MARA Options Price a ±$1.45 Move — but Every Major Strike Sits Below the Stock

The options market implies a $9.70–$12.60 range into the August 28 expiration; here's what's driving it and three defined-risk ways to trade it.

Published Sunday, August 23, 2026 · Data as of the 2026-08-21 close

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

Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Neutral
Options-implied range (into Aug 28)	$9.70 – $12.60 (±13.0%)
Major support	$10.54 (swing shelf; the Aug 28 put wall sits far below at $8.50)
Major resistance	$11.56
Max pain (Aug 28)	$9.50
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Positive — hedging tends to dampen moves; flip level ≈ $2, an estimate that sits far below any plausible trading range this week
Volatility condition	Rising — IV rank 42/100 · premium thin: options priced roughly 23 vol points below delivered movement (distorted by a recent earnings report inside the realized-vol window)
Technical check	Diverges (bullish, 3-day and 5-day)
Best-fitting strategy	Call debit spread, if you lean with the trend — owning premium is favored over selling it this week
Analysis invalidated if	MARA closes below $10.54

1 · What matters today

MARA ripped 21.2% higher in five sessions and closed Friday at $11.26. That move left the stock sitting above almost every meaningful options level for the August 28 expiration: that expiration's biggest pile of open call contracts is at $10, its biggest put pile is at $8.50, and max pain — the price where the most option value would expire worthless — is $9.50. In other words, the options structure is anchored well below where the stock now trades.

Meanwhile the flow itself is call-heavy and short-dated sentiment is bullish. Those two things pull in opposite directions, and our composite read lands squarely at Neutral. The options market is pricing a ±$1.45 move into Friday, or roughly $9.70 to $12.60. Both technical models we checked lean bullish with targets near $11.60–$11.70. The single level that changes the picture is $10.54 — a close below it says the breakout shelf gave way.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

Price did the heavy lifting. MARA gained 21.2% over five trading days but is still down 8.2% over the past month and 11.7% over roughly two months — the past week's surge runs directly against the bigger trend, and our short-, medium- and long-horizon trend reads openly disagree with each other. Total option volume ran 2.5× its 20-day average on Friday, and 49% of that unusual flow was call-skewed.

Volatility followed price up. At-the-money implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much MARA will move, baked into option prices — rose 19.3% over five sessions to 89.9%. IV rank climbed to 42/100 from a 7-day average of 30 and a 14-day average of 36. Under the surface, though, hedging has been building: the put/call open-interest ratio went from 0.43 to 0.56 over five days, a 31% jump. For every call contract held open there are now 0.56 puts — a week ago it was 0.43, so traders added downside protection at an unusually fast clip for this name. That put-side build is one of the sharpest readings versus MARA's own recent norm anywhere in the data.

One more note on the plumbing: day-over-day open-interest changes in Friday's snapshot came through flat across the board, so nothing here is built on one-day OI shifts. Into Friday's expiration, flow was frantic — the $11 calls expiring that day traded 55,021 contracts and the $10.50 puts 22,288 — but those contracts have settled and are history now.

Expected move

Into the August 28 expiration, the options market is pricing a ±13.0% move — the move implied by what straddles cost — which on a $11.15 chain-snapshot price works out to about ±$1.45, or a $9.70 to $12.60 range.

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $11.15
Fri, Aug 28 (7 days)	±13.0%	$9.70 – $12.60
Fri, Sep 4 (14 days)	±18.1%	$9.13 – $13.17
Fri, Sep 11 (21 days)	±20.4%	$8.88 – $13.42
Fri, Sep 18 (28 days)	±25.0%	$8.36 – $13.94

The rungs widen roughly the way time alone says they should, but the pricing is front-loaded: the August 28 rung carries 93.9% implied volatility, the richest of the four, while the September 11 rung sits at 84.9%, the cheapest. The market is paying up most for the next five sessions.

Volatility

At-the-money IV is 89.9%. IV rank of 42/100 means today's reading is cheaper than 58% of the past year's — middling, not a bargain and not a squeeze. IV sits just below its 30-day average (92.6%) and essentially on top of its 90-day average (89.9%), up 2.2% on the day and 19.3% over five days, but still down 4.5% over 30 days.

The term structure — comparing option prices across expiration dates — is inverted: front-month IV is running 18.7 vol points above the 60-day tenor (109.5% versus 90.8%). That kind of backwardation usually signals near-term stress or event risk, and the gap is wider than it typically runs for this stock. Realized movement backs it up: MARA's 20-day realized volatility is 112.7% annualized, well above its own recent norm, and its five-day pace is running about 18% hotter than its 20-day pace. This stock has genuinely been moving.

