ARM Options Are Pricing a ±$22 Move Into August 28 — Our Positioning Read and the Chart Disagree

The options market implies a $221.10–$265.55 range into the August 28 expiration; here's what's driving it, where the walls sit, and three defined-risk ways to trade it.

Published Saturday, August 22, 2026 · Data as of the 2026-08-21 close

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Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Slightly bullish (options positioning), against a bearish price trend
Options-implied range (into Aug 28)	$221.10 – $265.55 (±9.1%, about ±$22)
Major support	$220 (Aug 28 put wall); $238.59 swing shelf below it
Major resistance	$265 (Aug 28 call wall)
Max pain (Aug 28)	$257.50
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Negative — one rough estimate suggests market-maker hedging amplifies moves rather than cushioning them; no flip level could be computed from today's data
Volatility condition	Falling — IV rank 39/100 · premium thin: options priced about 21 vol points below the movement ARM has actually delivered (distorted by the late-July gap — see below)
Technical check	Diverges (bearish, 3-day and 6-day models)
Best-fitting strategy	Aug 28 $245/$260 call debit spread, if you want the positioning lean expressed with a hard cap on risk
Analysis invalidated if	ARM closes below $238

1 · What matters today

ARM closed at $243.32 after a brutal stretch — down 12.7% in five sessions and 19.7% over roughly two months. Yet the options chain is not positioned for more of the same. Calls are more expensive than equidistant puts by a wider margin than usual, put volume has dried up to roughly a third of call volume, and the strike where the most option value would expire worthless — max pain — sits at $257.50 for Friday, above today's price. Our composite read of options positioning lands slightly bullish. The options market is pricing a move of about ±$22 into August 28, framing a $221–$266 range, with the heaviest call open interest at $265 acting as the ceiling. Both technical models disagree and point lower. A close below $238 kills this read.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The past five sessions were a straight slide: $271.60 on August 17, then $253.32, $249.34, $250.72 and $243.32. Implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much ARM will move, baked into option prices — barely flinched, slipping 1.8% over five days to 66.8% and now sitting 27% below its own 30-day average. That is the tell: price fell hard and options got cheaper, not more expensive.

Flow followed the same script. Put volume relative to call volume printed 0.37 — for every 100 calls traded, only 37 puts changed hands — against a 7-day average of 0.63 and a 60-day median of 0.67. That is an unusually call-tilted session for this name, well above its own recent norm. Total option volume ran 1.24× the 20-day average, so this was participation, not a ghost tape. One caveat on open interest: chain-wide open interest jumped 46% versus the prior day in a way consistent with a data-coverage change rather than real positioning, so we are leaning on volume and pricing evidence this week rather than day-over-day contract counts.

The bigger tension: the short-, medium- and long-term trend reads all point down (price −12.7% over the past week, −5.8% over a month, −19.7% over two months), and a fresh bearish momentum crossover registered on August 20. So the near-term flow and the bigger trend are pointing different ways — that disagreement is the honest centre of this article, not something to paper over.

Expected move

Into the August 28 expiration, the options market is pricing a move of about ±9.1%, or ±$22.20 — that figure comes from what at-the-money straddles cost, and it is the market's own one-standard-deviation guess at the week's range. Around the $243.32 close, that maps to $221.10 – $265.55.

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $243.32
Fri, Aug 28 (7 DTE)	±9.1%	$221.10 – $265.55
Fri, Sep 4 (14 DTE)	±13.0%	$211.59 – $275.05
Fri, Sep 11 (21 DTE)	±15.6%	$205.44 – $281.20
Fri, Sep 18 (28 DTE)	±18.5%	$198.40 – $288.24

The ladder is smooth — each rung scales with the square root of time and nothing else, meaning there is no event bump priced anywhere in the next month. The whole curve sits in a narrow 64.9%–66.7% implied-volatility band from one week out to one month out.

Volatility

At-the-money implied volatility is 66.8%. IV rank is 39/100 — today's IV is cheaper than roughly 61% of the past year's readings — while the percentile version (56) says more than half of the past year's days were below today. Read together: middling, and falling. IV is down 1.3% on the day, 1.8% over five sessions and 37.8% over thirty, and it sits well under both the 30-day (91.5%) and 90-day (90.8%) averages. The front-month read is unavailable today — the snapshot landed on an expiry date, so that tenor cannot be interpolated.

One "vs its own norm" observation worth having: ARM's realized movement has cooled abruptly. Its 5-day realized volatility is running at less than half its 20-day figure, an unusually depressed reading for this stock. The slide of the past week has been steady rather than violent.

