Options Scorecard: The Week of August 24, Graded (4 Calls, 75% Right)

TL;DR

• The week of August 24 was the thinnest logging week since this scorecard started: only six new rows, all passes, and four of them on names with no options chain to price at all. Two calls from the week before that were still open just came due, so this scorecard grades both together: 3 of 4 resolved right, 75%.
• The miss was USA Rare Earth. The August 28 special meeting to approve 126.8 million new shares for the Serra Verde deal passed with 108.2 million votes for against 1.4 million against, exactly the formality this page expected. The stock still fell 6.55% that same session and kept sliding to 8.6% below entry by September 4. Calling a share-issuance vote "mechanical" was right about the vote count and wrong about the stock.
• Nvidia's weekly calls pass and Broadcom's straddle pass both won, and Broadcom's was close: AVGO settled Thursday, September 3 down 6.0% from entry, right at the bottom edge of the 6-9% range this page cited as the reason not to buy the volatility.
• Nayax's no-chain pass also won: the stock that popped 11% on the IPS Group acquisition news drifted to roughly flat nine days later, nowhere near enough of a move to have made an unpriced structure worth chasing.
• Eleven positions stay open, from a Home Depot conditional long down about 5% with no dated stop to a Moderna long still waiting on a data readout with no scheduled date. None of them get forced to a grade before their own checkpoint arrives.

The Board

3 of 4 right. USA Rare Earth's stock fell 6.55% on the day its dilution vote passed as expected, the clearest reminder this week that a certain outcome and a certain stock price are two different things.

This covers every trade log filed the week of August 24-28 (the week-ahead hub for that stretch), plus two calls from the August 17 scorecard's "Not Yet Due" table that reached their own checkpoint since: Nvidia's August 28 weekly options and Broadcom's September 2 earnings straddle. It picks up where that scorecard left off and runs against the current week-ahead hub for whatever resolves next.

The Loss, Named

One call lost this week. The reasoning behind it was defensible, and it was still wrong.

Treated a share-issuance vote as risk-free because the count wasn't in doubt

• USA Rare Earth (pass on any directional options structure into the August 28 stockholder vote). The thesis: no reliable USAR chain could be sourced, and the vote to approve 126.849 million new shares for the Serra Verde acquisition was a formality on a deal already negotiated in April and already board-recommended, so paying for volatility into a settled outcome was a weak bet regardless of the sourcing gap. The vote landed exactly as expected: 108,248,297 shares for, 1,403,269 against, per the company's own SEC filing and reported by TipRanks. USAR closed August 27, the day before the meeting, at $19.25, almost exactly where it sat at the $19.26 entry. It closed the vote day itself at $17.99, down 6.55% in a single session, and kept drifting to $17.60 by September 4, down 8.6% from entry. The vote wasn't the uncertain event. The 126.8 million shares clearing to actually issue was, and that is precisely the kind of "mechanical" catalyst this page keeps underpricing: a formality for the vote count, a real supply event for the share count. No premium was ever priced to grade this against a specific dollar loss, but a defined-risk bearish structure into that session would have paid, which is what makes the pass a loss under this site's own rule that a considered pass is scored as the trade not taken.

What Won

Nvidia's front-week calls pass held up on a print that beat and still stayed inside its own band. NVDA closed August 20 at $216.85 with the August 28 weeklies pricing a ±5.8% move. Revenue came in at $96.2bn against a Q3 guide near $108bn, and the stock jumped 8.74% to $227.98 by the August 27 close, briefly testing the top of the implied band on Friday's own intraday range. It settled the actual August 28 close, the date the weeklies expired, at $217.55, per stockanalysis.com and confirmed on MarketBeat, up just 0.32% from the $216.85 entry and comfortably inside the 5.8% band the pass was betting against. Front-week premium bought into the print would have decayed through a real 8.7% intraday swing and still lost, exactly the setup this page flagged: the base rate said Nvidia clears its own implied move roughly a quarter of the time, and this was one of the other three.

Broadcom's earnings straddle pass won, by the width of a coin flip. AVGO beat its own guide on every headline line on September 2, revenue of $29.6bn against a $29.4bn guide and AI semiconductor revenue of $16.7bn against $16.0bn, and the stock sold off anyway. The after-hours print narrowed from roughly -6% to about -3.6% within the first hour, which is exactly the kind of move this site's own house rule says not to grade off: a July SMCI pass got marked a win on an early after-hours read and had to be reversed once the stock settled up 32.4%. AVGO's settled Thursday, September 3 close was $357.16, down 6.01% from the $380.00 entry, per stockanalysis.com and matched by a second read carried in Barchart-sourced coverage. That lands right at the bottom edge of the 6-9% historical earnings-day range this page cited as the reason not to pay for a straddle. A structure priced to that range would need to clear it to profit; 6.01% doesn't clear it, so the pass wins, but this is the tightest resolution logged since this scorecard started. The slower, dated companion call, a bullish lean on $400 October calls into the same print, is not due until the October 16 expiry and stays open, currently about 6% underwater on the stock alone.

