HOOD Options Are Pricing a $14 Move Into July 31 — Our Read Says the Tilt Is Lower

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The options market implies an $81.26–$108.53 range into the July 31 expiration; here's what's driving that enormous number and three defined-risk ways to trade around it.

Published Sunday, July 26, 2026 · Data as of July 24, 2026 close

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Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Neutral with a bearish tilt
Options-implied range (into July 31)	$81.26 – $108.53 (±14.4%)
Major support	$90 — the heaviest put open interest below spot for the July 31 expiration, and the whole chain's put wall
Major resistance	$100 — the whole chain's heaviest call strike and July 31's max pain
Max pain (July 31)	$100
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Positive for the July 31 expiration — on that estimate hedging tends to dampen moves; the whole-chain flip level is estimated near $120, well above spot
Volatility condition	Easing day to day, elevated overall — IV rank 65/100, with July 31 at-the-money IV at 103.8%
Next earnings	Wednesday, July 29 (after close) — two sessions before the July 31 expiration
Technical check	Confirms (bearish, 3-day and 5-day horizons)
Best-fitting strategy	Short call vertical ($103/$109, July 31), only if you accept overnight earnings-gap risk
Analysis invalidated if	HOOD closes above $100

1 · What matters today

HOOD closed at $94.91 on Friday, July 24, down 5.0% in five sessions and now sitting below its 20-, 50- and 200-day moving averages. Our read of options flow leans mildly bearish — put open interest exploded higher, puts are pricier than calls versus this stock's own norm, and short-dated sentiment turned negative — but it is a lean, not a conviction call, because the week's biggest option piles sit above the price. The options market is pricing a ±14.4% move into July 31, roughly $81 to $109, largely because the earnings report lands Wednesday after the close, inside the window. The single level that matters: $100. That's where the most option value would expire worthless (max pain) and where the chain's heaviest call open interest sits. A close above it and the bearish tilt is gone.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The stock did the heavy lifting: down 5.0% over five trading days and 11.5% below its 20-day average, though still up 1.7% over 20 days — this is a sharp break inside a bigger uptrend, not a collapse. Under the surface, the positioning shift is more dramatic than the price. Put open interest grew by 35,968 contracts in a single session against a call build of just 168, pushing the put/call open-interest ratio to 1.00 — for every call contract held open there is now essentially one put. Two weeks ago that ratio averaged 0.73. Implied volatility, the market's estimate of how much HOOD will move that is baked into option prices, actually eased 1.8% on the day and 2.1% over the week, but remains 11.6% above where it sat a month ago.

The largest single-strike build among still-tradeable contracts was the July 31 $102 calls, up 3,973 contracts to 4,379, with the $106 calls (+3,896) and $104 calls (+2,949) close behind — fresh upside positioning into the report even as the broader chain loaded up on puts. Option volume ran 1.24× its 20-day average, and put volume was 0.49 of call volume, slightly below the 7-day average of 0.51 but above the 14-day 0.42. Into Friday's now-settled July 24 expiration, flow was mopping up: the $115 calls shed 1,825 contracts of open interest while the $102 puts added 1,502.

Expected move

The expected move is the move the options market is pricing in, derived from what straddles cost. Into July 31, that's ±14.4%, or about $13.64 either side of the $94.90 close — a $81.26 to $108.53 band over five trading days.

Expiration	At-the-money IV	Implied move	Range around $94.90
Friday, July 31	103.8%	±14.4%	$81.26 – $108.53
Friday, August 7	87.5%	±17.1%	$78.64 – $111.15
Friday, August 21	79.2%	±21.9%	$74.10 – $115.69

Note what the ladder does: the dollar range widens with time (it always does), but the implied volatility falls as you go out — 103.8% for July 31 against 79.2% for August 21. That inversion is the earnings report being crammed into seven days of premium. Meanwhile HOOD's realized volatility over the past 20 sessions is 72.3% against chain-wide at-the-money IV of 78.1%: options are priced for more movement than the stock has actually delivered lately, and that gap is wider than typical for this name. For premium sellers that's the setup they want — provided they are willing to be short an earnings gap.

Volatility

Chain-wide at-the-money IV is 78.1%, with an IV rank of 65/100 — cheaper than roughly 35% of the past year's readings, but higher than the vast majority of individual daily closes over that span. Current IV sits above both the 30-day average (72.7%) and the 90-day average (68.5%), so the medium-term direction is still up even though the last five sessions bled a little volatility off. The front-month interpolated read and term-structure slope are unavailable in this snapshot — Friday was an expiry day and a same-day-expiring contract can't be interpolated — so we're using the per-expiration table above instead of a single slope number. Realized volatility over the past month is about typical for HOOD, while the premium stacked on top of it is unusually generous versus this stock's own history. Net: this is a sell-premium tape on paper, with a very large event risk attached to that "on paper."

