QCOM Options Are Pricing a $20 Move Into July 31 — Our Read Says the Drift Is Lower

Listen to this analysis — prefer audio? This QCOM outlook is also available as a podcast episode:

---

The options market implies a $146.83–$187.30 range into the July 31 expiration; here's what's driving that unusually wide band, where the walls sit, and three defined-risk ways to trade the next five days.

Published Sunday, July 26, 2026 · Data as of the July 24 close

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

Quick answer

Item	Answer
Market bias	Slightly bearish
Options-implied range (into July 31)	$146.83 – $187.30 (±12.1%)
Major support	$160 (July 31 put wall); first structural shelf $164.77
Major resistance	$190 (July 31 call wall)
Max pain (July 31)	$175
Dealer gamma regime (estimate)	Negative — one rough estimate suggests hedging amplifies rather than cushions moves; no flip level available in today's data
Volatility condition	Falling, but still historically rich — IV rank 62/100
Next earnings	Wednesday, July 29 (after close) — before the July 31 expiration
Technical check	Confirms (bearish, 3-day and 5-day horizons)
Best-fitting strategy	Short call spread above the max-pain zone (only if you accept overnight gap risk)
Analysis invalidated if	QCOM closes above $172.50

1 · What matters today

QCOM closed at $166.97 after a brutal month — down 2.7% over five sessions and down 18.9% over twenty. Our read of options flow leans slightly bearish: sentiment in short-dated options is negative across every expiration bucket, and open put contracts now outnumber calls 1.24-to-1, up from 1.11 five sessions ago. The options market is pricing an unusually wide $146.83–$187.30 band into the July 31 expiration — roughly $20 either way — because the July 29 earnings report lands inside that window, which inflates every front-week premium. The one level that changes the picture is $172.50: a close back above it puts the 200-day average and the unfilled July 23 gap zone back in play and kills this read. Both technical horizons we checked also point lower, which raises conviction slightly without changing the plan.

2 · What the options market is pricing

What changed this week

The volatility story is one of steady cooling from a very high base. At-the-money implied volatility — the market's estimate of how much QCOM will move, baked into option prices — sits at 67.1%, down 3.2% on the day, 8.1% over five sessions and 22% over the past month. That leaves it about 11% below its own 30-day average (75.5%) but still above its 90-day average (63.1%). IV rank has slid to 62/100 from a 7-day average of 69 and a 14-day average of 70: premium is getting cheaper, but it is still expensive relative to the past year.

Positioning moved the other way. Puts kept building: the put/call open-interest ratio climbed from 1.11 to 1.24 over five sessions, against a 7-day average of 1.09 and a 14-day average of 1.02 — for every call contract held open there are now 1.24 puts, the heaviest reading of the recent stretch. Put/call volume came in at 0.70, below the past week's 0.85 average but still roughly 75% above this name's own 60-day median of 0.40 — hedging demand hasn't gone away, the tape just got quieter (total option volume ran at 0.82× its 20-day average). Among contracts still live, the biggest open-interest builds were the August 21 $200 calls (+1,010 to 7,646), the July 31 $175 calls (+547) and the July 31 $160 puts (+359), while the August 21 $180 calls shed 1,311. Into Friday's now-settled expiration, the $167.50 puts added 4,187 contracts on 5,795 volume — pure at-the-money hedging on the final day, and history now.

Expected move

Into July 31, the options market is pricing a move of roughly ±12.1%, or about ±$20.23 from the $167.07 chain-snapshot price — that's the move implied by what straddles cost. That is an enormous one-week band, and the reason is on the calendar rather than in the tape.

Expiration	Implied move	Range around $167.07
July 31 (7 days)	±12.1%	$146.83 – $187.30
August 7 (14 days)	±14.7%	$142.45 – $191.68
August 14 (21 days)	±17.0%	$138.60 – $195.54
August 21 (28 days)	±18.6%	$136.01 – $198.12

Notice how little the band widens as you go out: doubling the time from 7 to 14 days only widens the range by about 2.6 percentage points, when a calm market would widen it far more. That's because the July 31 rung carries an 87.5% at-the-money implied volatility while August 21 carries 67.1% — front-loaded premium, the fingerprint of a scheduled event inside the nearest expiration. Meanwhile QCOM's actual movement has been running well below what options are charging: realized volatility is 33% over ten days and 46% over twenty, against 87.5% priced into the week. That gap between implied and realized is unusually wide even by this stock's own recent standards — a setup that favors sellers of premium in normal conditions, with the very large caveat below.