Premium rich or cheap. The gap between what options are priced for and what ARM has actually delivered — positive when option sellers have been collecting more than realized movement cost them — currently sits at about −21 vol points: implied 66.8% against 88% delivered over the past twenty days. That reading is thinner than roughly 61% of this stock's own recent readings. Normally that would argue loudly for owning premium rather than selling it. Here it needs a caveat: ARM reported earnings on July 29, and the enormous gap moves around that date still sit inside the 20-day realized-volatility window. The sign flip in this measure during early August — from +37 vol points in late July to deeply negative now — is that gap entering the window, a mechanical effect, not a trader signal. So: yes, options look cheap versus delivered movement, but a meaningful slice of "delivered movement" is one settled event. Treat the cheapness as a mild tilt toward debit structures, not as free edge.

Skew and sentiment

Skew measures whether puts and calls the same distance from the stock price cost the same — and here they emphatically do not. The 25-delta put trades at 65.1% implied volatility while the 25-delta call trades at 70.4%: calls are running about 5.4 vol points over equidistant puts, against a 60-day median of 1.5 vol points. Traders are paying up for upside exposure, not crash protection, in a stock that has fallen 20% in two months. That is the single most contrarian data point in the file, and it is stretched versus this name's own history.

Put/call open interest is balanced at 1.01 (roughly one put held open for every call), close to its 7-day average of 1.02. Sentiment in short-dated options leans firmly call-side in both the 0–7 day and 7–30 day buckets, with only the 30–60 day slice tilting negative — the overall regime reads as mixed because the buckets disagree. Note that the front-week bucket's strength this session comes entirely from the open-interest side, which carries the coverage caveat above; the 7–30 day bucket, built on call-richer pricing plus call-dominant delta-weighted volume, is the cleaner evidence.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
Heaviest call strike, whole chain	$300	21,250 contracts open — a September/longer-dated magnet, not this week's wall
Gamma cluster	$270	One of the five largest gamma-by-strike concentrations across the chain
Call wall (Aug 28)	$265	The biggest pile of open call contracts for the target expiration (1,760) — rallies tend to slow into it
20-day moving average	$260.78	Price sits 6.7% below it
Max pain (Aug 28)	$257.50	Where the most option value expires worthless — expirations sometimes gravitate toward it
Largest gamma strike, whole chain	$250	Biggest single gamma concentration; also the technical models' stated resistance
Last close	$243.32	—
Swing support	$243.12	Nearest heuristic swing-pivot cluster — price is sitting on it
Gamma cluster	$240	Heavy combined call+put gamma
Swing support / TA support	$238.59	The shelf both technical models flag at $237–$238 — the invalidation zone
Gamma cluster	$230	Another heavy gamma strike
Put wall (Aug 28)	$220	Largest put open interest for the target expiration (704) — a rough floor for the week
Heaviest put strike, whole chain	$200	16,495 contracts — the chain-wide hedging floor, far below this week's action
200-day moving average	$197.14	Price is still 23.4% above it; the long-term uptrend is intact

Note the disagreement worth naming: the whole chain's heaviest strikes are $300 on the call side and $200 on the put side, but those are driven by September and November positioning. For the week that matters, the August 28 expiration's own walls are much tighter — $265 above, $220 below. Use the expiration-specific pair for this week's map.

Positioning and unusual flow

The dealer-gamma read for August 28 is an estimate, built on an assumed sign convention rather than observed dealer inventory — and it comes out negative, meaning market-maker hedging in this regime tends to amplify moves rather than dampen them. The whole-chain estimate agrees. No gamma flip level could be computed from today's data, so treat the "negative gamma" label as a regime description, not a tripwire at a specific price.

Three genuinely notable, still-live flow items:

• September 18 $300 calls — 9,667 contracts traded against 10,946 open, roughly $4.0 million of premium. That is far-out-of-the-money upside being bought or rolled in size, 23% above spot.
• November 20 $320 calls — 9,094 contracts traded, the single largest open-interest build in the file (+12,174) and the only contract clearing the 100th peer percentile on volume. Longer-dated upside, again.
• October 16 $270 puts — 1,002 contracts and about $4.2 million of premium, the biggest dollar-premium line in the chain. Someone is paying real money for downside into mid-October.

Closer to home, the August 28 $280 calls traded 1,702 contracts against 342 open — a lottery-ticket bid for a 15% week — and the $247.5 calls and $242.5 puts both turned over more than ten times their open interest, which is exactly the churn you expect right at the money into a weekly expiry.

