NOK Options Imply an $8.27–$9.94 Range Into Friday — Positioning Leans Lower, the Charts Say Bounce

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The options market implies an $8.27–$9.94 range into the August 7 expiration; here's what's driving it and three defined-risk ways to trade it.

Published Saturday, August 1, 2026 · Data as of the 2026-07-31 close

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

Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Neutral with a bearish tilt
Options-implied range (into Aug 7)	$8.27 – $9.94 (±9.2%)
Major support	$9.00 (Aug 7 put wall and max pain); $8.00 chain-wide
Major resistance	$10.50 (Aug 7 call wall); $9.81 swing resistance
Max pain (Aug 7)	$9.00
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Negative for the Aug 7 expiration — hedging tends to amplify moves; the whole-chain estimate reads positive. Flip estimate ≈ $3, far below spot, so it offers no usable near-term pivot
Volatility condition	Neutral, easing over the past month — IV rank 53/100 · premium thin: options priced about 5 vol points below delivered movement (post-earnings distorted)
Next earnings	October 22 (before open) — 82 days out, well beyond this window
Technical check	Diverges (bullish at both the 3-day and 6-day horizons)
Best-fitting strategy	Aug 7 $9.50/$8.50 put debit spread (only if $9.20 keeps capping rallies)
Analysis invalidated if	NOK closes above $9.50

1 · What matters today

Nokia closed Friday at $9.14 after a brutal month — down about 25% over 20 sessions — and then spent the last two sessions bouncing off the $8.30s. The options market is pricing a move of roughly ±$0.84, or ±9.2%, between now and the August 7 expiration: an $8.27–$9.94 band. Inside that band, one number does most of the work. The August 7 expiration's biggest pile of open put contracts sits at $9.00, and $9.00 is also that expiration's max pain — the price where the most option value would expire worthless. Spot is basically sitting on it.

Our read of the options flow leans mildly lower, mostly because puts have gotten relatively more expensive versus calls than is normal for this name. Both technical models disagree and see the bounce continuing. A close above $9.50 kills the bearish tilt outright.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The most striking thing about Friday's session is how quiet it was. Total option volume ran at 0.62× the 20-day average, and the stock finished the five-day stretch essentially flat (+0.05%) after a −24.6% twenty-day collapse. Put activity was unremarkable: for every call contract traded there were 0.34 puts, against a 0.36 fourteen-day average — calls still dominate this chain three-to-one, as they usually do in a low-priced name where retail buys upside.

Open interest tells a slightly different story. Puts held open moved to 0.44 per call from a 0.42 fourteen-day average — a slow, persistent build rather than a panic. Implied volatility (the market's estimate of how much NOK will move, baked into option prices) sits at 70.3%, up 2.0% over five days but down 7.7% over thirty and well under both its 30-day average of 80.8% and its 90-day average of 73.5%. The front-month read is unavailable in this snapshot — Friday was an expiration day, so that interpolated figure can't be computed.

The single largest change in contracts held open at a still-live expiration was upside, not downside: the August 21 $11 calls added 22,162 contracts to 35,974. Closer in, the August 7 $9 puts added 4,332 to 13,697 — that build is what makes $9.00 the week's put wall. Into Friday's expiration, the $9 calls shed 46,045 contracts of open interest as they settled; that's history, not a live magnet.

One tension worth naming: the short- and long-term trend reads agree that this is still a downtrend (price −24.6% over twenty sessions, −33.4% over fifty), while the past week has been flat-to-higher. A fresh momentum crossover on July 27 turned the near-term read back down. In practice that argues for short-dated directional structures and early profit-taking rather than anything you'd hold for weeks.

Expected move

The expected move is the move the options market is pricing in — derived from what straddles cost. Into August 7, that's about ±9.2%, or ±$0.84 around the $9.11 chain-snapshot price.

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $9.11
Friday, August 7 (7 DTE)	±9.2%	$8.27 – $9.94
Friday, August 14 (14 DTE)	±13.8%	$7.85 – $10.36
Friday, August 28 (28 DTE)	±19.1%	$7.37 – $10.84

The ladder scales almost exactly the way calendar time says it should — there's no hump anywhere in it, which matters because the August 7 expiration lands the same morning as the July employment report—nonfarm payrolls, unemployment rate and wage growth — 8:30 a.m. If traders were bracing for that print, you'd expect the front rung to price richer than the rest; instead its 66.5% at-the-money implied volatility is the lowest reading on the whole ladder. The chain shows no footprint of the macro calendar this week.

