MARA Options Imply a ±$0.91 Move Into August 21 — And Every Major Strike Sits Above the Stock

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The options market implies an $8.29–$10.11 range into the August 21 expiration; here's what's driving it, where the open interest is stacked, and three defined-risk ways to trade it.

Published Sunday, August 16, 2026 · Data as of the August 14, 2026 close

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

Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Neutral
Options-implied range (into Aug 21)	$8.29 – $10.11 (±9.9%)
Major support	$9.00 (heaviest put open interest below spot)
Major resistance	$9.50 (call wall, Aug 21 expiration)
Max pain (Aug 21)	$9.50
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Positive — one rough estimate suggests hedging tends to dampen moves; the flip level in that same estimate sits near $1, far below spot
Volatility condition	Falling — IV rank 22/100 · premium thin: options priced ~23 vol points below delivered movement (distorted by the recent earnings gap)
Technical check	Mixed (3-day model bearish, 5-day model bullish)
Best-fitting strategy	Long $9.00/$9.50 call spread expiring Aug 21 — conditional, see below
Analysis invalidated if	MARA closes below $8.87

1 · What matters today

MARA closed at $9.20 on Friday after an 8.9% slide over five sessions, and the options market is pricing roughly ninety cents of movement either way into the August 21 expiration — an $8.29 to $10.11 band. Our read of the options data lands squarely neutral: the flow signals genuinely disagree with each other this week rather than pointing one direction.

The single most interesting thing in the chain is where the open interest sits. For the August 21 expiration, the strike with the biggest pile of open call contracts is $9.50, the strike with the biggest pile of open puts is $10.00, and the price at which the most option value would expire worthless — max pain — is also $9.50. All of it is above the stock. Traders piled into upside strikes while the price kept falling.

The level that changes the picture is $8.87. A close below it takes the stock out of the zone this positioning is built around. Technically the picture is split — a 3-day model reads bearish, a 5-day model reads bullish, and both land inside the options range.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The stock did the falling and the options did the opposite. MARA is down 8.9% over five trading days and 14.0% over twenty, yet open interest kept tilting toward calls: the put/call open-interest ratio — how many put contracts are held open for every call — fell to 0.43 from 0.64 five sessions ago, against a 14-day average of 0.61. In plain terms, for every call contract held open there are now only 0.43 puts, and that ratio has been shrinking while the price dropped.

The biggest single positioning change was blunt: the August 21 $9.50 calls added 49,750 contracts of open interest in one session, taking that strike to 51,378 contracts. The August 21 $10.50 calls added another 45,977. Across the chain, call open interest grew by roughly 112,700 contracts against 853 on the put side. Into Friday's own expiration, meanwhile, the settled $10.50 calls shed 33,939 contracts as they rolled off the board — history now, but it explains why the shortest-dated sentiment read looks so ugly (more on that below).

Implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much MARA will move, baked into option prices — kept deflating: at-the-money IV is 75.4%, down 11.7% in five sessions and 21.8% in a month, and it now sits well below both its 30-day average (95.3%) and its 90-day average (90.6%). IV rank is 22/100 today versus a 7-day average of 33 and a 14-day average of 44. The front-month read is unavailable today (August 14 was an expiry day, so the nearest-expiration IV can't be interpolated).

One confirming clause on the bigger picture: the short-, one-month and two-month trend reads all point the same way — price is down 8.9%, 14.0% and 34.1% over those windows — so nothing in the price record argues against the prevailing drift, even as the option flow builds calls into it.

Expected move

Into August 21, the options market is pricing about ±9.9%, or roughly ±$0.91 around the $9.20 chain-snapshot price — that's the move implied by what at-the-money straddles cost. Here is the ladder:

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $9.20
Fri, Aug 21 (7 DTE)	±9.9%	$8.29 – $10.11
Fri, Aug 28 (14 DTE)	±14.4%	$7.87 – $10.53
Fri, Sep 4 (21 DTE)	±18.3%	$7.51 – $10.89
Fri, Sep 18 (35 DTE)	±24.1%	$6.99 – $11.41

The step from one rung to the next is roughly the square-root-of-time scaling you would expect from a flat volatility curve — there is no step-up anywhere in the ladder that suggests the chain is bracing for a dated event inside this window.