Earnings on the calendar

QCOM reports after the close on Wednesday, July 29, with a consensus estimate of $1.54 per share — inside the July 31 expiration and two days before it. That single fact explains the shape of the whole front of the chain: an 87.5% implied volatility at 7 days against 67.1% at roughly two months, and an expected move that barely widens between the July 31 and August 7 rungs. It also explains why IV rank has stayed above 60 while realized movement cooled. For context, the last four reports each landed a few cents above expectations in dollar terms. We take no view on the outcome — only on how the chain is priced around it.

Skew and sentiment

Puts and calls the same distance from the stock price don't cost the same, and right now the 25-delta put carries 67.8% implied volatility against 67.2% for the equivalent call — puts richer by about 0.7 vol points. That sounds small until you compare it to this name's own norm: the 60-day median has calls richer by 3.2 points. That's roughly a four-point swing toward downside protection, and it registers as one of the more stretched put-demand readings in QCOM's recent history. Traders are paying up to protect against a drop.

Sentiment across the curve agrees. Every expiration bucket reads negative — the 0–7 day bucket at −37, the 7–30 day bucket at −23, the longest bucket at −50 — which the model summarizes as broadly bearish, versus a 7-day average that was already negative but shallower (−17 and −15 for the two front buckets). Our composite flow read sits at −44 against a 7-day average of −41, and the trend read is aligned bearish across the 5-, 20- and 50-day lookbacks, with the last inflection turning down on July 16. This is a description of what traders have done, not a forecast of what price will do.

The key levels map

Level	Price	Why it matters
Whole chain's heaviest strike	$200	Largest call OI (18,522) and largest put OI (15,278) across all expirations, plus the biggest total gamma — an August-dominated level, not this week's
Call wall (July 31)	$190	The 5-day expiration's own heaviest call strike (2,380 contracts) — note this differs from the all-expiration figure above
Top of implied range	$187.30	Upper rail of the ±12.1% band into July 31
Heavy short-dated call activity	$182.50 / $185	1,971 contracts traded on 261 open at $182.50 — fresh upside speculation
Second-largest gamma strike	$180	Big chain-wide gamma cluster; a magnet if price ever gets back there
Max pain (July 31)	$175	Where the most option value would expire worthless; call OI here grew +547 on the day
Swing resistance	$172.12	Heuristic swing-pivot cluster (an estimate, not a guaranteed reaction zone)
EMA34 / 200-day average	$171.39 / $169.14	Technical resistance confluence; price sits 1.3% below the 200-day
Unfilled gap zone	$171.18 – $175.63	July 23's −2.5% gap down has not been filled
Spot	$167.07	Chain-snapshot price (official close $166.97)
Nearest structural support	$164.77	First swing shelf below the market (estimate)
Lower Bollinger band	$163.96	The technical model's primary support
Put wall (July 31)	$160	The 5-day expiration's heaviest put strike (1,419) — the level that anchors the downside
Bottom of implied range	$146.83	Lower rail of the ±12.1% band

Two things worth flagging. First, the July 31 expiration's own walls ($190 call, $160 put) sit far from the all-expiration walls (both at $200) — the aggregate is dominated by August open interest, so use the $160/$190 pair for this week. Second, the 20-day moving average at $179.87 is 7.2% above the close and the 50-day at $203.03 is 17.8% above it: every intermediate average is now overhead.

Positioning and unusual flow

Market makers hedge the options they've sold, and one rough estimate of that inventory reads negative for the chain as a whole — in that regime hedging tends to amplify moves rather than dampen them. The July 31 expiration's own estimate is also negative but very close to flat, so the week's positioning is close to neutral on its own; the amplification story really belongs to the August books. No gamma flip level could be computed from today's data, so we're not anchoring any scenario to one.

The flow itself is telling. Three non-expired standouts, all in the July 31 expiration: the $177.50 calls traded 1,855 contracts against 338 open — $747,000 of premium, the biggest single line in that expiration; the $182.50 calls traded 1,971 against 261 open ($564,000); and the $157.50 puts traded 752 against 183 open, clearing the 100th peer percentile for volume ($321,000). Add a brand-new $142 put strike that printed 1,139 contracts on a delta of just −0.09, and the picture is traders buying both tails cheaply. That is event positioning, not a directional consensus — which is exactly why the implied range is so wide and why selling either wing carries real gap risk.

