Options Scorecard: The Week of August 10, Graded (35 Calls, 51% Right)

TL;DR

• Every logged play from the week of August 10, from Applied Materials' Thursday print through Tenon-adjacent names still open, was checked against what actually happened: 18 of 35 resolved calls were right, a 51% hit rate.
• The biggest single miss was passing on Fabrinet's straddle. The stock fell 23.6% on a record beat-and-raise quarter against a 12% implied move, and this page took neither side.
• Every straddle this page actually bought won. Deere cleared its 5% implied by a wide margin (+7.0%) and Wolfspeed blew through its 14% implied on a fiscal Q4 loss (-18.3%). The losses all sit on the passing side of the ledger.
• The two most avoidable losses were on the sell side. Alibaba and Reddit both stayed inside their priced moves this week, which is exactly the condition that should have made selling premium the correct call, and this page passed on that sale twice.
• Target's three-way bet against the rally lost clean. A put, a put spread and a pass on the shares all bet the stock would fall toward $150; it closed the week at $165.44 on a guidance raise.

The Board

18 of 35 right. Every straddle this page bought won. Every straddle it passed on and shouldn't have (TJX, Fabrinet) cost it the week's two biggest misses.

This covers every trade log from the week-ahead hub of August 10-14 plus the previews that spilled into the following week and have since resolved: Alibaba, TJX, Ross, Deere, Wolfspeed, Target and Analog Devices all reported August 17-20. It picks up where the August 3 scorecard left off and runs against the current week-ahead hub for whatever resolves next.

The Losses, Named

Seventeen calls lost this week. Grouped by mechanism, because a list of tickers on its own teaches nothing.

Passed on selling rich premium, and it stayed calm (2 calls)

The two clearest, most avoidable misses of the week. Both names had a real catalyst, both stayed inside their priced range, and both times this page was on the wrong side of that calm.

• Alibaba (pass on selling August 21 premium). BABA closed the week at $119.47, a 3.51% move against the $123.81 entry, comfortably inside the 5.7% implied. Cloud revenue grew 45% year over year, the fastest in 22 quarters, but a 75% jump in capex overshadowed it and the stock whipsawed without ever clearing either breakeven. Selling that premium would have collected clean; passing on the sale is a loss.
• Reddit (pass on shorting the $185/$190 call skew). RDDT settled its August 21 expiry around $153, nowhere near either strike. The index-inclusion pop that carried the stock to $178+ intraday on the mechanical buying of roughly $3bn of forced index-fund flow gave the entire move back within a week. The $1.50 credit this page considered and passed on would have been kept in full.

Bought or held Alibaba directionally into a print that never committed (1 call)

• Alibaba (long half-size shares before the print). Same $123.81 entry, same $119.47 settlement, a 3.51% loss. The premarket dropped as much as 5.6% on the EPS miss before cloud growth pulled the stock positive intraday, then capex concerns dragged it back down into the week's close. A name that moves this much intraday and this little close to close is exactly the kind of print a half-size directional bet doesn't need.

TJX beat the top line, missed the guide, and lost both ways (2 calls)

• TJX (long shares into the print). Comp sales beat at +4% and TJX raised full-year EPS guidance, but a Q3 guide of $1.30-$1.32 landed below the roughly $1.35 Street consensus and the stock fell 4.87% to $144.70 by the reaction close, then kept sliding.
• TJX (pass on the $152.50 straddle). The stock closed its August 21 expiry at $140.53, a 7.61% move that cleared the $145.40 lower breakeven with room to spare against a 4.4% implied. The straddle this page passed on would have paid for itself and then some.

Target ran on a guidance raise, bet against three different ways (3 calls)

• Target (long $150 put, September expiry). TGT never traded near $150 after the print. It closed the reaction session at $159.00 and kept climbing to $165.44 by the following Friday. The put's own stated invalidation, a guidance raise that clears consensus, is exactly what happened: full-year sales growth guidance moved to roughly 5% from roughly 4%.
• Target (long $150/$140 put spread, August 21 expiry). Same story, both legs expired worthless against a $165.44 close.
• Target (pass on shares at $155.51). Comp sales beat at +3.8% against a 2.4% consensus. The stock ran 6.38% past the pass point, exactly the outcome this page's own note said would make the pass wrong.

The week's biggest miss: Fabrinet (1 call)

• Fabrinet (pass on the at-the-money straddle). Revenue of $1.3158bn and EPS of $4.10 were both records that beat guidance and consensus. The stock fell 19.4% the next session on margin and capex concerns anyway, and kept falling to a 23.59% loss from entry by the following Friday, roughly double the 12% the straddle would have needed to pay. This is the third straight beat-and-raise print at this name that sold off double digits (10.22% in February, 8.01% in May, now this), which says more about what the options market prices for Fabrinet than about any one quarter.

