QCOM Options Are Pricing an $11 Move Into August 14 — The Positioning Pull Is Lower

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The options market implies a $156.94–$178.76 range into the August 14 expiration; here's what's driving it and three defined-risk ways to trade the next six days.

Published Saturday, August 8, 2026 · Data as of the 2026-08-07 close

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Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Neutral with a slight bearish tilt
Options-implied range (into Aug 14)	$156.94 – $178.76 (±6.5%)
Major support	$160 — Aug 14 max pain and the heaviest nearby open-interest/gamma cluster
Major resistance	$170 — Aug 14's second-heaviest call strike (the expiration's own call wall at $165 now sits below the stock)
Max pain (Aug 14)	$160
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Positive for the Aug 14 expiration — hedging tends to dampen moves; flip level ≈ $180, above spot
Volatility condition	Falling — IV rank 38/100 · premium fair: options are priced within a fraction of a vol point of delivered movement (post-earnings distorted)
Technical check	Diverges (bullish, 3-day and 6-day models)
Best-fitting strategy	Iron condor bracketing the Aug 14 walls
Analysis invalidated if	QCOM closes above $172.50

1 · What matters today

QCOM closed Thursday at $167.86 after a 13.6% five-day sprint off its early-August lows, and the options market is pricing roughly another $10.91 either way — ±6.5% — into the August 14 expiration, a $156.94 to $178.76 band. That number is the move the options market is pricing in, derived from what straddles cost. Our read of the flow is neutral with a slight downward tilt, and the reason is positional rather than dramatic: the August 14 expiration's biggest pile of open call contracts sits at $165, which the stock has already run past; max pain for that date — the price where the most option value would expire worthless — sits at $160; and puts have quietly gotten about 3 vol points pricier relative to calls than is normal for this name. Two technical models point the other way, targeting $170.75 to $171.50. A close above $172.50 says the chart won.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The week belonged to the buyers. QCOM is up 13.64% over the last five sessions — and still down 11.0% over twenty and 26.8% over roughly fifty. That split matters: the short-term read on flow and price turned bullish this week while the medium- and long-term reads remain firmly negative, so the pop is running against the bigger trend rather than confirming it. Volatility collapsed alongside the rally: at-the-money implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much QCOM will move, baked into option prices — sits at 50.9%, down 6.6% on the day, 9.2% over five sessions and 29.2% over thirty, and well under its own 30-day (69.4%) and 90-day (65.9%) averages. IV rank has walked down with it, from a 14-day average of 57 to 38 today.

Flow turned decisively call-heavy. Put volume ran at 0.29 per call contract traded (21,125 puts against 72,271 calls) versus a 7-day average of 0.61 and a 14-day average of 0.68 — for every put traded there were more than three calls, and that pace is unusually call-tilted even measured against this stock's own recent history. Open interest tells the same story more slowly: 0.87 puts per call held open, down from a 14-day average of 1.06, meaning existing downside hedges are being retired faster than new ones are added. The single biggest build in live contracts was the August 14 $165 calls, up 1,865 to 2,402 open, with the August 14 $170 calls up 1,588 to 2,253. (Into Friday's expiration, the settled August 7 $172.50 calls had piled on 1,467 contracts — history now, not a live magnet.) Total option volume ran 1.58× its 20-day average.

Expected move

Into August 14, straddle pricing implies ±6.5%, or about ±$10.91 around the $167.85 chain-snapshot price.

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $167.85
Aug 14 (7 DTE)	±6.5%	$156.94 – $178.76
Aug 21 (14 DTE)	±9.5%	$151.87 – $183.83
Sep 4 (28 DTE)	±14.2%	$144.10 – $191.60

The rungs step up almost exactly the way the square root of time says they should — 6.5% to 9.5% to 14.2% — with no bulge at any one date. There is no scheduled-event hump in this ladder; the front-month interpolated read is unavailable today because the nearest expiration was an expiry-day contract, so treat the term-structure comparison as skipped rather than flat.

Volatility

At 50.9% implied with an IV rank of 38/100, QCOM options are priced cheaper than about 62% of the past year's readings — but the one-year percentile reads 73, which is the fingerprint of a stock that spent most of the last twelve months at lower absolute volatility and then spiked hard. Twenty-day realized volatility sits at 50.9% as well, which is actually below this stock's own recent norm for realized movement — QCOM has been violent by absolute standards and calm by its own August standards. The 5-day-versus-20-day realized ratio is 1.19, so day-to-day movement has been accelerating again into the rally.

