QCOM Options Are Pricing a ±$8.90 Move — Our Technical Model Sees Less Than a Third of It

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The options market implies a $156.90–$174.70 range into the August 21 expiration; here is what is driving it, the levels that matter, and three defined-risk ways to trade it.

Published Saturday, August 15, 2026 · Data as of the August 14 close

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

Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Neutral
Options-implied range (into Aug 21)	$156.90 – $174.70 (±5.4%) — call it $157 to $175
Major support	$160 (heaviest out-of-the-money put strike for Aug 21); $150 for the chain as a whole
Major resistance	$180 (Aug 21 call wall, and the whole chain's heaviest call strike)
Max pain (Aug 21)	$175
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	The Aug 21 expiration's own estimate is mildly negative — hedging tends to amplify moves; the whole-chain estimate is positive with a flip level ≈ $180
Volatility condition	Falling — IV rank 24/100 · premium thin: options priced about 7 vol points below delivered movement (post-earnings distorted)
Next earnings	October 29 (after close) — beyond every expiration quoted in this article
Technical check	Mixed (bullish on both the 3-day and 6-day reads, but targeting less than half the implied move)
Best-fitting strategy	Aug 21 $157.50/$152.50 put + $175/$180 call iron condor
Analysis invalidated if	QCOM closes below $160

1 · What matters today

QCOM closed Thursday at $165.79 after a sharp V-shaped recovery from the early-August low near $148. Our read of the options data comes out neutral — the flow leans mildly call-heavy, but the price of downside protection has quietly firmed and the week's strike positioning is a mess of legacy contracts rather than a clean corridor. The options market is pricing roughly a ±5.4% move into the August 21 expiration, or about $8.90 either way: a band of roughly $157 to $175 around Thursday's close. The level that changes the picture is $160 — the heaviest out-of-the-money put strike for this expiration and the floor of the two-week consolidation. Both technical reads lean bullish but target only $167.60–$168.50, well inside the market's band. That gap — a market paying for movement that the trend read does not expect — is this week's whole story.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The dominant change is volatility collapse. At-the-money implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much QCOM will move, baked into option prices — printed 41.6%, down 8.6% on the day, 18.3% over five sessions and 43.9% over the past month. That leaves it far under its own 30-day average of 65.1% and 90-day average of 66.1%, and it drags IV rank down to 24/100 from a 14-day average of 43. Flow tilted hard to the call side at the same time: for every 10 call contracts traded Thursday, only about 3 puts changed hands (a 0.31 put/call volume ratio) against a 14-day average of 0.66 and a 7-day average of 0.49. That is an unusually call-tilted session for this name even measured against its own recent history. Open interest moved the same way — calls added roughly 14,400 contracts day-over-day while puts shed about 1,200, pulling the put/call open-interest ratio to 0.84 from a 14-day average of 0.97. The largest single open-interest change was mechanical rather than directional: the August 21 $200 puts shed 6,816 contracts, a deep in-the-money position being cleaned up ahead of expiry.

One tension deserves naming. The short-term trend read is now flat-to-mildly-positive after a fresh momentum crossover on August 5, but the medium read is bearish (price −3.5% over roughly a month) and the longer read is decisively bearish (−33.7% over roughly two months). The past two weeks' bounce is running against a stock that is still down a third from its June levels and sits 9.8% below its 50-day moving average. Near-term flow and the bigger trend are pointing in different directions — a reason to keep directional structures short-dated and to bank profits early rather than press.

Expected move

Into the August 21 expiration, the options market is pricing a move of about ±5.4%, or ±$8.90 — that figure is derived from what at-the-money straddles cost, and it is the market's one-standard-deviation guess at where the stock lands, not a forecast of direction.

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $165.82
Friday, August 21 (6 days)	±5.4%	$156.90 – $174.70
Friday, August 28	±7.9%	$152.70 – $178.90
Friday, September 4	±10.3%	$148.80 – $182.80
Friday, September 18 (~1 month)	±13.2%	$144.00 – $187.60

The rungs step up smoothly — no earnings report falls inside this ladder (the next one is October 29), so the widening is pure time math rather than event premium. There is no hump anywhere in the curve, which is itself informative: the chain is not bracing for a scheduled shock over the next month.

Volatility

IV rank at 24/100 means today's implied volatility sits cheaper than roughly three-quarters of the past year's readings, though the percentile measure (53.6) says the last 12 months have had plenty of even lower days clustered elsewhere — the rank is being pulled down by the extreme late-July highs still in the window. The direction is unambiguously down on every horizon: −8.6% in a day, −18.3% in a week, −43.9% in a month. The front-month read is unavailable today (Thursday was an expiration day, so the nearest contract cannot be interpolated into a term-structure reading), which is a calendar artifact and nothing more.

