HOOD Options Are Pricing a $7.73 Move Into August 14 — The Chain Says the Middle of That Range

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The options market implies an $85.65–$101.11 range into the August 14 expiration; here's what's driving it and three defined-risk ways to trade it.

Published Saturday, August 8, 2026 · Data as of 2026-08-07 close

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Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Neutral with a bullish tilt
Options-implied range (into Aug 14)	$85.65 – $101.11 (±8.3%)
Major support	$85 — the Aug 14 expiration's put wall ($90 is the nearer structural shelf)
Major resistance	$97 — the heaviest call open interest above spot at that expiration
Max pain (Aug 14)	$93
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Positive for the Aug 14 expiration — hedging tends to dampen moves; whole-chain flip estimate ≈ $100
Volatility condition	Falling — IV rank 32/100 · premium fair: options priced ~1 vol point above delivered movement (post-report distorted)
Technical check	Confirms (bullish, 3-day and 6-day models)
Best-fitting strategy	Short put spread (Aug 14 $88/$85), conditional on $90 holding
Analysis invalidated if	HOOD closes below $90

1 · What matters today

Robinhood closed the week at $93.29 after an 8% five-session bounce off the early-August low, and the options chain has quietly stopped leaning defensive. Put open interest shrank hard while call open interest built, and the single biggest positioning change of the day was traders adding 4,504 contracts of Aug 14 $93 calls. Our read of that flow lands neutral with a bullish tilt — the flow-based inputs lean up, but price is already sitting on top of the week's heaviest call strike, which is what keeps this from being a clean bullish call.

The options market is pricing roughly $7.73 either way into August 14 — an $85.65–$101.11 band. Max pain, the price where the most option value expires worthless, sits at $93, essentially where the stock closed. Both technical models we checked also lean bullish. The level that changes the picture: a close below $90.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The week's story is put unwinding. The put/call open-interest ratio — how many put contracts are held open for every call — fell from 0.88 to 0.74 over five sessions, against a 14-day average of 0.84; in the single session from Thursday to Friday, put open interest dropped 33,928 contracts while call open interest added 10,435. That is traders taking off downside protection, not buying it. Put/call volume at 0.41 is call-heavy and right in line with its own 7-day average of 0.42, so the flow is steady rather than a one-day spike.

Implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much HOOD will move, baked into option prices — has been deflating alongside it: at 63.1% ATM, it is down 5.1% over five days, 7.2% over thirty, and sits about 15% below its own 30-day average. That pace of compression is unusual for this name, well above its own recent norm. The biggest forward-looking open-interest build was the Aug 14 $93 calls (+4,504 to 4,866 contracts), with the Aug 14 $97 calls close behind (+4,107). Into Friday's expiry, the settled $95 calls added 2,955 contracts on 14,378 of volume — history now, but it tells you where the chase was.

The horizon reads disagree, and that matters. The past week's 8% pop runs against a market still down 16.2% over the past month, while the 50-day picture is up 24.5% — near-term flow and the intermediate trend are pointing different ways. That argues for shorter-dated structures and earlier profit-taking, not for pressing a directional bet.

Expected move

Into August 14, the options market is pricing a move of about ±8.3%, or ±$7.73 — derived from what straddles cost at the money. Around Friday's $93.38 chain-snapshot price, that's an $85.65–$101.11 band.

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $93.38
Aug 14 (7 DTE)	±8.3%	$85.65 – $101.11
Aug 21 (14 DTE)	±11.7%	$82.46 – $104.31
Aug 28 (21 DTE)	±14.7%	$79.68 – $107.08
Sep 4 (28 DTE)	±17.1%	$77.38 – $109.38

The ladder scales almost perfectly with the square root of time — ATM implied vol is 59.8% at the first rung and 61.9% at the fourth. There is no bump, no kink, no event being priced into any one date; the chain is simply charging a flat, elevated rate for a high-volatility stock.

Volatility

ATM implied volatility is 63.1% with an IV rank of 32/100 — where today's IV sits versus the past year, meaning option prices are cheaper than roughly 68% of the last twelve months' readings. It sits below both the 30-day average (74.2%) and the 90-day average (69.2%), and IV rank has walked down from a 14-day average of 54 to a 3-day average of 34. The front-month read is unavailable today (Friday was an expiry day, so the nearest-expiration IV can't be interpolated), which is why there's no term-structure line here.

