INTC Options Are Pricing a $10 Move Into August 14 — Our Chart Model Sees a Third of That

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The options market implies a $91.40–$111.56 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 the 2026-08-07 close

Explore the live INTC options data in the Detailed Options Analyzer →

Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Neutral with a bullish tilt
Options-implied range (into Aug 14)	$91.40 – $111.56 (±9.9%)
Major support	$95 (the whole chain's heaviest put strike); $90 is the Aug 14 expiration's own put wall
Major resistance	$110 (call wall, both for Aug 14 and chain-wide)
Max pain (Aug 14)	$98
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Positive — hedging tends to dampen moves; flip level ≈ $109
Volatility condition	Falling — IV rank 53/100 · premium thin: options priced about 13 vol points below delivered movement (realized vol still carries the July 23 earnings gap)
Technical check	Confirms direction, disagrees on size (bullish, 3-day and 6-day)
Best-fitting strategy	Aug 14 $102/$107 call debit spread, if you want the directional tilt
Analysis invalidated if	INTC closes below $98

1 · What matters today

Intel closed Friday at $101.65 after a violent recovery — up 12.7% in five sessions off the early-August lows. The options market's read is genuinely mixed rather than conveniently bullish: our blended positioning score lands almost dead center, with only a slight upward lean. Short-dated flow is call-heavy, implied volatility is collapsing, and the option chain is priced for a move of roughly $10 either way — a $91.40 to $111.56 band — into the August 14 expiration.

The one number that anchors everything: $110. That's where the heaviest pile of call contracts sits, both for Aug 14 and across the whole chain, and rallies tend to slow into strikes like that. On the downside, $98 is where the most option value would expire worthless. A close below $98 breaks the constructive read. Both technical models agree on direction — they just expect a far smaller move than options are charging for.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The story of the past five sessions is a price rip and a volatility collapse. INTC is +12.7% over five trading days but still −7.6% over twenty — so this is a bounce inside a broken chart, not a resumed uptrend. Implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much INTC will move, baked into option prices — fell to 73.2%, down 5.7% on the day, 12.0% over five sessions and 21.9% over thirty. That puts it well under both its 30-day average (92.9%) and its 90-day average (84.6%). IV rank has slid to 53/100 from a 3-day average of 60, a 7-day average of 67, and a 14-day average of 76. Fear is bleeding out of the chain fast.

Flow tilted with it. For every put contract traded, roughly 2.5 calls changed hands — a put/call volume ratio of 0.41 against a 7-day average of 0.50 and a 14-day average of 0.54, so the call bias is intensifying, not fading. Open interest tells the same story more slowly: 0.71 puts held open per call, versus 0.83 two weeks ago. Total option volume was 0.93× its 20-day average, so this was a normal-sized session, not a frenzy. The biggest genuine positioning build in a live contract was in the Aug 12 $96 puts, which went from 8 contracts open to 4,956 — someone laid down real downside protection just under the 20-day moving average. (Into Friday's now-settled expiry, the $112 calls added 5,332 contracts of open interest — history, not a live magnet.)

The horizons disagree, and that's the honest headline. Our short-, medium- and long-term trend reads are split: the past week is bullish, but the past month (−7.6%) and the past two-and-a-half months (−16.5%) are both bearish. Near-term flow and the bigger trend are pointing in different directions — which is exactly the setup where directional trades should be short-dated and taken off early.

Expected move

Options expiring August 14 are pricing a move of about ±9.9%, or roughly $10.08 around the $101.48 chain-snapshot price — that's the move the options market is pricing in, derived from what straddles cost. Here's the ladder:

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $101.48
Mon, Aug 10 (3 days)	±4.6%	$96.84 – $106.12
Wed, Aug 12 (5 days)	±7.6%	$93.77 – $109.19
Fri, Aug 14 (7 days)	±9.9%	$91.40 – $111.56
Fri, Aug 21 (14 days)	±14.1%	$87.18 – $115.78

The ladder is smooth — no humps, no kinks. Each rung scales roughly with the square root of time, which is what a chain with no scheduled event inside the window looks like. The volatility is being priced as ambient, not event-driven.

Volatility

At-the-money implied volatility sits at 73.2%, with an IV rank of 53/100 — option prices are higher than 53% of the past year's readings and cheaper than the other 47%. The 52-week percentile is a bit richer at 63. The front-month read is unavailable today (Friday was an expiry day, so front-month IV can't be interpolated from a same-day-expiring contract), but the ~60-day tenor prints 73.9% — essentially flat against the front of the curve.