Volatility

At 75.4% at-the-money IV and an IV rank of 22/100, option prices are cheaper than about 78% of the past year's readings for this name — and by the percentile measure, cheaper than roughly 90% of the past year's individual sessions. That is a real compression: IV has fallen in each of the last three snapshots and is 21% below where it stood a month ago.

Two "vs its own norm" observations sit alongside that, both of them measured against MARA's own recent history rather than the broader market. First, 20-day realized volatility — how much the stock has actually been moving — is running at 98%, well above this stock's recent norm. Second, and pulling the other way, the ratio of 5-day to 20-day realized volatility is 0.48, unusually depressed for this name: over the past week MARA has actually been moving at less than half the pace of the past month. The stock has been calming down faster than the option market's month-long lookback can register.

Premium rich or cheap. The volatility risk premium — the gap between how much movement options are priced for and how much MARA has actually delivered — is currently about 23 vol points negative. Option sellers over the past month have been collecting less than the stock's realized movement cost them. That reading sits at the 3rd percentile of this stock's own recent history, meaning it is thinner than roughly 97% of recent sessions, and the same gap shows up as an unusually stretched reading against this name's norm. But there is a mechanical caveat that has to come with it: MARA reported earnings on August 6 (a $0.70 loss per share against an expected $0.56 loss), and the gap moves around that date sit inside the 20-day realized-volatility window. The premium series flipped from positive to negative on July 30 and has widened steadily since — that flip is the arithmetic of large realized moves entering the lookback, not a trader signal. So: option prices are genuinely low by IV rank, but the "cheap versus delivered" comparison is contaminated right now, and it is not free edge.

Skew and sentiment

Skew is the observation that puts and calls the same distance from the stock price don't cost the same. For MARA right now, they are inverted: 25-delta calls carry 79.8% implied volatility against 75.8% for 25-delta puts — puts are running 3.9 vol points below calls, against a 60-day median of roughly flat (+0.3 vol points). Traders are paying up for upside, not crash protection, in a stock that is 61% off its 52-week high. Over the last week that put-side skew has bled off by more than three vol points.

Put volume was heavier than usual on Friday — a 0.58 put/call volume ratio against a 7-day average of 0.42 — but total option volume was only 0.53× its 20-day average, so it was a quiet tape overall. The rate at which put open interest is thinning relative to calls is running further above this stock's own norm than almost any other reading in the data, and the day's net new open interest was unusually call-heavy for this name.

Sentiment in short-dated options is where the numbers need care. The 0–7 day bucket prints deeply negative (−74), which the model labels "bearish capitulation" — but that reading is driven entirely by open interest rolling off the August 14 contracts that were expiring that same day, and it has printed near −75 on every recent Friday. The bucket that actually covers our target expiration, 7–30 days, reads +57, with call open interest up 128,048 contracts against 17,744 on the put side. The 30–60 day bucket reads +55. Once the expiry artifact is set aside, the curve leans call-side across every live tenor.