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 negative 23 vol points. Option sellers have been collecting less than realized movement cost them. That gap sits at the 4th percentile versus this stock's own recent readings, meaning premium is richer than only 4% of them; it flipped from positive to negative in late July as realized volatility exploded and has stayed there all month. One caveat matters here: MARA reported earnings on August 6, and that session sits inside the 20-day realized-volatility window, so part of the "cheap options" reading is a scheduled event echoing through the math rather than pure ongoing turbulence. Treat it as descriptive, not as free money. On balance, IV rank of 42 plus a 4th-percentile premium gap tilts this week toward owning premium rather than selling it — which is why the debit structures lead below.

Skew and sentiment

Skew is the fact that puts and calls the same distance from the stock price don't cost the same. Right now 25-delta puts trade at 89.9% implied volatility and 25-delta calls at 90.5% — calls are the more expensive side by about 0.7 vol points, against a 60-day median of puts being 0.7 points richer. That's a roughly 1.3-point swing toward calls versus this stock's own norm: traders are paying up for upside, not crash protection, which our engine reads as complacency rather than conviction.

Put/call volume came in at 0.34 — meaning roughly one put traded for every three calls — right on its 7-day average of 0.35 and below its 14-day average of 0.42. Six call contracts cleared the peer-relative unusual-volume bar on Friday versus one put, an unusually call-dominant split for this name. Short-dated sentiment is broadly bullish across the curve: our 0–7 day read scores +41 and the 7–30 day read +37, with every bucket leaning positive.

The dissent comes from our leading positioning read, which measures flow, skew and term structure while deliberately excluding price. Over the trailing ten sessions price rose 13.7% while that composite fell sharply — a price-versus-positioning divergence, the kind of condition that has historically preceded a turn. It is an early, unconfirmed read, not a confirmed turn, and it is the main reason this week's label is Neutral rather than something with a lean attached.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
52-week high	$23.45	Price sits 52% below it; the stock is at the 27th percentile of its yearly range
Swing resistance	$12.50	Upper rail used for the short call in the range structure below
50-day average	$12.06	Still declining, 6.7% above the close — the first real trend hurdle
Overhead options cluster	$12.00	Fourth-largest gamma concentration in the whole chain; the Aug 28 $12 calls traded 21,449 contracts Friday
Swing resistance	$11.78	Next pivot above the breakout high
Nearest resistance	$11.56	The breakout pivot both technical models flag; a close above opens the $12 zone
Official close	$11.26	Friday's daily-feed close
Chain-snapshot spot	$11.15	Anchor for every strike, wall and expected-move figure here
200-day average	$11.10	Reclaimed on the surge; 1.5% below the close
Gamma cluster	$11.00	Second-largest total gamma strike in the chain
Largest gamma strike	$10.50	The single heaviest gamma concentration across all expirations
Swing support	$10.54	The breakout shelf — this week's kill switch
20-day average	$10.49	Sits directly beneath that shelf, 7.3% below the close
Next swing supports	$10.27 / $10.03	Pivot cluster from the pre-breakout base
Call wall (Aug 28 and whole chain)	$10.00	Biggest pile of open call contracts both for Aug 28 (7,625) and across the chain (64,425) — but it sits below spot, so it is a magnet, not a ceiling. The whole chain's put wall is also $10 (52,937)
Max pain (Aug 28)	$9.50	Where the most option value would expire worthless; expirations sometimes gravitate toward it
Put wall (Aug 28)	$8.50	Biggest pile of open put contracts for this expiration (19,809) — far below spot, so it offers no near-term floor

The disagreement worth naming: the whole chain's put wall is $10, but the August 28 expiration's own put wall is $8.50. For this week's trading, the $8.50 figure is the relevant one — and it is 24% away. Also note two unfilled up-gaps beneath price, from August 20 (+5.8%) and August 21 (+4.9%), which is where the air pocket lives if the move unwinds.

Positioning and unusual flow

One rough estimate of dealer positioning puts the August 28 expiration in a positive-gamma regime, where market makers' hedging tends to dampen moves rather than amplify them — the same read applies to the chain as a whole. The estimated flip level, below which that hedging would start accelerating selling instead of cushioning it, comes out at $2, which is so far below spot that it is not a live pivot this week; spot currently sits unusually far above it even by this stock's own standards.