3 · Technical check (the 20%)

Both technical reads are bearish, and both are fresh (dated August 22). The 3-day model targets $239.80 by August 25 with a $236.00–$249.50 range, citing price below both short-term exponential averages, −DI dominant over +DI, and a MACD that is negative though decelerating; its dominant scenario is a break of the $242 shelf toward $235–$237, invalidated on a daily close back above $248. The 6-day model, aligned to our target date, targets $236.50 with a $232.00–$249.50 range and a rising ADX suggesting the downtrend is strengthening, not fading — invalidated on reclaiming and holding $250.

Against the options-implied range, this classifies as Diverges. The technical targets sit comfortably inside the options-implied $221–$266 band, so there is no magnitude argument here — the disagreement is purely directional. The chart says the path of least resistance is down toward $233–$237; the chain says the expiration's centre of gravity is $257.50 and that traders are paying up for calls, not puts. Both models do concede a bounce scenario back to the $246–$253 zone, which happens to be exactly where the max-pain pull would take price.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $221.10–$265.55 into August 28 with its centre of gravity at $257.50; the 6-day technical model targets $236.50. Roughly $21 separates those two anchors — a reclaim of $250 resolves it upward, a close below $238 resolves it downward, and anything in between leaves both reads alive.

How this shaped the strikes below: it capped our enthusiasm. The bullish structure is a defined-risk debit rather than a naked directional bet, the short strikes on the range trade are pushed out to the expected-move rails rather than shaded toward max pain, and the bearish structure is built to pay at exactly the technical target.

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 ($265): That is the strike with the heaviest call open interest for Friday, and the heaviest positioning overhead tends to slow rallies as it is approached. A clean break through leaves relatively thin positioning until the $270 gamma cluster, and after that nothing meaningful until $280. Getting there requires roughly a 9% week — the top edge of what the options market is pricing.

If ARM drifts between the walls: This is the base case the chain is built around. Max pain for Friday sits at $257.50, and expiring open interest plus hedging flow sometimes pull price toward that strike into settlement. In practice that means a grind back up through $250 — the largest single gamma concentration in the chain and the technical models' stated resistance — with the $243 swing shelf holding underneath. Every credit structure below is built on this branch.

If ARM breaks below the put wall ($220): The far tail. First it would have to lose the $238.59 swing shelf and the $230 gamma cluster. Because the dealer gamma estimate for this expiration is negative, one rough estimate suggests hedging flows would add to the move rather than absorb it on the way down — which is how you get from $238 to $220 inside six sessions. That is the branch the technical models are leaning toward, and it is the reason nothing below is a naked bullish position.

5 · Three defined-risk structures

Prices are end-of-day midpoints as of 2026-08-21. All structures are hypothetical. Verify live prices before trading — these will be stale by the open. One blanket warning: weekly ARM contracts are quoting 10–16% wide as a percentage of mark this session. Work limit orders at the midpoint and never lift the offer on a spread.

If you lean bullish: August 28 $245/$260 call debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 28 $245 call, sell the Aug 28 $260 call
• Debit: $4.18 · Max profit: $10.82 · Max loss: $4.18 · Break-even: $249.18
• Why it fits: It expresses the slightly bullish positioning read — call-richer skew, call-dominated volume, max pain at $257.50 — with a hard-capped loss, and it buys rather than sells premium at a time when options are priced roughly 21 vol points below ARM's delivered movement. The short strike sits below the $265 call wall, so you are not asking price to break the week's heaviest resistance.
• Makes sense only if: You believe the $243 shelf holds and the max-pain pull toward $257.50 does real work into Friday.
• Invalidated if: ARM closes below $238.
• Managing it: This is a six-day debit — theta is the enemy. Take profit at 60–70% of max value if $257 trades; cut at half the debit if ARM closes below $238. With the short-term trend fighting the position, take money earlier than feels comfortable rather than holding for expiration value.
• Liquidity note: The $245 calls quoted $1.15 wide ($7.15/$8.30) and the $260 calls $0.40 wide ($3.35/$3.75). That is real slippage on a $4.18 debit — assume you pay $4.30–$4.40 in practice and size accordingly.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: August 28 $217.5/$225/$265/$272.5 iron condor