Volatility

At-the-money implied volatility is 70.3%, an IV rank of 53/100 — meaning today's reading is higher than 53% of the past year's and cheaper than the other 47%. The percentile measure runs hotter at 73, so options are not cheap in absolute terms; they're simply mid-range for a stock that has been this violent. Realized volatility over the past twenty sessions is 75.6%, which is actually slightly below this stock's own recent norm — a reminder that 76% annualized movement is now unremarkable for NOK. Shorter-window movement is running about 13% hotter than the twenty-day pace, so the tape is accelerating modestly, not calming down.

One "vs its own norm" reading stands out: implied volatility has compressed relative to its 30-day average far more than is typical for this name. That is the mechanical aftermath of the July 23 report — the event premium came out of the curve and never came back.

Premium rich or cheap. The volatility risk premium is the gap between how much movement options are priced for and how much NOK has actually delivered — when it's positive, option sellers have been collecting more than realized movement cost them. Today it's negative: options are priced about 5 vol points below the movement the stock has actually delivered, and that gap is thinner than roughly four-fifths of this stock's own recent readings. Mechanically that favors owning premium over selling it — but the caveat is load-bearing. The series was sitting at +14 vol points on July 22 and flipped to roughly zero on July 23, the day of the last earnings report; the post-report volatility crush plus the report-day gap moves now sitting inside the 20-day realized-volatility window are what produced the negative print. That flip is mechanical, not a trader signal, and it means "cheap premium" is not a clean edge here.

Skew and sentiment

Skew means puts and calls the same distance from the stock price don't cost the same. In NOK, calls are normally the expensive side — the 25-delta call has run about 6.5 vol points over the matching put as a 60-day median. Today that gap has shrunk to 1.8 vol points (25-delta put IV 68.7% versus 70.5% for the call). Calls are still richer, but relative to this stock's own norm, roughly 4.7 vol points of extra demand has moved to the downside. That is the single most bearish input in our read, and it sits noticeably steeper than this name's own recent history.

Sentiment in short-dated options prints as "bearish capitulation" — the 0–7 day bucket reads −85, driven almost entirely by 45,038 call contracts disappearing from open interest versus 1,187 puts added. Read that carefully: the only expiration inside that bucket on Friday was Friday, so the number largely describes expiring calls settling to zero, not fresh conviction. Step one rung out and the picture changes: the 7–30 day bucket, which covers August 7 through August 28, reads a mildly call-tilted +14, with call-side delta-weighted flow dominating and 43,932 calls added against 17,672 puts. The seven-day average across all buckets is "calm." Meanwhile the pace of unusual call-side sweeps, while still dominant seven-to-four over puts, is unusually subdued for this name.

Net of that: real, measurable downside demand in the pricing of puts; no matching wave of downside positioning in the expirations that actually matter this week.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
Chain-wide heaviest call strike	$15.00	165,735 calls held open across all expirations — a magnet only on a violent recovery, far outside this window
50-day moving average	$12.90	Price sits 29% below it; the medium-term trend is unambiguous
Swing resistance cluster	$10.56 / $11.58	Prior consolidation shelves from the June breakdown
Call wall (Aug 7)	$10.50	Biggest call open interest at the target expiration (10,344) — above the top of the implied range, so not a realistic test this week
Largest total gamma strike	$10.00	Heaviest combined gamma in the chain; 8,361 calls open at Aug 7 with 4,151 traded Friday — the practical ceiling if the bounce extends
Swing resistance	$9.81	Nearest structural level overhead from recent pivots
200-day moving average	$9.17	Price is 0.3% below it; the technical models flag this as the pivot that has capped every recent rally
Friday's close	$9.14	Chain-snapshot price $9.11 — the small difference is normal vendor timing
Put wall + max pain (Aug 7)	$9.00	13,697 puts open, the expiration's largest single pile, and the strike where the most option value expires worthless
Active put strike (Aug 7)	$8.50	4,407 contracts traded Friday — the busiest put at this expiration, $48,000 of premium
Bottom of the implied range	$8.27	1σ downside boundary the options market is pricing into Aug 7
Chain-wide put wall	$8.00	102,831 puts open across all expirations — the deepest downside shelf in the book
Swing support	$7.79	One rough estimate of the next structural floor beneath the walls
52-week range	$4.00 – $17.45	Price sits at 38% of the range, 48% below the high

Positioning and unusual flow

Market makers hedge the options they've sold, and the direction of that hedging depends on the regime. Here the estimates disagree by expiration, which is worth flagging plainly: the whole-chain dealer-gamma estimate reads positive (hedging that tends to dampen moves), but the August 7 expiration's own estimate reads negative — hedging that tends to amplify moves rather than cushion them. For this week's expiration, the negative read is the relevant one. Both are estimates built on an assumed dealer sign convention, not observed inventory. The chain-wide flip level — below which hedging is estimated to accelerate selling — sits at about $3, roughly 67% below spot, which is about typical for this name and means the flip estimate offers no usable pivot here.