Underneath the implied numbers, the stock itself has calmed dramatically. Twenty-day realized volatility is 48.7%, but the five-day-versus-twenty-day pace ratio is 0.59 — recent movement is running at barely 60% of the month's own tempo, an unusually quiet reading for QCOM compared against its own recent history. Compression like this is also showing up in the option-flow data as the single most stretched reading on the board: implied volatility is contracting faster than is normal for this name.

Premium rich or cheap. The gap between how much movement options are priced for and how much QCOM has actually delivered — the volatility risk premium — currently sits at about −7 vol points: options are priced roughly 7 points below the stock's 20-day delivered movement. That reading is around the 46th percentile of this stock's own recent history, meaning it is richer than 46% of them — squarely mid-pack, not an extreme. Two caveats matter more than the number. First, the 20-day realized window still contains the July 29 earnings gap and the early-August collapse, so the "cheap" verdict is mechanically flattered; the sign flip from about +7 points a week ago to −7 points today is that arithmetic working through the window, not traders repricing risk. Second, with realized movement fading fast (that 0.59 pace ratio), the gap is likely to close on its own. Net: this is not a premium edge in either direction. IV rank 24 says option prices are lowish outright; the delivered-movement comparison says nothing trustworthy this week. Trade the levels, not the volatility.

Skew and sentiment

Skew is where the neutral read earns its keep. Puts and calls the same distance from the stock price do not normally cost the same — for QCOM, calls have typically been the richer side, running about 2.6 vol points over puts across the past 60 sessions. Today that premium is gone: 25-delta puts price at 42.1% and 25-delta calls at 42.1%, dead level. Relative to this name's own norm, that is a meaningful step toward downside protection even while raw volume is overwhelmingly call-side. Traders are trading calls and hedging with puts at the same time.

Sentiment across expiration dates is genuinely split. The 0–7-day bucket reads mildly bullish (+26 on a −100/+100 scale, against a 7-day average of +15), the 7–30-day bucket bullish (+27 versus a +14 average), the 30–60-day bucket bearish (−15), and the 60–120-day bucket mildly bullish (+15). Buckets disagree; no single regime dominates. The near-dated bullishness is real but shallow, and it is being offset by the flattened skew and by the week's odd wall structure below.

The key levels map

A note on method: for the August 21 expiration specifically, the biggest put open interest sits at $190 — deep in the money, roughly 15% above the stock. That is legacy positioning being unwound, not a support shelf, and it is why the corridor math for this week is degenerate. Where the week's own levels are unhelpful, the whole-chain figures are labeled as such.

Level	Price	Why it matters
Put "wall" (Aug 21, in the money)	$190	7,660 puts open, but deep ITM — an unwind, not support; ignore it as a level
Call wall (Aug 21) and whole-chain call wall	$180	8,464 calls open for this week, 20,804 across the chain — the heaviest overhead pile, and the whole-chain gamma flip estimate
Swing resistance	$178.65	Price-structure pivot cluster from the July decline
Max pain (Aug 21)	$175	Where the most option value would expire worthless; sits at the very top of the implied band
Swing resistance	$172.12	Prior consolidation shelf
Call cluster (Aug 21)	$170	3,010 calls open; heavy two-way flow Thursday (2,209 traded)
200-day moving average	$168.68	The technical model's stated resistance; price is 1.7% below it
Spot / largest gamma strike	$165.82	Thursday's chain-snapshot price; also the single heaviest gamma strike across the chain
Swing support	$164.77	Nearest price-structure support from the past two weeks
20-day moving average	$163.19	Rising; the bounce has held above it since August 6
Heaviest OTM put (Aug 21)	$160	3,233 puts open, 1,348 traded Thursday — the week's real downside marker
Whole-chain put wall	$150	15,085 puts open across all expirations; the structural floor if $160 fails

Positioning and unusual flow

On dealer hedging, the two estimates disagree and the disagreement matters. Aggregated across every expiration, one rough estimate puts net dealer gamma positive with a flip level around $180 — the regime where hedging tends to dampen moves. But the August 21 expiration's own estimate is mildly negative: for this week specifically, hedging is more likely to amplify a move than cushion it. Both are estimates built on an assumed dealer sign convention, not observed inventory, and the magnitudes are small. The practical read: do not count on a pin, and note that spot is sitting unusually far below the flip estimate compared with this stock's own recent history.