One "vs its own norm" observation worth having: realized volatility over the past 20 days is 62.2% annualized — high in absolute terms, but actually below this stock's own recent norm. And the 5-day/20-day realized ratio of 0.73 says the last week of movement has been slower than the month behind it. HOOD has been calming down relative to itself, even while still moving several percent a day.

Premium rich or cheap. The volatility risk premium — the gap between how much movement options are priced for and how much HOOD has actually delivered — is currently about 1 vol point, which puts it in the 53rd percentile versus this stock's own recent readings: richer than about half of them, thinner than the other half. A week ago that gap was running 5 to 8 vol points, so premium has compressed fast. Two caveats keep this from being a signal: the July 29 earnings gap still sits inside the 20-day realized-volatility window, mechanically inflating the realized leg and squashing the gap, and the snapshot reading of that gap is about typical for this name. Verdict: option prices here are fair, not a gift in either direction. If you sell premium this week, sell it because of where the strikes sit, not because the premium is rich — it isn't.

Skew and sentiment

Skew — the fact that puts and calls the same distance from the stock price don't cost the same — has flipped. The 25-delta put is at 62.5% implied vol and the 25-delta call at 62.8%, so puts are running 0.2 vol points cheaper than calls, against a 60-day median of puts being 0.4 points richer. Two weeks ago the 14-day average had puts 2.8 points over calls. Traders have stopped paying up for crash protection in this name — flat-to-inverted skew is the complacency side of the ledger, not the fear side.

Sentiment across expiration dates is uniformly constructive: our read of short-dated options scores +20 in the 0–7 day bucket and +40 in the 7–30 day bucket, with the 30–60 and 60–120 day buckets at +33 and +36. The one-phrase summary from that structure is "bullish recovery" — the positioning is building further out the curve rather than in a frantic front-end chase. One counterweight, and it's an honest one: on peer-relative sweep counts, 11 put contracts cleared the unusual-volume bar versus 10 calls, and that put tilt is unusually pronounced for this name versus its own history. Not everything points the same way.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
Top of implied range (Aug 14)	$101.11	1σ upper rail of what the options market is pricing
Whole-chain call wall / gamma flip estimate	$100	40,328 calls held open across all expirations — the chain's heaviest strike; also where one rough estimate places the dealer gamma flip
50-day and 200-day moving averages	$98.34 / $98.26	Converged and flat — a resistance shelf the stock broke down through in July
Aug 14 secondary call wall	$97	4,481 calls open, the heaviest strike above spot at the target expiration
Swing resistance	$96.59	Recent pivot cluster from the price feed
Large-gamma strike	$95	Third-largest total gamma strike chain-wide; 7,446 calls traded there Friday
Swing resistance	$94.40	Nearest overhead pivot
Last close / chain spot	$93.29 / $93.38	Official close vs the price recorded with the chain snapshot
Aug 14 call wall + max pain	$93	4,866 calls open and the biggest OI build of the day; also the strike where the most Aug 14 option value expires worthless
Swing support	$93.06	Nearest pivot support — the stock is sitting on it
Largest-gamma strike chain-wide	$90	30,418 calls and 27,669 puts open; also the Aug 6 low and lower Bollinger band ($90.11)
Heavy put flow	$88	8,145 Aug 14 puts traded Friday against 1,088 open — the day's busiest downside strike
100-day moving average	$87.29	The only major average price is above (+6.9%)
Aug 14 put wall	$85	2,354 puts open — the heaviest downside strike for this expiration
Bottom of implied range (Aug 14)	$85.65	1σ lower rail

Worth naming plainly: the Aug 14 expiration's own walls ($93 call, $85 put) are nothing like the whole chain's aggregate walls ($100 call, $70 put). The far-dated open interest is where the big, stale positions live; the week's actual battleground is much tighter and much closer to spot.

Positioning and unusual flow

Market makers hedge the options they've sold, and the direction of that hedging depends on their net position. For the Aug 14 expiration specifically, one rough estimate puts dealer gamma positive — the regime where hedging tends to dampen moves and pull price toward the biggest strikes, which in this case is $93. The whole-chain flip estimate sits up at $100, and spot is about 7% below it, a bit further under that estimate than is typical for this name; treat both numbers as estimates built on an assumed dealer convention, not observed inventory.

