monday.com Earnings Preview (August 10): Guided To Slow Down, Priced For Something Worse

TL;DR

• monday.com reports Q2 2026 on Monday, August 10, before the US open, opening the busiest earnings week left in the quarter.
• Consensus wants revenue of $355.5 million and adjusted EPS of $1.11 from 24 analysts, with the EPS spread running $0.98 to $1.26. Company guidance is $354-356 million, so consensus sits at the top of the range management gave itself.
• The guided number is 18-19% growth, down from the 24% the company printed in Q1 on $351.3 million. On the sequential line that is roughly 1% growth quarter on quarter.
• Options price a 23.4% move over the print, the widest single-name implied move on this week's calendar. On a stock that has been as high as $264 and as low as $57.50 in twelve months and closed Friday at $93.13, that is the market saying it has no idea.
• The February call is why. Management described weakness in the low-touch, self-serve channel that sells to small businesses as structural rather than temporary, and the shares fell about 17% on the outlook. Monday is the first real test of whether that read was too harsh.

When Does monday.com Report Earnings?

The short answer: Monday, August 10, before the US market opens. The rest of the week, including CoreWeave and Super Micro on Tuesday and July CPI on Wednesday, is laid out in the earnings calendar and in our week-ahead hub.

The Board

Consensus sits at the top of a guide the company set low. The option market is not trading the guide at all.

The Deceleration Is Guided, Not Feared

This is the part that gets misreported every quarter. monday.com is not being ambushed by a slowdown. It told the market about this one in May, alongside Q1 revenue of $351.3 million, up 24%, record GAAP operating income of $19.8 million (a 6% margin) and non-GAAP operating income of $49.0 million (14%).

Its own Q2 guide was $354-356 million, or 18-19% growth, and management attributed the step down to lapping prior pricing changes and to softness in small-business demand. The full-year guide is $1,466-1,474 million, up 19-20%.

Do the sequential arithmetic, because it is the uncomfortable version: $351.3 million to a $355 million midpoint is roughly 1% growth in three months. For a company the market once paid a triple-digit multiple for, a quarter of a percent a month is not a growth rate, it is a plateau. My read is that the guide was set to be beaten and the sequential optics were the price of setting it there. The number that decides Monday is not the beat, it is whether the full-year guide moves.

The Channel That Broke

The reason the stock is at $93.13 and not $264 traces to one disclosure. On the February 9 call, management said the weakness in the no-touch, performance-marketing-led channel that acquires small and mid-sized customers was not a passing demand dip, and that it did not expect those channels to exit a choppy environment during 2026. The shares fell roughly 17% on that outlook.

That is a different problem from a macro slowdown, and it is worth being precise about why. A no-touch funnel is the cheapest revenue a software company can buy: no salesperson, high margin, compounding. If that funnel structurally degrades, the fix is enterprise sales headcount, which is slower, more expensive and permanently dilutive to margin. The bull answer is that AI-assisted search is doing to the funnel what it is doing to everyone's funnel, and that the enterprise motion (record net additions of customers above $500,000 of ARR in Q1) is the real business anyway.

Both readings survive Monday unless one line moves: net adds in the large-customer cohort, and any change in the full-year revenue guide. Everything else is noise around a quarter that management has already described.

What The 23.4% Implied Move Is Actually Saying

An implied move of 23.4% on a $93 stock is about $22 a share of expected range, and it makes monday.com the most violently priced name of the week, ahead of Super Micro's roughly 18%. Options do not price direction, they price disagreement, and the disagreement here is total: one camp thinks a 19%-growth software company with 14% non-GAAP operating margins at a $57.50-264.00 twelve-month range is a washed-out compounder, the other thinks the funnel damage is permanent and the multiple has further to fall.

The house rule from July applies with force: "implied looks expensive" was badly calibrated in this earnings season, and realised moves repeatedly beat implied on names with exactly this profile. Our implied versus realised move database is the record of that. Selling a 23.4% straddle into a name that fell 17% on a guidance sentence is picking up nickels in front of a steamroller.

The Options Angle

The setup rewards defined risk and punishes premium selling.

• The straddle is expensive and roughly fairly priced, not a bargain. Buying it needs a move of about a quarter of the stock's value to pay, and the last three prints have delivered moves in that neighbourhood.
• The cleaner expression of the bull case is a call spread, which caps the cost of being early. The call I want is upside above the guide-raise level, financed by selling the strike the whisper implies.
• Selling covered calls into a 23.4% implied move on a stock 65% off its high is the trade that scored worst across July: it collects a small premium and caps the only outcome that repairs the position.

Trade log

#	Stance	Structure	Strikes and expiry	Cost or credit	Spot at writing	Implied move	Breakeven
1	Bullish	Call spread	$100C / $115C, Aug 21	Live prices not sourced; quoted against the implied move	$93.13, Aug 7 close	±23.4%	Needs a close above $100, inside the implied range
2	Pass	Short straddle / premium sale	$95 straddle, Aug 21	~23.4% of spot collected	$93.13, Aug 7 close	±23.4%	Loses beyond $71.34 or $114.92
3	Pass	Covered call	Aug 21 upside strikes	Not sourced	$93.13, Aug 7 close	±23.4%	Scored on the whole position, not the leg

Row 1 is logged without a live debit because option prices for the August 21 expiry could not be sourced at writing; it is scored against the realised move and the $100 level. Rows 2 and 3 are passes and get scored as trades not taken.

The One-Line Read

monday.com has already told the market that growth steps down from 24% to 18-19% and that its cheapest acquisition channel is structurally impaired, so Monday is not about the beat: it is about whether the full-year guide moves and whether the enterprise cohort is big enough to carry a company the market has already marked down by two thirds.