The interesting part is what the stock has actually been doing. Realized volatility over the past 20 sessions is 86.4% — measured against this stock's own recent history, that's a touch below its norm, and the 5-day-versus-20-day ratio (0.84) says movement is decelerating, not accelerating. Meanwhile the pace of IV compression is far above anything this name has produced recently. Traders are marking down option prices faster than the stock is calming down.

Premium rich or cheap. The volatility risk premium — the gap between how much movement options are priced for and how much INTC has actually delivered — is running at about negative 13 vol points. Options are priced roughly 13 points below realized movement, which sits at the 18th percentile of this stock's own recent readings: thinner than about 82% of them. On paper that says buy premium, not sell it. But be careful with that conclusion: the July 23 earnings gap is still inside the 20-day realized-volatility window, mechanically inflating the realized leg, so some of this "cheapness" is arithmetic rather than opportunity. The premium reading flipped from about +24 points on July 23 to deeply negative now, and that flip is largely the gap entering the window — a calendar effect, not a trader signal. Net: the chain is not rich, IV rank is mid-range, and neither the buy-premium nor the sell-premium case is clean this week.

Skew and sentiment

Skew — the fact that puts and calls the same distance from the stock price don't cost the same — is unusual here. At 25 delta, calls carry about 75.1% implied volatility against 72.97% for puts, so calls are the expensive side by about 2.1 vol points. Traders are paying up for upside, not crash protection. That's not new for this name: the 60-day norm is calls running 4.1 points over puts. So the configuration is still call-favoring, but by half its usual margin — the upside chase has cooled since last week, when the 3-day average had calls a full 6.5 points richer.

Short-dated sentiment is the firmest part of the picture. Our read of the 0–7 day bucket scores +38, driven by call-side delta-weighted flow and a net build in call open interest; the 7–30 day bucket is a milder +16. Every expiration bucket leans the same way — the regime reads as broadly bullish across the curve. Against its own norm, today's put/call volume ratio is unusually call-tilted for this name, and the pace of call-side sweeps clearing the peer-relative unusual bar (18 call contracts vs 14 put) is running above typical. Those are observations of what traders have done, not a forecast of where the stock goes.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
Call shelf (Aug 21)	$115	8,815 calls open — the next overhead cluster past the wall
Top of implied range	$111.56	Upper rail of the Aug 14 expected move
50-day moving average	$110.65	Still sloping down; price is 8.1% below it — the real chart hurdle
Call wall (Aug 14 and chain-wide)	$110	8,521 calls open for Aug 14; 109,911 across the whole chain — the single heaviest strike anywhere
Gamma flip (estimate)	≈ $109	One rough estimate of the hedging pivot; treat as an estimate, not a level
Swing resistance	$106.85	Prior pivot cluster from price structure
Heavy call OI	$105	5,636 calls open for Aug 14; a top-5 gamma strike chain-wide
Near resistance	$102.40	Swing pivot; both technical models flag $102.62–$102.65 as the immediate ceiling
Friday's close	$101.65	Chain-snapshot price $101.48
Gamma / round number	$100	Second-heaviest gamma strike chain-wide; the technical support cluster
Swing support	$98.33	Nearest structural shelf below
Max pain (Aug 14)	$98	Where the most option value would expire worthless — expirations sometimes gravitate toward it
20-day moving average	$96.96	Price sits 4.8% above it — the first trend line to lose
Put wall (chain-wide)	$95	54,134 puts open — the biggest downside pile in the whole chain
Bottom of implied range	$91.40	Lower rail of the Aug 14 expected move
Put wall (Aug 14 only)	$90	3,491 puts — this expiration's own heaviest put strike, well below the chain-wide $95

Note the disagreement worth naming: the Aug 14 expiration's own put wall sits at $90, but the whole chain's put wall is $95, where 54,134 contracts are held open across all dates. For this week's expiry the $90 strike matters; for the broader positioning floor, $95 is the number.

Positioning and unusual flow

One rough estimate reads dealer positioning as net positive gamma, both across the chain and specifically at the Aug 14 expiration — a regime where market makers' hedging tends to dampen moves rather than amplify them, pulling price toward heavy strikes instead of pushing it away. The same estimate places the pivot near $109. Treat all of that as an estimate built on an assumed convention, not observed dealer inventory.

Three live flows stood out, all call-side:

• Aug 14 $105 calls — 12,970 contracts traded on 5,636 open, about $3.43 million of premium. The single busiest non-expired contract, sitting one strike below the expected-move midpoint.
• Aug 14 $107 calls — 6,400 traded against just 529 open, a turnover ratio above 12 and roughly $1.28 million of premium. Fresh positioning, not recycling.
• Sep 4 $107 calls — 2,355 traded against 78 open (a 30× turnover, top of its peer group), about $1.47 million of premium. Someone is buying time as well as direction.