Earnings on the calendar

HOOD reports Wednesday, July 29, after the close, with a consensus estimate of $0.39 per share. That date is why the July 31 expiration prices at 103.8% implied volatility while August 21 prices at 79.2% — the market is compressing one binary event into seven days of premium instead of spreading it across a month. Every expiration currently listed sits after the report, so there is no "expires before earnings" option available this week. On history, in dollar terms: the last report came in a penny below the estimate ($0.38 against $0.39) after three consecutive quarters of beats. We take no view on the outcome.

Skew and sentiment

Skew measures the fact that puts and calls the same distance from the stock price don't cost the same — when puts are pricier, traders are paying up for crash protection. HOOD's 25-delta put IV is 79.8% against 77.8% on the call side, a 2.0 vol-point premium for puts against a 60-day median of 0.4 points. That's a real steepening, and it happened fast: the three-day average is still 0.4 points. Traders paid up for downside protection on Friday specifically.

The unusual-flow mix reinforces it. Contracts clearing the peer-relative volume bar split 6 calls to 7 puts — a put-tilted mix that is unusually put-heavy for this name relative to its own recent pattern, which has skewed call-side for most of the past two months. Short-dated sentiment in our term read is negative in the 0–7 day bucket (−14) but positive in the 7–30 day bucket (+11), with longer buckets negative; the overall regime label is "Mixed," which is exactly what it looks like. Momentum in option flow scores −38 today against a 7-day average of −36 and a 14-day average of −21: the bearish drift is broadening, not spiking.

The key levels map

Levels below are price-ordered, highest first. Note that the July 31 expiration's own walls differ sharply from the whole chain's: for July 31, the biggest call pile is way out at $120 and the biggest put pile is at $100 — above the current price, which makes it a magnet rather than a floor. The whole chain's walls (all expirations combined) sit at $100 for calls and $90 for puts. That disagreement is real and it's the reason $100 does double duty below.

Level	Price	Why it matters
Call wall (July 31) + gamma flip (estimate)	$120	6,054 calls open — the week's heaviest call strike, but 26% away; one rough estimate also puts the whole-chain hedging pivot here
Top of implied range (July 31)	$108.53	Upper 1σ rail of what options are pricing
Call OI shelf	$105	2,401 July 31 calls plus one of the chain's five largest gamma strikes
Fresh call build	$102 – $106	Nearly 10,800 contracts of new July 31 call open interest arrived in one session
200-day moving average	$100.67	Price is 5.7% below it — the longer-term line lost on the gap down
Max pain (July 31) / whole-chain call wall / July 31 put wall	$100	Where the most option value expires worthless, 28,734 calls open across the chain, and July 31's biggest put pile — the week's center of gravity
Short-term technical resistance	$97.81	13-day EMA from the technical model; its stated invalidation level
Swing resistance	$96.59	Nearest pivot cluster overhead (heuristic level)
VWAP / 50-day moving average	$95.40 / $95.33	The immediate battleground — price closed 0.4% below the 50-day
Last close	$94.91	Reference for everything above and below
Swing support cluster	$94.40 / $93.06	Recent pivot lows (heuristic levels)
Lower Bollinger band	$92.07	The technical model's primary downside support
Put shelf / whole-chain put wall	$90	About 2,400 July 31 puts — the heaviest put strike below spot for the week; 27,013 puts chain-wide
Deep put OI + gamma strike	$85	903 July 31 puts and a major chain-wide gamma strike; the natural wing for spreads
Bottom of implied range (July 31)	$81.26	Lower 1σ rail of what options are pricing

Positioning and unusual flow

Market makers hedge the options they've sold, and in a positive-gamma regime that hedging tends to dampen moves rather than amplify them. Scoped to July 31 alone, the dealer gamma estimate is positive — on that assumption, hedging around the $100–$105 cluster works against big moves and toward the pin. The whole-chain version of the same estimate places the flip level near $120, far above spot, which would put price on the fragile side of that pivot; our snapshot reading notes spot is unusually far below that estimated pivot for this name. These two estimates point different ways, which is a good reminder that both are estimates built on an assumed dealer sign convention, not observed inventory. The objective open-interest map above is the sturdier guide.

Three flow items stood out among still-tradeable contracts:

• July 31 $101 calls — 9,537 contracts traded against just 360 open, about 26× turnover and roughly $2.9 million of premium, the largest dollar print anywhere in the chain. Someone took a large, dated view on the report through a strike 6% above spot.
• July 31 $97 calls — 5,885 traded on 217 open, about $2.6 million. Same expiration, same direction, tighter to the money.
• July 31 $86 puts — 4,262 contracts in a brand-new strike, roughly $0.83 million, alongside 2,812 contracts in a newly listed November $65 put (about $1.05 million). Downside protection is being bought both for the week and for the season.