Premium rich or cheap. The gap between what options are priced for and what QCOM has actually delivered — when it's positive, sellers have been collecting more than realized movement cost them — is essentially zero today: implied sits within a tenth of a vol point of 20-day realized, a reading right at the middle of this stock's own recent range (50th percentile, richer than half of them). One clause of caution is mandatory here: QCOM reported earnings on July 29, and that gap day still sits inside the 20-day realized-volatility window, which mechanically inflates the realized leg. The premium series has collapsed from roughly +29 vol points in late July to flat now — that collapse is the arithmetic of a post-report volatility crush meeting an event gap inside the lookback, not a signal that sellers have lost their edge. Practical translation: this is not a week where the premium math hands you a verdict. IV rank 38 with a dead-flat premium says option prices are neither a gift nor a trap — structure selection should follow the level map, not the volatility read.

Skew and sentiment

Skew measures the fact that puts and calls the same distance from the stock price don't cost the same. For QCOM, the normal state is call-rich: over the prior 60 trading days, 25-delta calls typically ran about 3 vol points over the matching puts. Today they're level — 25-delta puts at 51.1% against 25-delta calls at 51.2%. That's roughly 3 vol points steeper than this stock's own norm, and it is the single most bearish input in our read: even inside a violent call-buying rally, somebody is paying up to keep downside protection on. That steepening has been building for five sessions, and it is stretched versus this name's own history.

Directional lean by expiration term is genuinely mixed. The 0-7 day bucket reads mildly bullish (+17, driven entirely by call-side open interest building), the 7-30 day bucket mildly bullish (+20, with delta-weighted volume strongly call-side but risk reversals still showing puts richer than their baseline), the 30-60 day bucket slightly negative (−7), and the 60-120 day bucket mildly positive (+14). No single term dominates. Put that beside a leading positioning read that has climbed out of a deep hole — from −76 in mid-July to −6 today — but has not crossed into positive territory, and you have a market that has stopped selling and has not yet committed to buying.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
Whole-chain call wall	$200	20,634 calls held open across all expirations — an aggregate figure, not this week's battleground
Largest gamma strike / flip estimate	$180	Biggest total gamma·OI strike in the chain; one rough estimate also places the dealer gamma flip here, above spot
Top of expected move (Aug 14)	$178.76	The upper rail straddle pricing implies for the covered window
Next call shelf	$175	585 calls open at Aug 14 and 17,840 chain-wide; also the early-July consolidation shelf
Swing resistance	$172.12	Nearest heuristic pivot cluster from price structure — an estimate, not a guaranteed reaction zone
Aug 14 second-heaviest call strike	$170	2,253 contracts open, 1,588 of them added Friday — the first real overhead shelf
200-day moving average	$168.91	Price sits 0.6% under it; the technical models call this the decisive line
Thursday's close	$167.86	Reference price for everything below
20-day moving average	$166.39	Price is 0.9% above it — reclaimed during this week's run
Aug 14 call wall	$165	2,402 calls, the biggest single-day build in the chain — and now below the stock, which flips it from ceiling toward magnet
Swing support	$164.77	Nearest heuristic support cluster from price structure (estimate)
Aug 14 max pain	$160	Where the most Aug 14 option value expires worthless; also a dense call+put strike and the chain's third-largest gamma cluster
Bottom of expected move (Aug 14)	$156.94	The lower rail straddle pricing implies
Whole-chain put wall	$150	17,446 puts across all expirations — deep support, but mostly parked in later months
Aug 14 put wall	$140	The covered expiration's own heaviest put strike, just 1,986 contracts — thin, and 17% below spot

Say the disagreement plainly: the whole-chain aggregate walls ($200 call / $150 put) and the August 14 expiration's own walls ($165 call / $140 put) are nowhere near each other. The aggregate is dominated by far-dated October and November positioning. For a six-day trade, the August 14 row is the one that governs — and its structure is unusual, because the stock has already climbed through its own call wall with almost nothing but max pain at $160 underneath it.

Positioning and unusual flow

The dealer-gamma figures are estimates built on an assumed convention, and this week they don't fully agree with each other, so treat them loosely. Scoped to the August 14 expiration alone, the estimate reads net positive — market makers hedge the options they've sold, and in that regime their hedging tends to dampen moves rather than amplify them, which fits a stock that just ran 13% and might now chop. The same estimate places the flip level near $180, above the stock; spot is about 7.2% below it, which is unusually far below the flip mark for this name. In plain terms: the pinning case is the estimate's base case for this expiration, but there is no cushion narrative to lean on if $160 gives way.

Three live flow items stood out:

• August 14 $155 calls — 5,741 contracts traded against just 175 held open, nearly 33× turnover and a 100th-percentile print versus peer contracts, moving about $7.75M of premium. Deep in-the-money call buying at that size is a leveraged long-stock expression with a week to run.
• September 4 $175 calls — 6,717 traded against 192 open, about 35× turnover and $4.25M of premium, with 3,111 more contracts in the September 4 $170s. Somebody paid up for upside past this window, not inside it.
• August 14 $140 puts — 2,000 traded against 1,986 open, also a 100th-percentile peer print. Two thousand far-out-of-the-money tail hedges at a strike 17% below spot is the other half of the skew story.