A narrow miss: Deere's shares (1 call)

• Deere (pass on shares at $608.85). EPS of $5.10 beat by 6.5% and the FY2026 net-income guidance floor was raised. The stock closed the reaction session up a modest 1.99%, enough to make the pass a loss on points but nowhere near the scale of the week's other misses.

What Won

Every straddle this page actually bought, won. Deere's $610 straddle cleared its 5% implied on a 7.01% move to $651.54. Wolfspeed's roughly $32 straddle blew through its 14% implied on an 18.31% drop, the third straight report at that name to run at close to double its priced move.

Correctly stayed out of a straddle that stayed inside implied: Applied Materials (7.47% realized against a 7.5-11.03% implied, a razor-thin call), NetEase (2.31% against a self-stated 3% threshold) and Target's own straddle (7.50% realized, just inside the $166.20 breakeven implied by the piece's own quoted premium, a narrow win on the other side of the same coin as the ledger's stored 6.5-6.9% figure, which would have called it a loss; the specific breakeven is the more reliable number here and it is flagged in the ledger note).

Passes that avoided a real decline: AAOI fully round-tripped its unexplained 15.53% spike and then some, closing the week below where it started; the pass on both the shares and on selling premium into that realized volatility both won. Wolfspeed's shares pass and Fabrinet's shares pass both avoided their respective double-digit drops. Ross Stores popped as much as 7.05% after hours on its own beat-and-raise, then faded to close still below the entry; the pass on chasing it held.

Correctly stayed out of a name with no real catalyst: Kioxia's sector-wide memory pop and Unusual Machines' tariff-anticipation spike both faded before the actual dates they were pricing arrived; Valneva's EMA validation pop gave back its small gain with a full-year-out decision date still ahead.

One clean read on a small move: Analog Devices beat on revenue, EPS and guidance and still only moved about 2%, confirming the pass on any pre-print options structure. Nu Holdings' pass on buying calls after its post-print gap, in favor of just holding shares, avoided the extra decay a leveraged bet would have added on top of the stock's own 4.27% pullback.

Crude kept climbing. WTI ran from $82.40 to roughly $86.70 with no pullback into the $70-80 range, confirming both the call that it holds above $80 and the pass on re-entering the fade-the-spike trade this page had used in July.

Not Yet Due

Several calls from this week are graded against a checkpoint that hasn't arrived: a Q3 print, a 12-month horizon, a September expiry. They stay open, with a mark rather than a grade.

Ticker	Call	Entry	Current mark	Unrealized	Graded at
KLC shares pass	$2.65, Aug 14	$2.74, Aug 21	+3.4%	Q3 2026 print
RDDT shares pass	$178.69, Aug 14	~$153, Aug 21	-14.4%	Mid-September
RDDT Sep $160 put	$179.09, Aug 14	~$153, Aug 21	Already ITM	Sep 18 expiry
UMAC Sep call pass	$32.83, Aug 14	$27.51, Aug 21	-16.2%	Sep expiry
NU shares (12mo)	$15.23, Aug 14	$14.58, Aug 21	-4.3%	Q3 print
AMD shares (12mo)	$514.39, Aug 14	$473.25, Aug 21	-8.0%	Q3 print
BIDU shares (12mo)	$90.87, Aug 18	$93.21, Aug 21	+2.6%	12 months
NTES shares (12mo)	$125.12, Aug 14	$128.17, Aug 21	+2.4%	Q3 mark reversal
ADI conditional long	$378.55, Aug 19	$373.09, Aug 21	-1.4%	1-2 months
WTI holds above $80	$82.40, Aug 14	$86.70, Aug 21	On track	End-September

Never triggered: Alibaba's second-half scale-in needed a close below $117 after the print; the low was $119.23, so the second half was never struck.

Two calls could not be scored. Kioxia's week-closing print (roughly JPY 54,320) cleared only one strong source plus a loosely-agreeing secondhand check, short of this site's two-source bar; the well-sourced move (+15.1% Aug 14-17) fully round-tripped, netting close to flat either way. Capricor's premium-selling pass never had specific strikes logged, so there is no breakeven to grade; what's known is that the stock logged four straight double-digit-swing sessions even with the PDUFA date pushed out, which does not look like the quiet decay the pass was betting on.

The Calibration Lesson

This week does not split cleanly into "buy vol" or "sell vol" the way July did. It splits by what kind of surprise the print actually carried. Deere and Wolfspeed both delivered a genuinely uncertain outcome, an unambiguous beat and an unambiguous miss respectively, and both blew through what was priced. Buying volatility into a real binary outcome worked, same as it worked all last month.