Three flow items stood out among still-live contracts. The August 7 $8.50 puts traded 4,407 contracts against 3,193 open, about $48,000 of premium — someone paid up for protection just below the put wall. The August 14 $9 and $9.50 calls traded 6,767 and 7,981 contracts against under 1,100 open each, roughly $660,000 of combined premium — that is aggressive, fresh call buying one week beyond this article's window. And the August 14 $7.50 puts printed 451 contracts against an open interest of 3: a small, brand-new far-downside position. Upside and downside money are both showing up; neither side is dominating.

3 · Technical check

Both technical reports come in bullish, and both diverge from our positioning lean. The 3-day model targets $9.22 with a $8.85–$9.35 range; the 6-day model, which lands on the August 7 expiration itself, targets $9.28 with a $8.75–$9.50 range. Their case is momentum: a fresh MACD crossover, +DI overtaking −DI on July 30, and RSI round-tripping from 28.6 (oversold) to 52.9 in a few sessions.

Their own caveat is the interesting part. Chaikin Money Flow reads −0.338 — deeply negative and, in the report's words, one of the most bearish readings on the chart. Price bounced 8.6% off $8.39 while money flow never left distribution territory, which the model itself reads as short-covering rather than committed accumulation. That is the same tension our skew data shows from the other side: downside demand priced into options while the tape rallies. Both reports also flag the $9.17–$9.20 confluence of the 200-day average and VWAP as the shelf that has capped every attempt.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $8.27–$9.94 into August 7 with the heaviest positioning parked at $9.00; the 6-day technical model targets $9.28. The technical target sits comfortably inside the options range but on the wrong side of the pin — meaning the disagreement is only about 3% of price, and a decisive close above $9.50 resolves it in the chart's favor.

Practically, the TA pulled our short strikes wider rather than closer: with a credible bounce case on the table, we're not selling anything at $9.00 or $9.50 this week.

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

4 · Three ways the next six days can go

If NOK pushes through $9.50 toward $10.00: The August 7 call wall at $10.50 sits above the top of the implied range, so it isn't a realistic magnet this week — the level that matters is $10.00, the chain's largest combined gamma strike and a busy call line at this expiration. Positioning above $9.81 thins out considerably, so a clean break through the $9.17–$9.20 shelf leaves less overhead structure than the last month of trading suggests. This is the branch that invalidates our lean.

If NOK drifts between $8.50 and $9.50: The base case. Max pain and the put wall coincide at $9.00 with spot sitting on top of them, expiring open interest is concentrated within a few dimes of the money, and total volume has already dropped to 0.6× normal. Expirations don't reliably pin, but this is the configuration in which they most often gravitate — and a $9.00 close would leave both the heaviest call and put lines at the strike expiring worthless.

If NOK breaks below $9.00: Below the put wall, the next real shelf in the options book is the chain-wide $8.00 line with 102,831 puts open, with the implied-range floor at $8.27 and swing support around $7.79 beneath it. The August 7 expiration's own dealer-gamma estimate is negative, which — as an estimate — suggests hedging into that move tends to amplify rather than cushion it. The whole-chain flip estimate is nowhere near spot, so any acceleration would be an expiration-specific effect, not a regime break.

5 · Three defined-risk structures

Prices are end-of-day midpoints as of 2026-07-31. All structures are hypothetical unless flagged as an entered position. Verify live prices before trading — these will be stale by the open.

A note on ordering: because option prices are running below delivered movement right now, debit structures (where you pay a defined amount to own the move) lead here, and the credit structure carries a warning. Every leg below expires August 7, three days before the halfway checkpoint matters least and 76 days before the next earnings report — there is no earnings-gap risk in any of these.

If you lean lower (featured): August 7 $9.50/$8.50 put debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 7 $9.50 put, sell the Aug 7 $8.50 put
• Debit: $0.47 ($47 per spread) · Max profit: $53 · Max loss: $47 · Break-even: $9.03
• Why it fits: It expresses the pin-or-lower case rather than betting on a crash — max profit is reached at $8.50, inside the implied range and just below the put wall. Break-even at $9.03 sits essentially at max pain, so a flat-to-slightly-lower expiration is enough. With premium running about 5 vol points below delivered movement, paying for the move is the structurally cheaper side of the trade this week.
• Makes sense only if: the $9.17–$9.20 moving-average/VWAP shelf keeps capping rallies, as it has all month.
• Invalidated if: NOK closes above $9.50.
• Managing it: Take profits at roughly 60–70% of max value rather than holding for expiration — the short-term trend read is fighting a two-month downtrend, and these bounces have been fast in both directions. Exit by Thursday's close if price is still hovering above $9.10.
• Liquidity note: The $9.50 puts traded 4¢ wide (about 7% of mid) with 183 contracts on the day; the $8.50 puts were 2¢ wide and the busiest put at this expiration with 4,407 traded. Use limit orders — 2¢ is 18% of an 11¢ option.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: August 7 $8.00/$8.50/$10.00/$10.50 iron condor