3 · Technical check

Both technical timeframes read bullish, and both diverge from the options-derived tilt. The 4-day model targets $170.75 with a $163.50–$172.50 range; the 6-day model, which lands exactly on our August 14 expiration, targets $171.50 with a $162.00–$174.50 range. Their reference price of $167.87 matches the options snapshot to a penny, so there's no data-date mismatch to discount.

The case behind them is trend-quality rather than pattern-based: ADX at 31.6 and rising with +DI (33.3) far above −DI (10.9) — a trend-strength gauge confirming bulls in control — plus a money-flow reading that swung from −0.10 to +0.13 in two sessions, which is a genuine inflection toward accumulation rather than a short squeeze. Both write-ups flag the same obstacle: the 200-day average at $168.91 and the upper Bollinger band at $169.07 form a single overhead shelf that price is pressing into right now, with RSI at 68.7. Both name a close back below $164 as the level that breaks their setup.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $156.94–$178.76 into August 14, with the heaviest live positioning clustered between $160 and $170 and max pain at $160; the 4-day technical model targets $170.75 and the 6-day model $171.50. Both targets sit comfortably inside the implied range, so this isn't a magnitude fight — it's a direction fight over roughly ten dollars, and it resolves on whether QCOM can close above the $169–$172.50 shelf where the calls are stacked.

How this changed the strikes below: it widened them. Because a credible bullish technical read sits against the positioning tilt, the neutral structure gets its short call at $175 rather than at $170, and the bearish structure's short strike is placed at $172.50 — above the technical models' own targets — so that being merely a little bit wrong doesn't cost money.

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

4 · Three ways the next six days can go

If QCOM pushes above the $170 shelf and closes over $172.50: the August 14 open interest thins out fast above there — 585 calls at $175 against 2,253 at $170 — so there is less positional friction until the $175–$180 zone, where the chain's largest gamma strike sits. That is the scenario where both technical models are right and this article's tilt is wrong, and it's why $172.50 is the kill switch rather than a soft caution.

If QCOM drifts between $160 and $170: this is the base case the positioning describes. The stock is above the expiration's own call wall at $165, max pain sits at $160, and the estimated gamma regime for that expiration is the dampening kind. Expiring open interest is concentrated in exactly that $160–$170 band, and expirations sometimes gravitate toward where the most value dies. A drift back to the $164–$166 area — where the 20-day average and the nearest swing support sit — would be the least surprising outcome in the file.

If QCOM breaks below $160: there's very little put open interest underneath at this expiration; its own put wall is a thin 1,986 contracts all the way down at $140, and the meaningful put pile at $150 belongs mostly to later months. Spot is already sitting unusually far below the $180 gamma-flip estimate for this name, so the comforting "dealers cushion the dip" framing does not apply here — one rough estimate suggests hedging support is not where price would need it. A break of $160 would put the lower expected-move rail at $156.94 in play quickly.

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 expect the range to hold: Aug 14 iron condor, $152.50/$160 – $175/$182.50

• Trade: Sell the Aug 14 $160 put and $175 call; buy the Aug 14 $152.50 put and $182.50 call. You collect premium up front and keep it if QCOM finishes between the short strikes.
• Credit: $2.31 · Max profit: $231 · Max loss: $519 · Break-evens: $157.69 and $177.31
• Why it fits: The short strikes bracket the entire live positioning cluster — max pain at $160 on the floor, the $175 call shelf on the ceiling — and the break-evens land within a dollar of the expected-move rails ($156.94 / $178.76). With the premium gap between implied and delivered movement sitting flat, you're not being paid a premium bonus here; you're being paid for the range, which is what the level map actually supports.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the six-day chop scenario, and you're comfortable that a genuinely bullish technical read is arguing against your upper wing.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes above $172.50 (the call wing is then live and the neutral thesis is gone) or below $161.
• Managing it: close at roughly 50% of max credit; take the interim reading at Tuesday, August 11 — if the stock has cleared $172.50 by then, close the call wing rather than hope 7-DTE gamma sorts it out. Because the near-term direction is fighting the two-month trend, take profits earlier than you normally would rather than holding into Friday for the last thirty cents.
• Liquidity note: the $175 calls quoted 1.71/1.85 (14¢ wide, ~8% of mid) and were the most-traded live contract at that strike; the $160 puts quoted 1.31/1.59 (28¢) and the $182.50 calls 0.42/0.66 (24¢). All four legs are wider than the 5%-of-mark bar — work the mid on a four-leg order and don't pay the natural, or the fills alone eat a quarter of the credit.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bearish: Aug 14 $172.50/$180 call credit spread