On the other side, the Aug 21 $100 puts added 3,593 contracts and the Aug 14 $97 puts added 1,440 — real hedging, but smaller in dollars than the call flow. The chain is leaning up; it is not one-sided.

3 · Technical check

Both technical reports are fresh (dated August 8) and both read bullish, working from the same $101.65 close the options data uses. The 3-day model targets $103.00 with an expected range of $99.60–$103.90, calling support at $100 and resistance at the upper Bollinger band near $102.62. The 6-day model, which lines up with our outlook date, targets $103.30 with a range of $97.80–$105.30, support at $99.40 and resistance at $102.65.

The reasoning is consistent across both: price is holding above a rising short-term moving-average stack, money-flow readings have turned back to net accumulation, and the +DI line leads −DI. The caution flag both reports raise is trend strength — ADX at 19.6 and falling from ~31 says direction is up but conviction is thin, which is the technical mirror of our own divergent horizon read. Both models also note the declining 50-day average at $110.65 as the wall this bounce would eventually have to clear — the same price the options chain's call wall occupies.

Classification: confirms direction, diverges sharply on magnitude. The technical target sits comfortably inside the options-implied range, which is the definition of a confirming read — but the size gap is the interesting part.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $91.40–$111.56 into August 14; the 6-day technical model expects $97.80–$105.30 with a $103.30 target. The chain is charging for roughly three times the movement the chart expects — which is why the structures below are built with defined width rather than naked exposure, and why the range-bound structure's short strikes sit at the implied rails rather than near the technical ones.

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

4 · Three ways the next six days can go

If INTC pushes above the call wall ($110): That's the heaviest single strike anywhere in the chain — 109,911 calls open across all dates, 8,521 for Aug 14 alone. Positioning that dense overhead tends to slow rallies as hedging flows lean against the move. A clean break through it also runs directly into the declining 50-day average at $110.65, so the zone between $110 and $111 is where two independent kinds of resistance stack. Above that, positioning thins out until the $115 shelf.

If INTC drifts between the walls: This is the base case the arithmetic points to. Max pain for Aug 14 is $98, roughly 3.6% below Friday's close, and the estimated gamma regime is positive — meaning the hedging flow around big strikes tends to pull price toward them rather than away. A drift back toward the $98–$100 shelf, where the $100 strike carries the second-heaviest gamma load in the chain, would be the most ordinary outcome of a week with no scheduled catalyst and rapidly deflating implied volatility.

If INTC breaks below the put wall zone: The first real shelf is $96.96 (the 20-day average) and then $95, where 54,134 puts are held open chain-wide. Below that the expected-move floor at $91.40 lines up near the early-August lows. Worth noting: the estimated hedging pivot at ~$109 sits above spot, so by that rough estimate the current regime is the supportive one — but a fast move down would test that assumption before any model would confirm it.

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 $102/$107 call debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 14 $102 call, sell the Aug 14 $107 call
• Debit: $1.88 · Max profit: $3.12 · Max loss: $1.88 · Break-even: $103.88
• Why it fits: A debit spread means you pay up front and profit if the stock rises — and with the premium gap running about 13 vol points below delivered movement, buying defined-width premium is structurally more defensible right now than selling it. The $107 short strike sits under both the $110 call wall and the technical models' $105.30 upper range, so you're capping profit exactly where positioning gets heavy rather than hoping through it.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the call-heavy short-dated flow (put/call volume 0.41 vs a 0.54 two-week average) leads price rather than lags it.
• Invalidated if: INTC closes below $98.
• Managing it: The short-term trend is fighting a still-bearish one- and two-month trend, so don't be greedy — take profit at 60–70% of maximum value rather than holding to expiration, and be flat by Thursday's close regardless. If the stock closes below $100 (the technical support cluster), close it.
• Liquidity note: The $102 calls traded 15¢ wide on 4,441 contracts (about 3.9% of mark); the $107 calls are 12¢ wide on 6,400 contracts (about 6% of mark) — a touch wider than ideal, so work the fill rather than crossing.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: Aug 14 $90/$95/$110/$115 iron condor