The flow itself was concentrated and one-sided:

• Aug 28 $11 calls — 37,968 contracts traded against 3,577 held open, more than ten times the standing position, and about $2.73 million of premium. The single biggest money print on the board.
• Aug 28 $12 calls — 21,449 contracts against 2,631 open, roughly $697,000 of premium. Traders reaching a full dollar above spot for a seven-day option.
• Sep 4 $11 puts — 3,617 contracts against just 273 open, a 13× turnover and about $244,000 of premium. The clearest downside-hedging print in the file, and it lands one week past this article's expiration.

3 · Technical check

Both technical reports run bullish. The 3-day model targets $11.58 with a $10.85–$11.65 range, citing an ADX of 40.8 with +DI far above −DI (a strong, established uptrend), a bullish short-term moving-average stack, and money flow still in accumulation. The 5-day model targets $11.70 with a $10.90–$11.70 range and flags the same strength, tempered by a contracting MACD histogram — the initial thrust losing speed. Both use a reference price of $11.28, which is essentially Friday's official close; the chain snapshot recorded $11.15, a normal vendor-timing gap rather than an error.

Against our Neutral options read, that counts as a divergence — the technical side picks a direction our positioning composite refuses to. But the disagreement is narrower than it sounds: both TA targets sit comfortably inside the options-implied range, and the levels the models care about ($10.90–$11.00 support, $11.55 resistance) sit almost on top of the levels the chain cares about ($10.54 shelf, $11.56 pivot). The dominant technical scenario invalidates on a close below $10.90 — within a few cents of our own kill switch.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $9.70–$12.60 into August 28; the 5-day technical model targets $11.70 inside a $10.90–$11.70 band. The technical model is pricing a far tighter path than the options market is charging for — and given MARA has realized 112.7% volatility over the past month, the wider band has the better recent evidence behind it.

Practically, the TA nudged strike selection rather than flipping anything: the bullish structure's short strike sits at $12, just under the technical models' overhead confluence, and the range structure's short call sits at $12.50, above every target either model published.

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

4 · Three ways the next five days can go

If MARA pushes above $11.56: there is no meaningful open-interest ceiling until the $12 strike, where the chain's fourth-largest gamma concentration sits alongside the declining 50-day average at $12.06. Positioning above the money is thin for this expiration, which historically leaves less hedging friction — the $12.00–$12.10 shelf is where overhead supply next shows up.

If MARA drifts between $10.54 and $11.56: this is the base case the structure argues for. With spot above the entire August 28 wall corridor and dealer hedging estimated to be in the dampening regime, expiring open interest exerts a mild downward tug toward max pain at $9.50 — but that pull is 15% away and rarely reaches that far in five sessions. A grind that bleeds the front-week premium out of the $11 and $11.50 calls is the most consistent read of the current setup.

If MARA breaks below $10.54: the 20-day average at $10.49 sits immediately beneath, then two unfilled gaps from August 20 and 21 create thin air down toward $10.00, where the chain's heaviest call and put open interest both cluster. That $10 shelf is where the whole-chain structure would meet price, and max pain at $9.50 is only fifty cents further down. Spot sits far above the estimated gamma flip level, so this branch is a positioning unwind rather than a hedging cascade.

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.

If you lean bullish: Aug 28 $11/$12 call debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 28 $11 call, sell the Aug 28 $12 call
• Debit: $0.375 ($37.50 per spread) · Max profit: $62.50 · Max loss: $37.50 · Break-even: $11.375
• Why it fits: you pay a defined debit and win if MARA holds its gains. With the volatility premium at the 4th percentile, you are buying movement that has been cheap relative to what this stock actually delivers — and the short $12 leg caps what you pay for that. It also rides with the call-dominant flow: the Aug 28 $11 calls alone traded $2.73 million of premium on Friday. Because the past week's strength fights a still-negative two-month trend, keep this short-dated and take profits early.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the breakout shelf at $10.54 holds and the stock can retest $11.56.
• Invalidated if: MARA closes below $10.54.
• Managing it: take it off at roughly 60–70% of max value rather than holding for the last few cents; exit regardless by Thursday's close, since a seven-day spread loses value fast in its final session. If MARA closes below $10.54, close it — don't wait for expiration.
• Liquidity note: the $11 calls quoted two cents wide (2.9% of mid) and the $12 calls one cent wide (3.2%). Both are among the most actively traded contracts in the file; fills should be straightforward.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: Aug 28 $9/$10/$12.50/$13.50 iron condor