Three non-expired flow items stood out Friday, and they cut both ways. The Aug 14 $100 calls traded 13,716 contracts against 3,623 open — about $1.31 million of premium, the day's largest single-contract print, and a straight lottery bet on a break above the chain's heaviest strike. The Aug 14 $91 puts traded 4,773 against just 228 open — nearly 21× turnover and $940,000 of premium, someone paying up for protection barely 2% below spot. And the Aug 14 $88 puts did 8,145 contracts ($835,000) with open interest rising 426, which reads more like protection being layered under the bounce than a conviction short.

3 · Technical check

Both technical timeframes come back bullish, and both are tighter than the options market. The 3-day model targets $94.50 by August 11 within a $90.30–$96.20 range, built on price reclaiming the EMA13/EMA34 cluster near $92.50–$93.00 after Friday's gap, a fresh MACD crossover, and +DI above −DI. Its own caution is that ADX has fallen from the high 20s to 19 — the prior downtrend has lost force, but no new trend has taken over. Its invalidation is a close below $92.40.

The 6-day model, which lands exactly on our target date, targets $95.00 with a $89.60–$97.00 range and calls the structure a potential double bottom near $90–91 inside a larger downtrend, capped by the converged 50- and 200-day averages near $98. It flags a mild negative: money-flow (CMF at −0.02) never confirmed the bounce. Both classify as Confirms — direction matches our bullish tilt and both targets sit comfortably inside the options-implied band.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $85.65–$101.11 into August 14; the 6-day technical model targets $95.00 inside a much narrower $89.60–$97.00. The chain is charging for roughly 2.5× the range the chart model expects — which is why the structures below are built to collect that difference rather than to chase a direction.

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

4 · Three ways the next six days can go

If HOOD pushes above $97: the Aug 14 expiration's second-heaviest call strike sits there with 4,481 contracts open, and heavy call open interest overhead tends to slow rallies as hedging supply meets them. A clean break through leaves the $98.26/$98.34 moving-average shelf and then the chain's $100 monster strike, where 40,328 calls and Friday's $1.31 million of fresh call premium are stacked. That's a lot of paper to chew through in six sessions.

If HOOD drifts between $90 and $96: this is the base case the positioning describes. Max pain for Aug 14 is $93, the expiration's call wall is $93, the biggest open-interest build of the day was at $93, and the per-expiration dealer-gamma estimate is the pinning kind. Expirations sometimes gravitate toward max pain, and rarely has the arithmetic pointed at a single strike this cleanly. Time decay does the work in this branch.

If HOOD breaks below $90: that level is the largest-gamma strike in the entire chain, the Aug 6 low, and the lower Bollinger band all in one place — losing it removes the floor that the whole bounce was built on, and the next real options shelf is the $85 put wall, which also happens to be the bottom of the implied range. Spot already sits roughly 7% under the whole-chain gamma flip estimate near $100, the side of that estimate where market-maker hedging is thought to amplify selling rather than cushion it. This is the branch the $91 and $88 put buyers paid for.

5 · Three defined-risk structures

Prices are end-of-day midpoints as of 2026-08-07. All structures are hypothetical. Verify live prices before trading — these will be stale by the open.

If you lean bullish: Aug 14 $88/$85 short put spread

• Trade: Sell the Aug 14 $88 put, buy the Aug 14 $85 put (you collect a credit up front and keep it if HOOD stays above $88 at expiration).
• Credit: $0.55 · Max profit: $55 · Max loss: $245 · Break-even: $87.45
• Why it fits: The short strike sits below the $90 gamma/structure shelf and above the $85 put wall, with a break-even 6.4% under Friday's close — wider than the 6-day technical model's entire downside case ($89.60). Put open interest is being unwound, not built, and skew has flattened to the point where puts are the cheaper side.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the $90 area holds, and you're comfortable being paid modestly for a defined risk rather than chasing the bounce with long calls into deflating implied vol.
• Invalidated if: HOOD closes below $90.
• Managing it: Close at roughly 50% of max credit; with the past week's strength fighting a month-long downtrend, take profits earlier than you'd like rather than holding for the last dime. If HOOD closes through $88, close it — don't hope into expiration Friday.
• Liquidity note: The $88 puts traded 9¢ wide on a $1.03 mid with 8,145 contracts of volume; the $85 puts are 4¢ wide. Both fill easily.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: Aug 14 $82/$85 – $100/$103 iron condor