• Trade: Sell the $95 put and buy the $90 put; sell the $110 call and buy the $115 call, all Aug 14
• Credit: $1.58 · Max profit: $1.58 · Max loss: $3.42 · Break-evens: $93.42 and $111.58
• Why it fits: Both short strikes sit exactly on structural positioning: $110 is the call wall and $95 is the chain's put wall, and each is roughly a 23-delta strike sitting just inside the expected-move rails of $91.40 and $111.56. A condor collects premium up front and wins if the stock finishes between the short strikes; the estimated positive-gamma regime and the $98 max pain both describe a market whose hedging flows favor drift over dislocation.
• Health warning: you're selling premium that hasn't been rich lately — implied volatility is running below what the stock has delivered, so this structure is being paid less than the recent movement history would justify. Size it smaller than you would in a high-IV-rank week.
• Makes sense only if: you accept a 1:2.2 reward-to-risk ratio in exchange for a wide profit zone.
• Invalidated if: INTC closes above $110 or below $95.
• Managing it: Close at ~50% of max credit; exit regardless by Thursday, August 13. If either short strike is breached on a closing basis, close that side rather than hoping for a reversion.
• Liquidity note: The $110 calls traded 5¢ wide on 15,367 contracts and the $95 puts 11¢ wide on 1,719 — both fine. The wings are thinner: the $115 calls are 6¢ wide (~10% of mark) and the $90 puts 4¢ wide (~7%), so expect a little slippage on the protection legs.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bearish: Aug 14 $100/$95 put debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 14 $100 put, sell the Aug 14 $95 put
• Debit: $1.74 · Max profit: $3.26 · Max loss: $1.74 · Break-even: $98.26
• Why it fits: The break-even sits essentially on top of the $98 max-pain strike and the $98.33 swing support — meaning this trade only pays if price pushes through the pin zone rather than settling into it. That's the honest framing of a bearish bet here. It's the structure for a trader who thinks the one- and two-month downtrends (−7.6% and −16.5%) reassert themselves over a five-session bounce, and again a debit rather than a credit given how thin the premium is versus delivered movement.
• Makes sense only if: you're fading the call-heavy flow and expect a retest of the 20-day average at $96.96.
• Invalidated if: INTC closes above $105.
• Managing it: Take profit at 60–70% of max value. Because it's fighting the short-term trend, cut it fast — if INTC closes above $103 with no follow-through lower, close rather than average.
• Liquidity note: The $100 puts traded 15¢ wide on 2,728 contracts (~4.7% of mark); the $95 puts 11¢ wide on 1,719 (~7.7%). Acceptable, but use limit orders on the short leg.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

There is a real case for standing aside this week, and it's stronger than usual. The bias arithmetic lands almost exactly in the middle — the constructive inputs (call-heavy short-dated flow, collapsing implied volatility, a big five-day price move) are offset by a skew reading that has steepened against its own norm and a spot price sitting in the upper half of its wall corridor with more room below than above. Neither the buy-premium nor the sell-premium verdict is clean: IV rank at 53 is mid-range, and the volatility premium looks cheap mostly because the July 23 earnings gap is still inflating the realized-volatility window, so a debit structure isn't the bargain the raw number suggests. Add a short-term trend that directly contradicts the one- and two-month trends, and you have a week where the highest-quality decision may be to wait for the $98–$110 corridor to break in one direction and trade the resolution instead of the range.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is INTC's expected move this week? About ±9.9%, or ±$10.08 — a $91.40 to $111.56 range into the August 14 expiration, per the options market's straddle pricing as of the August 7 close.

Is INTC expected to go up or down over the next six days? Options positioning as of August 7 leans neutral with a slight bullish tilt — short-dated flow is running roughly 2.5 calls for every put and calls are the pricier side of the chain — but that's a read of what traders have done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $91.40–$111.56 range and the $95/$110 wall levels, with $98 as the pin candidate.

Are INTC options expensive right now? Two lenses. IV rank of 53/100 says option prices are higher than 53% of the past year's readings — middling. On top of that they're running about 13 vol points below the movement INTC has actually delivered, thinner than roughly 82% of this stock's own recent readings. That normally argues for buying premium rather than selling it, but the realized-volatility number is still inflated by the July 23 earnings gap, so treat the "cheap" verdict as soft rather than as an edge.

Where is INTC's biggest options support and resistance? Resistance at $110, the call wall for both the August 14 expiration (8,521 contracts) and the chain as a whole (109,911). Support at $95 chain-wide (54,134 puts), with the August 14 expiration's own put wall further down at $90.

What invalidates this week's read? A close below $98 — through max pain and the $98.33 swing shelf. That would put the constructive tilt on the wrong side of both the pin level and the nearest structural support.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for INTC, 2026-08-07, generated 2026-08-08T15:02:18Z. 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 2026-08-08T15:02:18Z; 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.