• Trade: Sell the Aug 28 $10 put and buy the $9 put; sell the Aug 28 $12.50 call and buy the $13.50 call
• Credit: $0.25 ($25 per condor) · Max profit: $25 · Max loss: $75 · Break-evens: $9.75 and $12.75
• Why it fits: a credit spread means you collect cash up front and keep it if price stays between your short strikes. Those break-evens sit roughly on the ±13% expected-move rails, and the short call at $12.50 is above every technical target either model published. Neutral is the honest bias, and this is the structure that gets paid for neutrality.
• Health warning: you're selling premium that hasn't been rich lately. Implied volatility is currently running about 23 vol points below what MARA has actually delivered over the past 20 sessions — the 4th percentile of this stock's own recent readings. Risking $75 to make $25 into a stock that just moved 21% in a week is the wrong side of that math for most accounts. Size it small or skip it.
• Makes sense only if: you specifically expect realized volatility to collapse back toward the implied 13% and you accept the 3:1 risk-to-reward.
• Invalidated if: MARA closes outside $10.54–$11.56, which is well inside the short strikes and gives you an early exit rather than a maximum-loss one.
• Managing it: close at ~50% of max credit; exit regardless by Thursday. If either short strike is breached on a closing basis, close that side rather than hoping — a $1-wide wing on an $11 stock can go to full loss in a single session at this realized volatility.
• Liquidity note: the $10 puts traded two cents wide, the $9 puts one cent, the $12.50 calls two cents and the $13.50 calls one cent. The percentage spreads look ugly (7–20%) only because the options are cheap in absolute dollars; the pennies are the real cost. Leg in patiently at the mid.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bearish: Aug 28 $11/$10 put debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 28 $11 put, sell the Aug 28 $10 put
• Debit: $0.355 ($35.50 per spread) · Max profit: $64.50 · Max loss: $35.50 · Break-even: $10.645
• Why it fits: this is the max-pain trade. The August 28 expiration's own max pain is $9.50, its call wall is $10, and the whole chain's heaviest open interest on both sides also sits at $10 — the short leg is parked exactly on that magnet. It also expresses the put-building we saw in the open-interest ratio (0.43 to 0.56 in five days) and the price-versus-positioning divergence, and like the bullish spread it buys rather than sells a premium that has been historically thin.
• Makes sense only if: you think a 21% five-day move is exhaustion rather than the start of something, and you're willing to fight two bullish technical reads to say so.
• Invalidated if: MARA closes above $11.56.
• Managing it: the break-even at $10.645 is only 5.5% below Friday's close, so this needs a fast move; take 60% of max value if it comes, and exit by Thursday regardless. A close above $11.56 kills the premise — close it.
• Liquidity note: the $11 puts traded one cent wide (1.8% of mid) — one of the tightest quotes in the entire chain — and the $10 puts two cents. Easy fills on both legs.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

Standing aside is defensible here, and for a specific reason. MARA has realized 112.7% annualized volatility over the past month; a 13% weekly move is simply normal for this stock right now. That means $1-wide spreads on an $11 underlying are narrow relative to how far price routinely travels in five sessions — the structures above are all coin-flips dressed in defined risk. On top of that, the two most decisive signals in the data point opposite ways: short-dated sentiment and call flow lean bullish, while the wall structure, max pain and the price-versus-positioning divergence lean the other way. When the read is genuinely Neutral and the premium isn't rich enough to make selling it worthwhile, there is no edge to harvest. Waiting for a decisive close through $10.54 or $11.56 and trading the resolution costs nothing.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is MARA's expected move this week? About ±$1.45 (±13.0%) into the August 28 expiration, per the options market's straddle pricing as of the August 21 close — a $9.70 to $12.60 range.

Is MARA expected to go up or down over the next five days? Options positioning as of August 21 reads Neutral — short-dated flow is call-heavy and bullish, but the whole August 28 wall structure and max pain sit below the current price — and that's a read of what traders have done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $9.70–$12.60 range with $10.54 support and $11.56 resistance.

Are MARA options expensive right now? IV rank of 42/100 says option prices are higher than 42% of the past year's readings — middling. On top of that, they're running about 23 vol points below the movement MARA has actually delivered, thinner than 96% of this stock's own recent readings. That tilts toward owning premium rather than selling it, though the August 6 earnings report sits inside the realized-volatility window and inflates part of that gap, so it isn't a clean edge.

Where is MARA's biggest options support and resistance? For the August 28 expiration, the put wall is $8.50 and the call wall is $10 — both below the current price, which is unusual and means the chain offers no near-term ceiling. The practical levels are the $10.54 swing shelf and $11.56 resistance.

What invalidates this week's read? A close below $10.54.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for MARA, 2026-08-21, generated 2026-08-23T18:48:33.953Z. 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 2026-08-23T18:48:33.953Z; 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.