One more observation worth stating plainly, without turning it into a call: over the past ten sessions price fell about 27% while our leading positioning read rose by roughly 50 points. That combination — price down, positioning up — describes conditions that have historically preceded a turn in this kind of data. It is an early, unconfirmed read by construction, not a confirmed turn.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
Swing resistance cluster	$11.56 – $11.78	Prior pivot highs from the July range
200-day moving average	$11.30	Price sits 18.6% below it
20-day moving average	$11.02	16.5% overhead — the stock has fallen a long way from its own short-term mean
Swing resistance cluster	$10.03 – $10.54	Three clustered pivot levels; $10.03 is the first one price would meet
Second-heaviest call strike (Aug 21)	$10.50	47,722 calls open — the next block of overhead supply after $9.50
Top of implied range (Aug 21)	$10.11	Upper 1σ rail of the options-implied move
Put wall (Aug 21)	$10.00	13,932 puts open — the biggest put pile at this expiration sits above spot, which is unusual; also the whole chain's heaviest put strike (51,502)
Call wall + max pain + largest gamma strike (Aug 21)	$9.50	51,378 calls open, the price at which the most option value expires worthless, and the single largest gamma concentration in the chain — the week's magnet
Friday's close	$9.20	Reference price for everything above and below
Heaviest put strike below spot (Aug 21)	$9.00	11,935 puts open — the first real downside shelf
Shared technical support	$8.87	Lower Bollinger Band and recent swing low in both technical reports; the invalidation level for this read
Next put shelf	$8.50	6,335 puts open; positioning thins out quickly beneath it
Bottom of implied range (Aug 21)	$8.29	Lower 1σ rail of the options-implied move
52-week low	$6.66	Range position is 15/100 — near the bottom of the past year

Note that the August 21 expiration's own walls and the whole chain's aggregate walls agree this week — $9.50 on the call side, $10.00 on the put side — so there is no conflict to arbitrate between the two views.

Positioning and unusual flow

The dealer-gamma read is an estimate, not observed inventory, and it should be treated that way. Under the standard sign convention it comes out positive for the August 21 expiration, which is the regime in which market makers' hedging tends to dampen moves rather than amplify them — consistent with a chain whose gamma is piled at $9.50, just above spot. The same estimate places the gamma flip level near $1, which in practice means spot is sitting unusually far above it for this name; that estimate is not flagging a fragility zone anywhere near current prices.

Three pieces of flow stand out among the still-live contracts. The largest premium of the day went to September 18 $9 calls — 3,720 contracts and about $368,000 changing hands. The August 28 $9 calls traded 1,484 contracts against just 161 held open, a nine-fold turnover, roughly $95,000 of premium. And on the other side, 2,006 October 16 $8 puts traded against only 7 contracts of prior open interest — about $128,000 of fresh, far-dated downside protection bought at a strike 13% below spot. Someone is paying up for calls inside a month and someone else is buying insurance out to October; both are real, and they do not agree.

3 · Technical check

Two technical models were run against this window and they split. The near-term read, covering the next few sessions to August 19, is bearish with a $9.02 target and an $8.80–$9.45 expected band: price below every major moving average, negative directional index still dominant, and money flow in distribution — although the model itself notes trend strength has been fading, with the ADX rolling over from about 30 to 23.6. Its dominant scenario is invalidated on a sustained close above $9.35.

The read that lands on our actual target date, August 21, is bullish with a $9.48 target and an $8.90–$9.55 band, built on a fresh MACD crossover, RSI recovering from 25 to 36, and money flow improving sharply from −0.28 to −0.05. Its dominant scenario invalidates on a close back below $8.95. Both models name $8.87 as the support that matters.

Classification: mixed. Neither target sits outside the options-implied range, so neither model is fighting the market's pricing — but they disagree with each other over three days versus six. The convergence worth noting is that the bullish 5-day target, $9.48, lands essentially on the options market's own max-pain strike of $9.50. That coincidence is what shaded the short call strike in the first structure below to exactly $9.50 rather than higher.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $8.29–$10.11 into August 21; the 5-day technical model targets $9.48 inside a far tighter $8.90–$9.55 band. The technical read is pricing a much quieter week than the option chain is — if realized movement keeps decelerating the way the 5-day-versus-20-day volatility ratio suggests, the options are the side that's wrong.

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

4 · Three ways the next five days can go

If MARA pushes above the call wall ($9.50): that strike holds 51,378 open calls, the heaviest concentration anywhere in the week's chain, and the heaviest call open interest overhead tends to slow rallies as it is approached. A clean break through it runs into the $10.00 round number, the top of the implied range at $10.11, and then a 47,722-contract call block at $10.50 — three layers of positioning inside seventy cents.