That is a genuinely two-sided book: heavy short-dated call speculation into the print, layered over a much larger and steadier put build. It is also why our composite lands near neutral rather than firmly bearish.

3 · Technical check

Both technical horizons read bearish, and both targets sit comfortably inside the options-implied range — so the classification is Confirms, with a much smaller magnitude than the options market is pricing. The 3-day model targets $93.30 with a $90.80–$97.20 range and calls its thesis dead on a sustained close above $97.00. The 5-day model, which lands on the July 31 expiration itself, targets $92.80 within $90.50–$96.50 and invalidates above $97.81. Its supporting evidence is the decisive part: ADX at 38.9 and rising with −DI (41.5) far above +DI (10.7) — a strong, strengthening downtrend rather than chop — plus the July 24 high-volume gap down through the 13-day EMA, 50-day and VWAP all at once. The one counterweight the model flags itself: RSI at 30.8 is oversold enough to make a relief bounce toward $95.40–$97.81 a live possibility before any continuation.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $81.26–$108.53 into July 31; the 5-day technical model targets $92.80 inside a $90.50–$96.50 band. That gap is almost entirely the Wednesday earnings report — the chart model is extrapolating trend, while the chain is pricing a single overnight gap that trend has nothing to say about.

Practically, the technical read did one thing to the structures below: it pushed the short call strike down toward the $103–$105 open-interest shelf rather than out toward the $113–$120 area, since the confirming bearish read makes overhead premium the side worth selling.

Full technical write-ups: 3-day report → · 5-day report →

4 · Three ways the next five days can go

If HOOD reclaims $100 (max pain, and the chain's heaviest call strike): the positioning story flips. That strike carries 28,734 calls chain-wide, the fresh $102–$106 call builds sit just above it, and the 200-day average at $100.67 is right there — a close through the zone means the put build was hedging into an intact longer-term uptrend rather than a directional bet, and the next real congestion is the $105 shelf. This is also the article's kill switch.

If HOOD drifts between $90 and $100: the pin case, and the one the July 31 gamma estimate quietly favors. Max pain at $100 sits about 5% above spot, so "drift" here means grinding up toward heavy strikes rather than sideways — expiring open interest and hedging flows around $95–$100 tend to compress movement, with the 50-day average and VWAP at $95.33–$95.40 as the hinge. A muted earnings reaction is the version of the week that ends here.

If HOOD breaks below $90 (the put shelf and whole-chain put wall): the acceleration case. Below the $92.07 lower band and the $90 strike, the objective open-interest map thins out quickly until $85, where the next real put pile and a major gamma strike sit — and $85 is still well inside the implied $81.26 lower rail. One rough estimate places the whole-chain hedging pivot far above spot at $120, which on that reading means market-maker hedging currently amplifies selling rather than cushioning it. A disappointing Wednesday print is the obvious route.

5 · Three defined-risk structures

Prices are end-of-day midpoints as of July 24, 2026. All structures are hypothetical. Verify live prices before trading — these will be stale by the open. Every one of them spans the Wednesday, July 29 after-close earnings report, because every listed expiration does.

If you lean bullish: July 31 $89/$85 put credit spread

• Trade: Sell the July 31 $89 put, buy the July 31 $85 put. You collect a credit up front and keep all of it if HOOD stays above $89 at expiration.
• Credit: $1.18 · Max profit: $118 · Max loss: $282 · Break-even: $87.82
• Why it fits: $89–$90 is where the week's own put open interest is heaviest below spot (about 2,400 contracts at $90) and it sits under the $92.07 technical support and the $93.06 swing low. You're also selling a 105% implied-volatility put — the steepened skew means the downside is where the richest premium is.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the put build is hedging rather than conviction, and you're comfortable that a 7.5% adverse gap still leaves you whole.
• Invalidated if: HOOD closes below $92.07.
• Earnings exposure: spans the July 29 report — the premium is inflated for exactly that reason, and price can gap straight through both strikes overnight.
• Managing it: close at roughly 50% of max credit; if you want no gap risk at all, close before Wednesday's close rather than hold through the print; if HOOD closes below $89, close rather than hope into a two-day expiration.
• Liquidity note: the $89 puts traded 16¢ wide and the $85 puts 10¢ wide on Friday — fills are workable at the mid.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: July 31 $85/$88/$105/$109 iron condor