Alibaba and Reddit were different: both had a real, dated catalyst, and both settled inside what the market had already priced for. That is the setup where selling premium wins, and this page passed on the sale both times. The lesson isn't that implied looked expensive and should have been sold on reflex, the July mistake. It's closer to the opposite: when a catalyst is scheduled and liquid, the market's own pricing of it is often the sharper read, and the edge sits in taking the other side of a rich premium.

Target and TJX are the pattern to watch going into next week. Both beat their headline numbers and both moves diverged from what the guidance detail implied, in opposite directions: Target's guidance raise cleared consensus and the stock ran, TJX's Q3 guide missed consensus and the stock fell. A beat alone is not the signal; the guide inside the beat is.

The Full Ledger

Every scored row from this week, in one place. The Track Record ledger carries the complete dataset (CSV and JSON), recomputes every statistic from these same rows and breaks results out by category: stock-direction hit 58% (7 of 12), volatility hit 50% (7 of 14), options-direction hit 40% (2 of 5), event hit 33% (1 of 3, small sample), and the single macro call landed a win.

Ticker	Play	Logged	Result	Realized vs. implied
AMAT	Pass, long straddle	$548.15, 7.5-11.03% implied	Win	-7.47% vs. implied
AMAT	Pass, long shares	same	Win	-7.47% vs. implied
NTES	Pass, long straddle	$122.65, ~3% self-stated	Win	-2.31% vs. implied
RDDT	Pass, long call	$178.37, 7% implied	Win	-14.1% vs. implied
RDDT	Pass, short call skew	same	Loss	-14.1% vs. implied
VALN	Pass, long option	$7.20, event	Win	-3.1% vs. no news
UMAC	Pass, long shares	$32.83, event	Win	-16.2% vs. implied
AAOI	Pass, long shares	$150.28, no catalyst	Win	-16.9% vs. implied
AAOI	Pass, short premium	same	Win	-16.9% vs. implied
NU	Pass, long calls	$15.23, post-print	Win	-4.3% vs. implied
BABA	Long, long straddle	$123.81, 5.7% implied	Loss	-3.5% vs. implied
BABA	Pass, short premium	same	Loss	-3.5% vs. implied
BABA	Long, half shares	same	Loss	-3.5% vs. implied
TJX	Long, shares	$152.11, 4.4% implied	Loss	-4.9% vs. implied
TJX	Pass, long straddle	same	Loss	-7.6% vs. implied
ROST	Pass, long shares	$245.36, no options logged	Win	-2.6% vs. implied
DE	Long, long straddle	$608.85, 5.0% implied	Win	+7.0% vs. implied
DE	Pass, long shares	same	Loss	+2.0% vs. implied
WOLF	Long, long straddle	$31.79, 14.0% implied	Win	-18.3% vs. implied
WOLF	Pass, long shares	same	Win	-18.3% vs. implied
FN	Pass, long straddle	$570.22, 12.0% implied	Loss	-23.6% vs. implied
FN	Pass, long shares	same	Win	-23.6% vs. implied
TGT	Pass, long straddle	$153.90, ~8% breakeven	Win	+7.5% vs. implied
TGT	Long, $150 put (Sep)	same	Loss	+7.5% vs. implied
TGT	Long, put spread	$155.51, event	Loss	+6.4% vs. implied
TGT	Pass, long shares	same	Loss	+6.4% vs. implied
ADI	Pass, any options	$381.17, unpriced	Win	-2.1%, too small to pay
USO	Pass, fade the spike	$82.40, macro	Win	+5.3%, no fade
CAPR	Pass, directional options*	$3.93, event	Loss	+69.2%, direction only
NU	Pass, long straddle*	$13.84, 7.8% implied	Loss	+10.0% vs. implied
NU	Pass, long shares*	same	Loss	+10.0% vs. implied
NU	Long, put spread*	same	Loss	+10.0% vs. implied
BIDU	Pass, shares through print*	$103.67, 5.8% implied	Win	-12.35% vs. implied
BIDU	Pass, long straddle*	same	Loss	-12.35% vs. implied
AVB	Pass, merger arb*	$184.06, spread	Loss	Spread moved against

*Graded in-place by an earlier hub update, before this scorecard; carried here for the full weekly count.

Two rows could not be scored: Kioxia's pass (weak sourcing on the closing print) and Capricor's premium-selling pass (no strikes logged). Both are detailed above rather than forced into a grade.

The One-Line Read

Fifty-one percent on a week where every straddle this page actually bought paid off. Every real loss sat on the passing side: two missed premium sales into names that stayed calm, two missed straddles that a beat-and-raise print should have paid for.