• Trade: Sell the $85 put and buy the $82 put; sell the $100 call and buy the $103 call, all Aug 14 (you collect a credit and keep it if HOOD finishes between $85 and $100).
• Credit: $0.69 · Max profit: $69 · Max loss: $231 · Break-evens: $84.31 and $100.69
• Why it fits: The short strikes are pinned to the expiration's own put wall ($85) and the chain's heaviest call strike ($100), and both sit just inside the implied-move rails of $85.65 and $101.11. With max pain at $93 and a positive per-expiration gamma estimate, the pin case is the modal case — and the profit zone is $15 wide.
• Makes sense only if: you're genuinely neutral and want to be paid for the gap between the options market's $85–$101 band and the technical models' much tighter $89.60–$97.00. Note that premium here is only fair, not rich — you're selling distance, not expensive volatility.
• Invalidated if: HOOD closes below $90 or above $97 — either break makes the corresponding wing live well before expiration.
• Managing it: Take it off at ~50% of max credit; close the tested side rather than rolling into a stock that has gapped 2%+ on three of the last five sessions.
• Liquidity note: The $85 puts are 4¢ wide, the $82 puts 2¢, the $100 calls 5¢ on a $0.96 mid. The $103 call is the weak leg at 8¢ wide on a $0.54 mid (~15%) — expect to give something up on that wing, or skip the structure if you can't get filled near mid.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bearish: Aug 14 $97/$100 short call spread

• Trade: Sell the Aug 14 $97 call, buy the Aug 14 $100 call (credit collected up front, kept in full if HOOD stays below $97).
• Credit: $0.71 · Max profit: $71 · Max loss: $229 · Break-even: $97.71
• Why it fits: The short strike is the expiration's heaviest call open interest above spot (4,481 contracts) and sits just under the converged 50-/200-day averages at $98.26–$98.34 — the shelf HOOD broke down through in July and hasn't reclaimed. The long wing sits at the chain's biggest call strike. Price would have to travel 4% higher and through two layers of overhead paper in six sessions.
• Makes sense only if: you think the bounce stalls into resistance — the same read the 6-day technical model assigns 35% probability, citing negative money flow and price still under VWAP.
• Invalidated if: HOOD closes above $97.
• Managing it: This one fights the near-term momentum turn, so keep it small and short-dated; close at 50% of credit or on a close above $96.59 swing resistance, whichever comes first.
• Liquidity note: The $97 calls are 3¢ wide on a $1.67 mid (under 2%) — one of the tightest contracts on the board — and the $100 calls 5¢ wide with 13,716 contracts of volume. Excellent fills both legs.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

There's a real case for standing aside. IV rank of 32 is not a premium-seller's dream, and the volatility risk premium is roughly one vol point — meaning option sellers have barely been collecting more than the stock's actual movement costs them, and part of even that compression is mechanical from the July 29 report sitting inside the realized-vol window. Meanwhile the underlying has gapped more than 2% on three of the last five sessions, which is exactly the environment where a $3-wide spread's max loss arrives overnight rather than gradually. If your edge in this name depends on premium being rich, it isn't this week — and a max pain that lines up perfectly with spot is a description of where the paper sits, not a guarantee of where the stock goes.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is HOOD's expected move this week? About ±$7.73 (±8.3%) into the August 14 expiration, giving an $85.65–$101.11 band, per the options market's straddle pricing as of the 2026-08-07 close.

Is HOOD expected to go up or down over the next six days? Options positioning as of August 7 leans neutral with a bullish tilt — puts are being unwound, call open interest is building, and skew has flattened — but that's a read of what traders have done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $85.65–$101.11 range and the $90/$97 levels.

Are HOOD options expensive right now? IV rank of 32/100 says option prices are lower than about 68% of the past year's readings; on top of that, they're running only about 1 vol point above the movement HOOD has actually delivered — right in the middle of this stock's own recent readings. Call it fair, and remember the July 29 report's gap is still inflating the realized-volatility side of that comparison.

Where is HOOD's biggest options support and resistance? For the August 14 expiration: put wall $85, call wall $93 (which the stock is sitting on top of), with the heaviest call open interest above spot at $97. Across the whole chain the numbers are wider — $70 and $100 — because far-dated positions dominate there.

What invalidates this week's read? A close below $90.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for HOOD, 2026-08-07, generated 2026-08-08T15:59:38.652Z. 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 2026-08-08T15:59:38.652Z; 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.