• Trade: Sell the $8.50 put and buy the $8.00 put; sell the $10.00 call and buy the $10.50 call
• Credit: $0.12 ($12) · Max profit: $12 · Max loss: $38 · Break-evens: $8.38 and $10.12
• Why it fits: Both short strikes sit outside the technical models' ranges ($8.75–$9.50) and just inside the options-implied rails ($8.27–$9.94), with max pain dead-center. In a credit spread you collect the premium up front and keep it if price stays between your short strikes.
• Health warning: you're selling premium that hasn't been rich lately — the volatility risk premium is negative and in the bottom fifth of this stock's own recent readings. Sizing should reflect that you're on the statistically disfavored side of the premium trade.
• Makes sense only if: you genuinely expect the post-collapse consolidation to continue and are comfortable risking $38 to make $12.
• Invalidated if: NOK closes outside $8.50–$10.00 at any point before Thursday — close the threatened side rather than hoping.
• Managing it: Take it off at roughly 50% of max credit; with six days to expiration there is no room to roll, so treat the short strikes as hard stops.
• Liquidity note: The $10.00 calls were 1¢ wide with 4,151 traded; the $8.00 puts and $10.50 calls are also 1–2¢ wide but on marks of $0.04 and $0.035, so bid-ask alone can consume a quarter of the credit. This is the structure most exposed to slippage.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean higher: August 7 $9.00/$9.50 call debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 7 $9.00 call, sell the Aug 7 $9.50 call
• Debit: $0.205 ($20.50) · Max profit: $29.50 · Max loss: $20.50 · Break-even: $9.205
• Why it fits: This is the technical case expressed cheaply. Break-even at $9.205 is essentially the 200-day/VWAP shelf both models identify as the trigger level, and max profit lands at $9.50 — below the 6-day model's $9.50 range high and well inside the options-implied $9.94 ceiling. Because the short-term momentum read is fighting a two-month downtrend, six days is the right amount of exposure, not six weeks.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the MACD/DI momentum flip outweighs the money-flow distribution reading the same reports flag.
• Invalidated if: NOK closes below $8.90 (the level both technical reports name as their own invalidation).
• Managing it: Close on a decisive reclaim of $9.50, and don't hold a losing debit spread into Friday morning — the expiration lands on the payrolls print at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.
• Liquidity note: The $9.00 calls traded 4¢ wide (10% of mid) on 999 contracts; the $9.50 calls were 1¢ wide on 3,933 contracts. Leg into the long side patiently.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

There is an honest case for sitting this one out. The premium that looks cheap is cheap for a mechanical reason — a July 23 earnings gap now living inside the 20-day realized-volatility window — so "buy volatility" isn't the free edge the number suggests. IV rank at 53/100 is middling, the options data leans lower while both technical models lean higher, and the disagreement between them is worth only about 3% of price. On top of that, most of the interesting strikes here trade for pennies, where a 1–2¢ bid-ask can eat a third of the theoretical edge on a $0.04–$0.12 option. If your plan requires the pin to hold within a dime, the transaction costs will decide the outcome, not the thesis. Waiting for a decisive resolution of the $9.17–$9.20 shelf costs nothing.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is NOK's expected move this week? About ±$0.84, or ±9.2%, into the August 7 expiration — an $8.27–$9.94 range, per the options market's straddle pricing as of the July 31 close.

Is NOK expected to go up or down over the next six days? Options positioning as of July 31 leans mildly lower — puts are running about 4.7 vol points richer versus calls than this stock's own norm, and put open interest keeps grinding higher — but that's a read of what traders have done, not a forecast. Both technical models point the other way. The actionable map is the $8.27–$9.94 range and the $9.00 / $10.00 levels.

Are NOK options expensive right now? Two lenses. IV rank of 53/100 says option prices are higher than 53% of the past year's readings — squarely mid-range. On top of that, they're running about 5 vol points below the movement NOK has actually delivered, thinner than roughly four-fifths of this stock's own recent readings, which normally favors owning premium rather than selling it. The caveat: that negative gap is largely the mechanical aftermath of the July 23 report sitting inside the realized-volatility window, so treat it as context, not an edge.

Where is NOK's biggest options support and resistance? For the August 7 expiration, the put wall is $9.00 (13,697 contracts open) and the call wall is $10.50 (10,344). Across the whole chain the concentrations are wider — $8.00 on the put side and $15.00 on the call side — so quote the expiration's own levels when trading this week.

What invalidates this week's read? A close above $9.50.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for NOK, 2026-07-31, generated 2026-08-01T21:38:02Z. 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 2026-08-01T21:38:02Z; 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.