• Trade: Sell the $88 put and buy the $85 put; sell the $105 call and buy the $109 call, all July 31. You collect one credit and keep it if HOOD finishes between $88 and $105.
• Credit: $1.575 · Max profit: $157.50 · Max loss: $242.50 on the call side (4-point wing), $142.50 on the put side (3-point wing) · Break-evens: $86.43 and $106.58
• Why it fits: the short strikes bracket the objective open-interest map — $88 sits just above the $85 put pile, $105 right at the call shelf — and both technical horizons project a finish between $90.50 and $97.20, comfortably inside. IV rank at 65/100 and options priced above delivered volatility are the classic conditions for selling a range.
• Makes sense only if: you expect a muted earnings reaction. Be clear-eyed: the break-evens are roughly ±11%, inside the ±14.4% the market is pricing. There is no combination of liquid July 31 strikes that puts a condor outside the implied rails.
• Invalidated if: HOOD closes outside $88–$105 before expiration.
• Earnings exposure: spans the July 29 report — this is explicitly a short-volatility bet on the event, and a single gap can take it to max loss with no chance to adjust.
• Managing it: take 50% of the credit if it's there before Wednesday's close; otherwise size it as though max loss is the likely outcome, and close the untested side after the print to release margin.
• Liquidity note: $88 put 18¢ wide, $85 put 10¢, $105 call 7¢, $109 call 8¢ — four legs of slippage on a $157 credit, so work the order as a package.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bearish: July 31 $103/$109 call credit spread

• Trade: Sell the July 31 $103 call, buy the July 31 $109 call. You collect a credit and keep it if HOOD stays below $103.
• Credit: $1.265 · Max profit: $126.50 · Max loss: $473.50 · Break-even: $104.27
• Why it fits: this is the expression that matches the tilt without paying 104% implied volatility for downside. The short strike sits above max pain at $100 and inside the $102–$106 zone where new call open interest just piled up, with the 200-day average at $100.67 as overhead. Both technical models cap their expected range at $96.50–$97.20.
• Makes sense only if: you accept that $126.50 of credit against $473.50 of risk demands a high hit rate, and you're selling upside rather than betting on a crash.
• Invalidated if: HOOD closes above $100.
• Earnings exposure: spans the July 29 report — an upside gap through $104.27 is a full loss with two days left, so treat the print as the whole trade.
• Managing it: close at 50% of max credit; hard-exit if HOOD closes above $100 at any point, including on Wednesday before the report if you'd rather not carry it.
• Liquidity note: the $103 calls traded 15¢ wide and the $109 calls 8¢ — both fine, and the $103 line was one of the chain's most active strikes on Friday.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

This is a legitimately good week to sit out. Every listed expiration sits after Wednesday's report, so there is no way to harvest the elevated premium without being short an overnight gap — and at 103.8% implied volatility for July 31, the market is charging (and paying) exactly what that gap is worth. If your edge is selling rich volatility rather than guessing at earnings, the cleaner trade is to wait for Thursday's open and sell into the volatility crush with a known price and a known reaction, rather than pre-positioning for a binary. Standing aside costs nothing here except a week.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is HOOD's expected move into July 31? About ±14.4%, or ±$13.64 around the $94.90 close — an $81.26 to $108.53 range, per straddle pricing as of July 24.

Is HOOD expected to go up or down over the next five days? Options positioning as of July 24 leans mildly bearish — put open interest has doubled relative to calls in two weeks, puts are 2.0 vol points over calls against a 0.4-point norm, and flow momentum is negative — but that's a read of what traders have already done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $81.26–$108.53 range with $90 as the put shelf and $100 as the level that flips the read.

When is HOOD's next earnings report? Wednesday, July 29, after the close, with a $0.39 consensus estimate — two sessions before the July 31 expiration, which is why July 31 options price at 103.8% implied volatility while August 21 options price at 79.2%.

Where is HOOD's biggest options support and resistance? For the July 31 expiration, the heaviest put open interest below spot is $90 and the heaviest call open interest is far out at $120; across the whole chain the walls are $100 for calls and $90 for puts, so $100 is the practical ceiling and $90 the practical floor this week.

Is HOOD implied volatility high or low right now? IV rank is 65/100 — cheaper than roughly 35% of the past year's readings, but well above the 30-day and 90-day averages, and the July 31 expiration alone carries 103.8% at-the-money IV because of the earnings report.

What invalidates this read? A close above $100.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for HOOD, July 24, 2026, generated 2026-07-26T20:38:35Z. Prices shown are midpoints and will differ from live markets. Momentum/positioning scores are descriptive measurements of past option flow — not investment advice, signals, forecasts, or guarantees. Earnings dates and reported results are from the data provider's earnings feed as of 2026-07-26T20:38:35Z; 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.