• Trade: Sell the Aug 14 $172.50 call, buy the Aug 14 $180 call. You collect a credit and keep it as long as QCOM stays below $172.50 at expiration.
• Credit: $1.55 · Max profit: $155 · Max loss: $595 · Break-even: $174.05
• Why it fits: This is the direct expression of the tilt. The short strike sits above the $170 call shelf and above both technical targets ($170.75 and $171.50), while the long strike sits at $180 — the chain's largest gamma strike and the level the flip estimate names. The 25-delta skew running about 3 vol points steeper than this stock's own norm says the market is not treating further upside as the risk that needs paying for.
• Makes sense only if: you accept a roughly 4:1 loss-to-profit ratio on a short strike that is only 2.8% above spot inside a ±6.5% implied move. This is a small, defined bet, not a conviction trade.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes above $172.50.
• Managing it: close at ~50% of the credit; because the short-term trend is up against a still-negative two-month trend, this position wants a short leash — exit on any daily close above $170 rather than waiting for $172.50 to print.
• Liquidity note: the $172.50 calls quoted 2.32/2.58 (26¢, ~11% of mid) and the $180 calls 0.82/0.99 (17¢, ~19%) — wide enough that a market order on the spread costs you roughly a fifth of the credit. Limit orders only.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bullish: Aug 14 $155/$162.50 put credit spread

• Trade: Sell the Aug 14 $162.50 put, buy the Aug 14 $155 put. You collect a credit and keep it as long as QCOM holds above $162.50 at expiration.
• Credit: $1.45 · Max profit: $145 · Max loss: $605 · Break-even: $161.05
• Why it fits: This is the trade that sides with the technicals and with the flow that actually happened this week — put open interest thinning from 1.06 to 0.87 per call, put volume at 0.29 per call, and a leading positioning read that has climbed from −76 to −6 in three weeks. The short strike sits just under the $164.77 swing support and the 20-day average at $166.39.
• Makes sense only if: you're willing to be short a strike that sits above August 14 max pain at $160. If the pin case plays out, this position finishes near its short strike — that's the honest risk, and it's the reason it's listed third.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes below $164.
• Managing it: close at ~50% of max credit; use the Tuesday, August 11 checkpoint — if the stock has failed at the $169 shelf and slipped under $164, close rather than average the risk down into expiration Friday.
• Liquidity note: the $162.50 puts quoted 1.93/2.25 (32¢, ~15% of mid) and the $155 puts 0.49/0.79 (30¢, ~47% of mid — the widest leg in any of these structures). The $155 wing is the slippage problem here; if you can't get filled near the mid, don't force it.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

There is a respectable case for sitting this one out. The premium comparison that usually settles the buy-versus-sell question is uninformative right now — implied and delivered movement are dead level, and the reading is mechanically distorted by the July 29 report still sitting inside the realized-volatility window — so nobody is being paid extra to take the short side. IV rank at 38 is mid-pack. And the quoted spreads on the August 14 weekly run 8% to 47% of mid depending on the strike, which on a four-leg condor can hand back a third of the theoretical credit before the trade even starts working. Layer on a genuine disagreement between the positioning tilt and two bullish technical reads, and "wait for the $169–$172.50 shelf to resolve" is a perfectly good position. The August 21 expiration prices a ±9.5% move and will still be there on Monday.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is QCOM's expected move this week? About ±$10.91, or ±6.5%, into the August 14 expiration — a $156.94 to $178.76 band, per straddle pricing as of the August 7 close.

Is QCOM expected to go up or down over the next six days? Options positioning as of August 7 leans neutral with a slight downward tilt — the stock has run past the August 14 expiration's own call wall at $165, max pain for that date sits at $160, and 25-delta puts have gotten about 3 vol points richer relative to calls than is normal for this name. That is a read of what traders have already done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $156.94–$178.76 range and the $160 / $170 levels.

Are QCOM options expensive right now? Two lenses. IV rank of 38/100 says option prices are lower than about 62% of the past year's readings. On top of that, they're priced within a fraction of a vol point of the movement QCOM has actually delivered — right at the middle of this stock's own recent readings. Neither rich nor cheap, and the comparison is distorted by the July 29 earnings gap still sitting inside the 20-day realized-volatility window, so don't treat the flat reading as an edge in either direction.

Where is QCOM's biggest options support and resistance for this expiration? For August 14 specifically: the heaviest call strike is $165 (2,402 contracts, now below spot), the next overhead shelf is $170 (2,253 contracts), and max pain is $160. That expiration's own put wall is a thin $140. The whole-chain aggregates ($200 call / $150 put) sit far away and are driven by October and November positioning — don't use them for a six-day trade.

What invalidates this week's read? A close above $172.50. That would clear the $170 call shelf, confirm the technical models, and leave the next real positioning friction up near $175–$180.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for QCOM, 2026-08-07, generated 2026-08-08T15:12:01.171Z. 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 2026-08-08T15:12:01.171Z; 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.