Three flow items stood out, all in non-expired contracts:

• August 21 $157.50 calls — 5,778 contracts traded against just 323 open, nearly 18 times turnover, moving about $5.3 million of premium. These are deep in-the-money calls (0.85 delta), the classic shape of a large stock-replacement or directional position rather than a lottery ticket.
• August 21 $172.50 calls — 2,443 traded against 474 open (5.2× turnover), with open interest up 120 on the day. Genuine upside positioning for the week, sitting right between max pain and the call wall.
• September 11 $165 calls — open interest jumped from 240 to 3,442, a 3,202-contract build at the money a month out. Someone put on size beyond this week's expiration.

Against that, the single biggest open-interest change in the file was the $200 August puts shedding 6,816 contracts — settled housekeeping, not a signal.

3 · Technical check (the 20%)

Both technical horizons come back bullish, and both come back small. The 3-day read targets $167.60 with a $162.90–$169.30 band, citing a fresh MACD crossover, price above both short-term EMAs, and +DI clearly above −DI with ADX building from 17.5 to 22.4. The 6-day read targets $168.50 with a $161.00–$170.50 band and the same evidence, adding that the 200-day moving average at $168.68 is the level that decides whether this is a bounce or a turn. The most decisive caveat in both write-ups is the money-flow reading: it has stayed slightly negative through the entire rally off $150, which means the recovery has not been confirmed by strong accumulation.

Classified against the options data, this is Mixed leaning confirm. The direction does not contradict a neutral options read, and the target sits comfortably inside the implied band — but the magnitude is where the interest lies. The market is charging for ±$8.90 over six days; the model expects roughly +$2.70 and caps its own range at $170.50 on the upside and $161.00 on the downside. That is a band about half as wide as the one options are priced against.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $156.90–$174.70 into August 21; the 6-day technical model targets $168.50 inside a $161.00–$170.50 band. The market is paying for a move roughly twice the size the trend read expects — which is exactly the condition that favors range structures over directional bets, and which argues for placing short strikes at the market's rails rather than the model's.

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

4 · Three ways the next six days can go

If QCOM pushes above $175 (max pain, top of the implied range): the first friction is the 200-day average at $168.68, then the $170–$172 shelf where prior support turned into resistance. Above $175, the heaviest call open interest of the entire chain sits at $180 — piles that size overhead tend to slow rallies as they are hedged into. Getting there requires the full implied move in six sessions, which is possible but is the market's outer rail, not its base case.

If QCOM drifts between $160 and $175: this is the highest-probability branch and the one the numbers support. Max pain for the week sits at $175, above spot, which historically exerts a mild upward tug into expiration — but the week's own dealer-gamma estimate is negative rather than pinning, so treat that pull as weak. The realistic version is more chop in the $163–$170 zone the stock has occupied since August 6, with the 20-day average at $163.19 and swing support at $164.77 doing the work underneath.

If QCOM breaks below $160: that clears the heaviest out-of-the-money put strike for this expiration and the floor of the two-week base. Spot is already sitting unusually far below the whole-chain gamma flip estimate near $180 for this name, and one rough estimate suggests that in this zone market-maker hedging amplifies selling rather than cushioning it. The next structural marker is the whole-chain put wall at $150, with swing support at $142.89 beyond that. This is also the branch the money-flow divergence in the technical reads is warning about.

5 · Three defined-risk structures

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

If you expect the range to hold: Aug 21 iron condor

• Trade: Sell the Aug 21 $157.50 put / buy the $152.50 put, and sell the Aug 21 $175 call / buy the $180 call. You collect premium up front and keep it if QCOM finishes between the short strikes.
• Credit: $0.97 ($97 per condor) · Max profit: $97 · Max loss: $403 · Break-evens: $156.53 and $175.97
• Why it fits: the break-evens sit just outside the market's own implied band of $156.90–$174.70, and the short call is parked exactly at max pain ($175) while the short put sits below both the $160 put cluster and the 20-day average. It is the only structure here that profits from the specific gap the technical models identify — movement priced but not expected.
• Makes sense only if: you accept a $97-for-$403 payoff shape, which requires the high win rate this setup is built on; with IV rank at 24/100 you are not being paid richly, so size accordingly.
• Health warning: you are selling premium that has not been rich lately — options are priced about 7 vol points below QCOM's 20-day delivered movement, and that comparison is muddied by the late-July gap still sitting in the window.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes below $160 or above $172.50 — either side puts a short strike within one session's move.
• Managing it: close at ~50% of max credit; exit regardless by Wednesday's close (2 DTE) to avoid expiration-day gamma; if either short strike is breached on a closing basis, close rather than hope.
• Liquidity note: the $175 calls trade 3¢ wide and the $180 calls 1¢ — effortless. The put legs are 8¢ and 4¢ wide, pennies in absolute terms but roughly 10–14% of mid, so work the order as a package and do not pay the offer.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bullish: Aug 21 $160/$155 put credit spread