3 · Technical check

Both technical horizons read bearish and both sit inside the options-implied range, so they confirm the positioning read. The 3-day model targets $164.75 with a $161.50–$169.50 band; the 5-day model, which lines up with our July 31 window, targets $164.80 with a $161.30–$171.60 band. Its dominant scenario is bearish continuation, invalidated on a sustained close above $171.50 — close enough to our $172.50 kill switch that the two agree.

The most decisive reads: price has slipped below the 200-day average at $169.14 while sitting under both short-term EMAs, with −DI (24.8) dominant over +DI (16.7). Working against that, the Chaikin Money Flow reading is a persistent +0.117 while price fell — a genuine accumulation divergence, and the main reason we softened the bias to slightly bearish rather than outright bearish. ADX at 18.2 and falling says the down-move is losing directional strength, not gaining it.

Model vs. Market: The options market implies $146.83–$187.30 into July 31; the 5-day technical model targets $164.80 within a $161.30–$171.60 band. The technical read is a chart-extrapolation that cannot price an event, while the options market is charging for one — the whole gap between the two bands is the July 29 report, and only that report will resolve it.

The TA didn't flip the bias; it shaded strike selection. Because both models cluster resistance at $169–$172, the short call spread below sits comfortably above that zone rather than hugging it.

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

4 · Three ways the next five days can go

If QCOM pushes above the call wall ($190): That would require a move through the top of the implied range. The heaviest call open interest for this expiration sits there, and dense call OI overhead tends to slow rallies as hedging supply meets them — but positioning thins out quickly above $190 for this expiration, with the next real cluster not until the chain-wide $200 strike. Note this branch necessarily runs through the July 29 report.

If QCOM drifts between the walls ($160–$190): This is the pin case, and it covers most of the probability mass in a normal week. Max pain for July 31 sits at $175, about 4.7% above spot, and expiring open interest often exerts a mild pull toward that zone as hedges unwind. The overhead gap at $171.18–$175.63 and the 200-day average at $169.14 both sit inside that path, so the drift-higher version of this branch has to chew through resistance the technical models flag as decisive.

If QCOM breaks below the put wall ($160): Below $163.96 the technical structure gives way and the next options-derived shelf is the $157.50 strike where today's unusual put buying landed. In a negative dealer-gamma regime — an estimate, not observed inventory — market-maker hedging in that zone tends to add to selling rather than cushion it. The lower rail of the implied range at $146.83 is what the market is charging for that tail.

5 · Three defined-risk structures

Prices are end-of-day midpoints as of July 24. All structures are hypothetical. Every one of them expires after the July 29 earnings report — verify live prices before trading, and size for an overnight gap.

If you lean bearish: short call spread (best fit)

• Trade: Sell the July 31 $177.50 call, buy the July 31 $187.50 call
• Credit: $2.01 · Max profit: $201 · Max loss: $799 · Break-even: $179.51
• Why it fits: You collect the credit and win if QCOM stays below $177.50. The short strike sits above max pain ($175), above the unfilled gap zone, and above every technical resistance both models named — and it's the strike where the heaviest speculative call buying of the day landed, which is what makes the premium worth having.
• Makes sense only if: you accept that a strong earnings reaction can carry the stock through $179.51 overnight with no chance to manage.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes above $172.50.
• Earnings exposure: Spans the July 29 report — the premium is inflated for exactly that reason, and price can gap through both strikes before you can react.
• Managing it: Close at ~50% of max credit; there is no realistic mid-life exit around an event this close, so treat entry size as your only real risk control and close the position on July 30 if the reaction leaves the short strike threatened.
• Liquidity note: the $177.50 calls quoted 65¢ wide ($3.70/$4.35 — about 16% of mid) and the $187.50 calls 21¢ wide; this chain is wide, so work the midpoint and expect slippage, though the $177.50 line traded $747,000 of premium so there is genuine volume behind it.
• Analyze this position →