If MARA drifts between $9.00 and $9.50: this is the pin case, and it is the one the positioning is shaped for. Max pain for August 21 is $9.50, the largest gamma concentration is at $9.50, and one rough estimate of dealer hedging puts this expiration in the regime where that hedging dampens rather than amplifies movement. Expirations sometimes gravitate toward max pain; when the biggest gamma strike sits thirty cents above spot, that gravity points mildly upward rather than sideways.

If MARA breaks below $9.00: the first shelf is the 11,935 puts open at $9.00, then $8.87 — the swing low both technical models flag — then 6,335 puts at $8.50, below which open interest thins out fast until $8.00. The dealer-gamma estimate does not flag an acceleration zone near current prices (its flip level sits far below spot), so the honest framing is simply that there is much less positioning under $8.50 to slow a move, and the lower rail of the implied range at $8.29 is the market's own one-sigma marker for how far that could reach in five sessions.

5 · Three defined-risk structures

Prices are end-of-day midpoints as of the August 14, 2026 close. All structures are hypothetical. Verify live prices before trading — these will be stale by the open.

If you lean bullish: long $9.00/$9.50 call spread (Aug 21)

• Trade: Buy the Aug 21 $9.00 call, sell the Aug 21 $9.50 call
• Debit: $0.215 ($21.50 per spread) · Max profit: $28.50 · Max loss: $21.50 · Break-even: $9.215
• Why it fits: The short strike is the call wall, the max-pain strike and the largest gamma concentration in the week's chain, all at the same $9.50 — and it is also where the 5-day technical model's $9.48 target lands. You are paying for the pin rather than betting past it. IV rank of 22/100 means you are buying the option leg at prices cheaper than roughly 78% of the past year's readings.
• Makes sense only if: you think the $9.50 open-interest cluster acts as a magnet into Friday rather than a ceiling that price never reaches.
• Invalidated if: MARA closes below $8.87.
• Managing it: take profit at roughly 70% of max value rather than holding for the last few cents — the payoff flattens completely above $9.50 and the short-term trend read still points down, which argues for taking money early rather than sitting through Thursday and Friday. Exit regardless by the Thursday close.
• Liquidity note: the tightest pair in the chain — the $9.00 calls quote $0.46/$0.48 (about 4% wide) and the $9.50 calls $0.25/$0.26 (about 4% wide), on 2,052 and 7,260 contracts of volume respectively. Fills should be straightforward.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bearish: long $9.00/$8.50 put spread (Aug 21)

• Trade: Buy the Aug 21 $9.00 put, sell the Aug 21 $8.50 put
• Debit: $0.16 ($16.00 per spread) · Max profit: $34.00 · Max loss: $16.00 · Break-even: $8.84
• Why it fits: This is the cheap way to express the 3-day technical read, whose $9.02 target and $8.80 lower band both sit inside this spread's payoff zone. The trend reads across five, twenty and fifty days all point down, and with implied volatility at the low end of its yearly range you are not overpaying for the option you buy. The break-even at $8.84 sits just under the $8.87 support both models name.
• Makes sense only if: you expect the $9.00 put shelf to break rather than hold, and you are comfortable that the entire chain's open interest is stacked against you above spot.
• Invalidated if: MARA closes above $9.50 — through the call wall, which would confirm the pin resolved upward.
• Managing it: close on any touch of $8.87 rather than holding for the full $8.50; that level is the shared support in both technical reports and the most likely place a decline pauses. Exit regardless by Thursday's close, since a 1-DTE debit spread this far out of the money decays to nearly nothing on Friday.
• Liquidity note: the $9.00 puts quote $0.26/$0.27 (under 4% wide) on 2,847 contracts; the $8.50 puts quote $0.10/$0.11 — a penny wide, which is about 10% of the mark. That penny is unavoidable on a sub-$0.15 option; size accordingly and use limit orders.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: $8.50/$9.00/$10.00/$10.50 iron condor (Aug 21)