Nayax's no-chain pass on the IPS Group news also won, on a stock that mostly just held its pop. NYAX traded at $51.26 intraday on August 25 as the acquisition news broke, up 11% on the day, with neither Nasdaq nor Barchart returning a populated chain to price anything against. Nine days later, the stock closed September 3 at $52.68, per stockanalysis.com and matched by MarketBeat, up 2.77% from the entry. That is nowhere near the kind of follow-through that would have made an unpriceable structure worth inventing a trade for. The pass costs nothing when the stock just sits on its gap.

Not Yet Due

Eleven positions carry into next week's grading, none forced to a checkpoint that hasn't arrived. Marks below are the most recent verified close, not a final grade.

Ticker	Call	Entry	Current mark	Unrealized	Graded at
ABUS pass, shares and options (2 rows)	$5.21, Aug 21 close	$5.12, Sep 3 close	-1.7%	Sep 29 2026 tender expiry
DXLG pass, shares and options (2 rows)	$0.6361, Aug 24 close	$0.63, Sep 3 close	~flat	FullBeauty merger vote, date not yet set
HD conditional long	$340.26, Aug 18 morning	$321.05, Sep 4 close	~-5.6%	No dated checkpoint stated
MRNA long shares	$174.38, Aug 19 close	$145.61, Sep 4 close	~-16.5%	Full INTerpath-001 data presentation, date TBD
WEAV merger-arb long	$7.28, Aug 18 close	$7.34, Sep 4 close	+0.8%, pinned near the $7.40 deal price	Deal close, Q4 2026 target
RUM shares pass (4-week window)	$8.37, Aug 17 intraday	$8.59, Sep 4 close	+2.6% (cost of the pass so far)	Mid-September
BILL $55/$65 call spread	$49.78 ref., Aug 14 close	$49.16, Sep 4 close	Below the $55 strike	Jan 2027 expiry
AAP $60/$70 call spread	$56.55 ref., Aug 14 close	$44.18, Sep 4 close	Deep below the $60 strike	Oct 16 2026 expiry
AVGO $400C Oct calls, pass	$380.00, Aug 18 close	$357.16, Sep 3 close	~-6.0%, below the $400 strike	Oct 16 2026 expiry

Never triggered: Rumble's conditional long needed a regular-session close under $7.00; the low close since entry has stayed above $8.30.

Worth watching without a grade yet: DXL's own board reversed its recommendation on the FullBeauty merger, now urging shareholders to vote against it, on the same dilution and negative-equity risk this page's original pass already named. No meeting date has been set, so both DXLG rows stay open exactly as logged.

The Calibration Lesson

Too small a sample to say much about implied-versus-realized this week: four resolved calls, three of them options-direction or volatility passes that won because the actual move stayed inside what was already priced or expected. The one clean signal is USA Rare Earth, and it's not really a volatility-calibration lesson at all. It's a reminder that "the outcome isn't in doubt" and "the stock won't move" are two different claims, and this page conflated them. A vote that everyone expects to pass can still be the exact session a large, real supply of new shares clears to hit the market, and that is tradeable even when the headline vote count is not. The next mechanical corporate-action catalyst on this page gets asked a second question before it's passed on: not just "is the outcome in doubt," but "does the outcome itself release something the stock has to absorb."

The Full Ledger

Every scored row from this cycle, in one place. The Track Record ledger carries the complete dataset (CSV and JSON) and recomputes every statistic from these same rows.

Ticker	Play	Logged	Result	Realized vs. implied/entry
NVDA	Pass, weekly calls	$216.85, 5.8% implied	Win	+0.32% vs. implied
AVGO	Pass, long straddle	$380.00, 6-9% historical range	Win	-6.01%, at the range's edge
NYAX	Pass, any options	$51.26, event	Win	+2.77% vs. entry
USAR	Pass, any options	$19.26, event	Loss	-8.62% vs. entry

The One-Line Read

Three passes won this week because the moves stayed inside what was priced. The one that lost did because a vote nobody doubted still let 126.8 million shares loose on a stock with nowhere to hide from them.