing to reclaim the $247–$248 shelf that rejected it Friday — the same failure both technical models build their case on. IV rank of 65/100 means you're selling options that are still expensive versus their own year, even if the gap to delivered movement is currently nil.
• Makes sense only if: you expect the bounce to stall in the $240s and are content being paid for time rather than direction.
• Invalidated if: ARM closes above $250.
• Managing it: Close at ~50% of max credit; take profits early rather than late given the short-term trend is fighting a still-intact multi-quarter uptrend (price remains 26% above its 200-day average). If ARM closes through $255, close rather than hope — a negative-gamma estimate and a 13% weekly implied move are a bad combination to hold through.
• Liquidity note: The $255 calls traded 75¢ wide (about 11% of mark) and the $265 calls 60¢ (~14%). That is wide — work the mid and accept that slippage can eat a quarter of the credit on a bad fill.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: iron condor

• Trade: Sell the Aug 7 $220 put / buy the $210 put, and sell the Aug 7 $255 call / buy the $265 call
• Credit: $4.66 ($466) · Max profit: $466 · Max loss: $534 · Break-evens: $215.34 and $259.66
• Why it fits: Both short strikes sit outside the technical models' expected ranges ($226.50–$246.50 for the 6-day) while remaining well inside the options-implied $206–$270 rails — that's the Model vs. Market gap expressed as a position. The short call is capped by the $260 call wall; the short put sits above the $230 put shelf so the heaviest downside positioning acts as a buffer, not a magnet.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the ±13.4% the chain is charging overstates what a post-gap, post-earnings week actually delivers.
• Invalidated if: ARM closes above $250 (the bearish half fails) or below $230 (the bullish half is on the clock).
• Managing it: Take profit at ~50% of max credit — with the payrolls print inside the window, holding for the last dollar of theta is where condors go to die. Close the threatened side outright rather than rolling into Friday morning.
• Liquidity note: The $220 puts traded 55¢ wide (~11% of mark) and the $210 puts 42¢ (~14%); the call legs as above. Four wide legs means real slippage — consider legging in on strength/weakness rather than a single market order.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bullish: short put spread

• Trade: Sell the Aug 7 $220 put / buy the Aug 7 $210 put
• Credit: $2.14 ($213.50) · Max profit: $213.50 · Max loss: $786.50 · Break-even: $217.87
• Why it fits: This is the max-pain argument in trade form. The Aug 7 max-pain strike is $250, about 5% above Friday's close, and the shortest-dated sentiment bucket is the most call-tilted read in the file — 2,406 calls of new open interest against 357 puts, plus nearly 3,000 contracts of fresh open interest at the $252.50 and $260 calls. The short strike sits below the $230 put shelf and below both technical models' lower bounds.
• Makes sense only if: you read the last two gap-up days as the start of a base rather than a short squeeze — the technical models explicitly disagree, calling the money-flow divergence a warning.
• Invalidated if: ARM closes below $230.
• Managing it: Close at ~50% of max credit; because this trade fights the near-term trend read, cut it at the $230 shelf rather than at the short strike — waiting for $220 with a negative-gamma estimate overhead is how a $213 credit becomes a $786 loss.
• Liquidity note: The $220 puts traded 55¢ wide on a $5.13 mid, the $210 puts 42¢ on $2.99 — both above the comfortable 5% bar, so treat quoted credits as optimistic.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

There is a real case for standing aside. The premium that looks rich by percentile isn't — the gap between implied and delivered movement is about 0.2 vol points, and the flattering percentile is an artifact of the July 29 report sitting inside the realized-volatility window. So a premium seller here is collecting IV rank 65 and not much genuine edge, on a chain where every leg trades 10–14% wide and one bad fill erases a fifth of the credit. Add a macro-dense week ending in payrolls on expiration morning, a stock that has gapped double digits twice in three sessions, and a max-pain strike pulling against our directional lean, and "wait for a tighter market or a cleaner level" beats forcing a position. If you need exposure, size it so the max-loss figure — not the credit — is the number you can live with.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is ARM's expected move this week? About ±$31.90 (±13.4%) into the August 7 expiration, per the options market's straddle pricing as of 2026-07-31 — a $206.40–$270.10 range.

Is ARM expected to go up or down over the next six days? Options positioning as of 2026-07-31 leans slightly bearish — put-heavy volume, put-side sweeps unusually dominant for this name, and a price trend down 7.8% in five sessions — but that's a read of what traders have done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $206.40–$270.10 range and the $230/$260 levels, with $250 as the line that changes the story.

Are ARM options expensive right now? Two lenses. IV rank 65/100 says option prices are higher than 65% of the past year's readings. On top of that, they're running only about 0.2 vol points above the movement ARM has actually delivered — technically richer than about 73% of this stock's own recent readings, but that comparison is mechanically distorted by the July 29 report sitting inside the realized-volatility window. Verdict: moderately expensive by the yearly lens, no free premium by the delivered-movement lens.

Where is ARM's biggest options support and resistance? For the August 7 expiration, the call wall is $260 and the put wall is $200 — though the meaningful floor of positioning is the $230 strike, which carries 10,296 puts across the chain.

What invalidates this week's read? A close above $250 — the Aug 7 max-pain strike, and just above the $247–$248 level that rejected Friday's rally.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for ARM, 2026-07-31, generated 2026-08-01 16:15 UTC. Prices shown are midpoints and will differ from live markets. Momentum/positioning scores and volatility-premium comparisons are descriptive measurements of past option flow and past price movement — not investment advice, signals, forecasts, or guarantees. Earnings dates and reported results are from the data provider's earnings feed as of 2026-08-01 16:15 UTC; report dates can change. All trade structures are hypothetical. Every structure shown has a defined maximum loss; you can lose the entire max-loss amount. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for all investors.