• Trade: Sell the Aug 21 $9.00 put and buy the $8.50 put; sell the Aug 21 $10.00 call and buy the $10.50 call. You collect a credit up front and keep it if the stock finishes between your short strikes.
• Credit: $0.22 ($22.00) · Max profit: $22.00 · Max loss: $28.00 · Break-evens: $8.78 and $10.22
• Why it fits: The profit zone is centred almost exactly on the $9.50 max-pain strike, with the short call at the put wall and the short put at the first downside open-interest shelf. If the pin case plays out, this is the structure that gets paid for it.
• Health warning: you are selling premium that has not been rich lately. The gap between priced-in and delivered movement is deeply negative and near the bottom of this stock's own recent readings — that comparison is distorted by the August 6 earnings gap sitting inside the realized-volatility window, but nothing in it says premium sellers are being overpaid right now.
• Makes sense only if: you believe realized movement keeps decelerating the way the 5-day-versus-20-day volatility ratio suggests. The profit band is ±7.8% wide against a ±9.9% implied move — the market's own pricing says the stock is more likely than not to travel outside it, and you are being paid roughly 1:1 to bet against that.
• Invalidated if: MARA closes below $8.87 or above $10.11 — either break puts one wing in the money with the other worthless.
• Managing it: close at ~50% of max credit; do not hold a $9 stock's condor into Friday afternoon with a short strike twenty cents away. If either short strike is breached on a closing basis, close the tested side rather than hoping for a reversion.
• Liquidity note: the $9.00 put ($0.26/$0.27) and $10.00 call ($0.12/$0.13) are tight, but the $8.50 put ($0.10/$0.11) and $10.50 call ($0.06/$0.07) are each a penny wide on marks around a dime — that is 10–15% of mark on the protective wings. Expect to give up several cents of the $0.22 credit to slippage on a four-leg fill; leg pricing matters more than usual here.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

There is a respectable case for standing aside. The bias arithmetic came out neutral because the inputs genuinely conflict — a leading positioning read that has turned up, short-dated sentiment that is muddied by an expiry artifact, skew that says complacency and a price trend that says otherwise — and the two technical models disagree with each other across a three-day gap. On top of that, every attractive premium-selling strike on a $9 stock carries a penny-wide spread that eats 10% of the mark, and the one comparison that would normally justify selling premium (implied versus delivered movement) is mechanically distorted right now by the August 6 earnings gap sitting inside the realized-volatility window. If you do not have a view on whether $9.50 pulls or repels, the honest answer is that this chain does not hand you one.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is MARA's expected move this week? About ±9.9%, or ±$0.91 — an $8.29 to $10.11 range into the August 21 expiration, per the options market's straddle pricing as of the August 14 close.

Is MARA expected to go up or down over the next five days? Options positioning as of August 14 reads neutral — heavy call building sits against a price trend that is down across every lookback — but that is a read of what traders have done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $8.29–$10.11 range and the $9.00/$9.50 levels.

Are MARA options expensive right now? IV rank of 22/100 says option prices are lower than about 78% of the past year's readings; on top of that, they are running roughly 23 vol points below the movement MARA has actually delivered, thinner than about 97% of this stock's own recent sessions. Both lenses say cheap — but the second one is inflated by the August 6 earnings gap inside the realized-volatility window, so treat it as context rather than edge.

Where is MARA's biggest options support and resistance? For the August 21 expiration, the heaviest call open interest is at $9.50 (51,378 contracts) and the formal put wall is at $10.00 (13,932) — both above spot. The heaviest put strike below the stock is $9.00, with 11,935 contracts open.

What invalidates this week's read? A close below $8.87.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for MARA, 2026-08-14, generated 2026-08-16T20:28:43Z. 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 2026-08-16T20:28:43Z; 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.