• Trade: Sell the $225 put / buy the $217.5 put, and sell the $265 call / buy the $272.5 call, all Aug 28
• Credit: $2.12 · Max profit: $212 per condor · Max loss: $538 · Break-evens: $222.88 and $267.12
• Why it fits: The short strikes sit essentially on the expected-move rails ($221.10 / $265.55) and bracket the expiration's own walls — the $265 short call is the call wall, and the $225 short put sits just above the $220 put wall. You collect if the week resolves as a drift rather than a break.
• Health warning: you are selling premium that has not been rich lately — implied volatility is running well below what ARM has actually delivered, and IV rank at 39/100 gives you no cushion if realized movement reasserts itself. That gap is partly a mechanical artifact of the July 29 earnings gap sitting inside the realized-volatility window, but it still means this is not a premium-selling bonanza.
• Makes sense only if: You genuinely expect ARM to burn six sessions inside a $45 box after moving 12.7% in the last five.
• Invalidated if: ARM closes outside $222.88–$267.12 — at which point the tested side is already a loser.
• Managing it: Close at ~50% of max credit; exit the whole structure by Wednesday's close regardless. If either short strike is breached intraday, close that vertical rather than hope — with the dealer-gamma estimate negative, breaks here have historically extended rather than mean-reverted.
• Liquidity note: $225 puts $0.34 wide, $217.5 puts $0.17, $265 calls $0.35, $272.5 calls $0.26. Four legs of slippage against a $2.12 credit is the real risk here — leg it as two verticals if you must, and refuse fills below $1.90.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bearish: August 28 $245/$230 put debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 28 $245 put, sell the Aug 28 $230 put
• Debit: $6.55 · Max profit: $8.45 · Max loss: $6.55 · Break-even: $238.45
• Why it fits: This is the trade for readers who side with the chart over the chain. The break-even sits just above both technical models' support zone, so the 6-day model's $236.50 target would put this structure in profit, and the short strike sits at the $230 gamma cluster where downside momentum has historically found friction. Owning premium is also the side the implied-versus-delivered gap favours.
• Makes sense only if: You weight the aligned bearish trend across all three lookbacks above the call-tilted options positioning — a defensible read, and the reason this structure is here at all.
• Invalidated if: ARM closes above $250 — the level both technical reports name as the reclaim that ends their thesis.
• Managing it: Take profit at $237 or better rather than waiting on the $230 short strike; exit by Thursday if price is chopping above $243. The short-term downtrend runs against a stock still 23% above its 200-day average, so this is a tactical trade, not a position.
• Liquidity note: The $245 puts quoted $1.50 wide ($9.05/$10.55) and the $230 puts $0.50 wide ($3.00/$3.50). At $2.00 of combined spread against a $6.55 debit, this is the most slippage-exposed of the three — insist on a midpoint fill.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

Standing aside is defensible this week, and here is the honest case for it. The two most informative signals in the file point in opposite directions: options positioning leans slightly bullish while price momentum is bearish across every lookback, and neither is loud enough to override the other. Meanwhile the premium picture offers no clean edge in either direction — options look cheap versus delivered movement, but that cheapness is substantially an artifact of one settled earnings gap still inside the realized-volatility window, so "buy premium, it's cheap" is not the free lunch the number implies. Add weekly bid-ask spreads running 10–16% of mark and you are paying a meaningful toll to express a view you only half hold. Waiting for either a reclaim of $250 or a close below $238 — the two levels that resolve the disagreement — costs you nothing but a week.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is ARM's expected move this week? About ±$22.20 (±9.1%) into the August 28 expiration, framing a $221.10–$265.55 range, per the options market's straddle pricing as of the August 21 close.

Is ARM expected to go up or down over the next six days? The honest answer is that the data describes positioning, not the future. Options positioning as of August 21 leans slightly bullish — calls cost about 5.4 vol points more than equidistant puts against a 1.5-point norm, and max pain sits above spot at $257.50 — but that is a read of what traders have already done, and both technical models point lower. The actionable map is the $221–$266 range and the $220/$265 wall pair, with $250 and $238 as the two levels that settle the argument.

Are ARM options expensive right now? Two lenses. IV rank of 39/100 says option prices are lower than about 61% of the past year's readings. On top of that, they are running roughly 21 vol points below the movement ARM has actually delivered over the past twenty days — thinner than about 61% of this stock's own recent readings. That combination mildly favours owning premium over selling it, with the caveat that the July 29 earnings gap still inside the realized window is inflating the "delivered" side of that comparison.

Where is ARM's biggest options support and resistance? For the August 28 expiration: the put wall at $220 and the call wall at $265. Across the whole chain the heaviest strikes are further out — $200 on the put side and $300 on the call side — but those are driven by September and November positioning, not this week's.

What invalidates this week's read? A close below $238.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for ARM, 2026-08-21, generated 2026-08-22T11:02:13.800Z. 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 2026-08-22T11:02:13.800Z; 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.