If you expect the range to hold: iron condor

• Trade: Sell the July 31 $157.50 put / buy the $150 put, and sell the July 31 $182.50 call / buy the $190 call
• Credit: $3.30 · Max profit: $330 · Max loss: $420 · Break-evens: $154.20 and $185.80
• Why it fits: The short strikes are shaded just inside this expiration's own walls ($160 put wall, $190 call wall), and the structure monetizes the gap between an 87.5% implied volatility and 46% realized volatility over the past month.
• Makes sense only if: you believe the market has overpaid for the earnings reaction. Be honest about the arithmetic: the implied range ($146.83–$187.30) is wider than both break-evens, so the market itself is pricing a move that breaks this trade.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes outside $154.20–$185.80 at expiration; manage well before that.
• Earnings exposure: Spans the July 29 report on both sides — this is the highest-gap-risk structure of the three, and the reason its credit is so large relative to a 7.5-point wing width.
• Managing it: Close at ~50% of max credit; if you're not willing to hold through the report, the honest version of this trade is not entering it at all.
• Liquidity note: the $157.50 puts traded 45¢ wide ($4.05/$4.50) and the $150 puts 18¢ wide; the $182.50 calls quoted 48¢ wide and the $190 calls 13¢. Four wide legs compound — enter as a single package order, never leg by leg.
• Analyze this position →

If you lean bullish: short put spread

• Trade: Sell the July 31 $157.50 put, buy the July 31 $150 put
• Credit: $2.08 · Max profit: $208 · Max loss: $542 · Break-even: $155.43
• Why it fits: You collect a credit and win as long as QCOM holds above $157.50 — below this expiration's put wall at $160, below the technical support shelf at $163.96, and 6.9% under spot. With puts now richer than calls versus this stock's own norm, the downside wing is where the premium is.
• Makes sense only if: you think the put building of the past two weeks is hedging into an oversold tape rather than conviction, and the accumulation signal in the technical read is the real tell.
• Invalidated if: QCOM closes below $160.
• Earnings exposure: Spans the July 29 report — the elevated credit exists because of it, and a bad reaction can gap straight through $155.43.
• Managing it: Close at ~50% of max credit; exit regardless by the July 31 close, and if QCOM closes through $157.50 after the report, close rather than hope.
• Liquidity note: the $157.50 puts traded 45¢ wide (~11% of mid) on 752 contracts and the $150 puts 18¢ wide on 503 — the two most liquid puts in the expiration, but still work the mid.
• Analyze this position →

If none of these: no trade

This is a week where standing aside is a defensible answer, and arguably the best one. Every tradeable expiration spans a scheduled earnings report, the implied range is ±12% in five days, and the front-week bid-ask spreads run 8–17% of mid — so you're paying up on entry and on exit while carrying overnight gap risk you cannot hedge. If you like the bearish read but not the event, the cleanest expression is patience: wait for the July 31 close, let the front-week volatility crush out, and reassess against the same $172.50 invalidation with a chain that no longer charges event premium.

6 · Quick FAQ

What is QCOM's expected move into July 31? About ±12.1%, or ±$20.23 — a $146.83 to $187.30 range from the $167.07 chain price, per the options market's straddle pricing as of July 24.

Is QCOM expected to go up or down over the next five days? Options positioning as of July 24 leans bearish — sentiment is negative in every expiration bucket, open put interest has climbed to 1.24 per call, and puts are richer than calls versus this stock's own norm — but that's a read of what traders have done, not a forecast. The actionable map is the $146.83–$187.30 range with $160 support and $190 resistance.

When is QCOM's next earnings report? Wednesday, July 29, after the close — two days before the July 31 expiration, which is why the July 31 rung carries an 87.5% implied volatility against 67.1% two months out.

Where is QCOM's biggest options support and resistance? For the July 31 expiration, the put wall is $160 and the call wall is $190. Across the whole chain, the heaviest single strike on both sides is $200, driven by August open interest.

Is QCOM implied volatility high or low right now? IV rank is 62/100 — today's implied volatility is more expensive than about 62% of the past year's readings, and it's falling (down 8.1% over five sessions) while still sitting far above the 46% the stock has actually realized over the past month.

What invalidates this read? A close above $172.50.

---

Methodology & disclosures. Data: end-of-day options-chain snapshot for QCOM, 2026-07-24, generated 2026-07-26T15:24:16Z. Prices shown are midpoints and will differ from live markets. Momentum/positioning scores are descriptive measurements of past option flow — not investment advice, signals, forecasts, or guarantees. Earnings dates and reported results are from the data provider's earnings feed as of 2026-07-26T15:24:16Z; 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.