• Trade: Sell the Aug 21 $160 put, buy the Aug 21 $155 put. You collect a credit and keep all of it as long as QCOM stays above $160.
• Credit: $0.82 ($82) · Max profit: $82 · Max loss: $418 · Break-even: $159.19
• Why it fits: $160 is the heaviest out-of-the-money put strike for this expiration (3,233 contracts) and sits below both the 20-day average at $163.19 and the swing support at $164.77 — three separate reasons for the stock to find footing before your short strike. The near-dated sentiment reading and both technical horizons lean the same way.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the August 6 base holds; the short-term bounce is fighting a two-month downtrend, so this is a six-day tactical trade, not a position.
• Health warning: same as above — premium in this name has not been rich relative to delivered movement, so $82 of credit against $418 of risk demands discipline on the exit.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes below $160.
• Managing it: close at ~50% of max credit; given short-term strength running against the longer downtrend, take profits early rather than holding for the last few cents, and exit by Wednesday regardless.
• Liquidity note: the $160 puts quoted 13¢ wide on 1,348 contracts of volume and the $155 puts 4¢ wide on 1,211 — active but the $160 spread is about 10% of mid, so use limit orders.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bearish: Aug 21 $165/$160 put debit spread

• Trade: Buy the Aug 21 $165 put, sell the Aug 21 $160 put. You pay a debit up front and profit as QCOM falls, with the gain capped at $160.
• Debit: $1.79 ($179) · Max profit: $321 · Max loss: $179 · Break-even: $163.21
• Why it fits: the medium and long trend reads are both bearish (−3.5% over a month, −33.7% over two), the flattened skew shows traders paying up for protection relative to this name's norm, and with IV rank at 24/100 you are buying options in the cheaper quarter of the past year rather than selling them. A close below $163.21 — a 1.6% move — puts this in profit.
• Makes sense only if: you expect the bounce to fail into the 200-day average at $168.68 rather than break through it; if QCOM clears $169 convincingly, the premise is gone.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes above $169.
• Managing it: because the short-term trend is currently fighting you, take profit at roughly 60–70% of max value rather than holding for the full $321, and exit by Wednesday to avoid expiration-week decay eating a still-out-of-the-money spread.
• Liquidity note: the $165 puts trade 15¢ wide (about 5% of mid) and the $160 puts 13¢; both were among the most-traded strikes on the board, so fills should be reasonable at mid-to-mid-plus.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

There is a respectable case for standing aside this week. IV rank at 24/100 means credit structures are not being paid well, and the one measure that would tell you whether premium is genuinely cheap — implied versus delivered movement — is contaminated by the July 29 earnings gap still sitting inside the realized-volatility window, so it cannot be used as an edge in either direction. Meanwhile the directional signals genuinely disagree: near-dated flow is call-tilted, the skew says protection is being bid, and the trend is bearish on every horizon longer than a week. Six days is a short window in which to be right about a stock that has moved 10% in the past eight sessions. If none of the three structures above matches a view you actually hold, waiting for either a clean break of $160 or a close above $169 costs nothing.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is QCOM's expected move this week? About ±5.4%, or ±$8.90, into the August 21 expiration — a $156.90 to $174.70 band around the August 14 close, per straddle pricing as of that date.

Is QCOM expected to go up or down over the next six days? The honest answer is that this data describes positioning, not the future. Options positioning as of August 14 reads neutral — call-tilted volume offset by protection being bid up relative to this name's own norm — and that is a read of what traders have done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $157–$175 range and the $160 and $180 levels.

Are QCOM options expensive right now? IV rank 24/100 says option prices are lower than roughly 76% of the past year's readings. On top of that, they are running about 7 vol points below the movement QCOM has actually delivered over the past 20 sessions — mid-pack against this stock's own recent readings. But that 20-day window still contains the July 29 earnings gap, so the "cheap versus realized" verdict is mechanically flattered and should not be treated as an edge.

Where is QCOM's biggest options support and resistance? For the August 21 expiration, the heaviest out-of-the-money put strike is $160 and the call wall is $180. Across the whole chain, the put wall sits at $150 and the call wall also at $180. Max pain for this week is $175.

What invalidates this week's read? A close below $160.

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Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for QCOM, 2026-08-14, generated 2026-08-15T10:19:57Z. 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 2026-08-15T10:19:57Z; 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.