Options Scorecard: The Five-Week Backlog, Graded (12 Calls, 75% Right)

TL;DR

• No new options play was logged in an article for two full weeks (Aug 26 through Sept 11), so this edition grades the backlog instead: twelve conditional and pre-print positions from the site's first five weeks of logging, several sitting unresolved since early August, all graded now against verified closing prices. 9 of 12 right, a 75% hit rate.
• The pattern in the losses: the bullish condition fired and the stock still lost money. Shopify, Eli Lilly and Applied Materials all cleared the exact guide or margin bar this site set in advance, and all three positions are underwater five to six weeks later. The market gave back the gains in the back half of the window, not the earnings reaction itself.
• The passes held up better than the longs. Four "stand aside" calls (Applied Materials' pre-print pass, Unusual Machines' September calls, Reddit's index-pop fade, Rumble's chase-the-run pass) all won, three of them by wide margins once the initial pop or print reaction faded.
• Circle was the single biggest mover of the cycle, up 46.3% since its early-August print, the only structural outlier in either direction.
• Twenty-three older positions stay open, none forced to a grade before their own checkpoint, including two paper losses worth watching: Fabrinet down 19.5% on a beat that spooked the market anyway, and Rumble's separate $7.00 trigger, which missed firing by one cent at Wednesday's close.

The Board

9 of 12 right. The losses all cleared their own bar and lost money anyway. Circle was the one call nobody needed to think twice about.

This site logged nothing new in an article between August 25 and today. That is not a typo: the last scorecard, covering the week of August 24, closed out everything due through early September, and the two weeks since produced zero fresh trade logs. Rather than publish an empty page, this edition works backward through the ledger and grades every position that has reached its own checkpoint since the site started logging plays in early August, most of it conditional "post-print long" structures that fire off an earnings guide and were never revisited once the print landed. It runs against the current week-ahead hub for whatever resolves next.

The Losses, Named

Three calls lost, and all three share one mechanism: the bar this site set before the print was cleared, and the position lost money anyway.

Cleared the guide, lost the trade (three calls)

• Shopify (conditional post-print long). The plan: go long off the August 5 opening reaction if gross profit growth landed at the top of Shopify's own guide with revenue in line or better. It did, comfortably. Q2 2026 revenue came in at $3.58bn, up 34% against a high-20s guide, and gross profit grew 31%, above the "mid-20s" range Shopify had given, per the company's own release. The stock opened that reaction session at $150.00. Six weeks later, SHOP closed Friday, September 11 at $130.53, down 12.98% from that entry. This is the week's biggest single loss.
• Applied Materials (conditional post-print long). The trigger was a fiscal Q4 guide confirming a 30%-plus growth trajectory in the Semiconductor Systems segment. CFO Brice Hill told the August 13 call the greater-than-30% figure "highlighted last quarter" was now "greater than that," backed by a roughly $7.9bn Q4 systems guide, about 62% above a year earlier. The trigger fired and the long was struck at the August 14 opening print of $499.40. It closed September 11 at $456.68, down 8.56%.
• Eli Lilly (conditional post-print long). The condition was a raised full-year guide, and Lilly delivered one: FY2026 revenue guidance moved up to $85.0-87.0bn on Q2 revenue of $23.0bn, up 48% year over year, per Lilly's own investor release. The stock opened the reaction session at $1,174.00 and closed September 11 at $1,114.75, down 5.05%.

None of the three theses were wrong about the print. All three were wrong about what the following month would do with it. SPY itself gave back roughly 0.8-1.6% across this same stretch, with the sharpest leg landing in the final week: a hot August PPI print pushed September Fed hike odds toward 70% and the S&P fell four straight sessions into September 10, per the current week-ahead hub. A conditional long triggered by a clean earnings beat is a bet on the print, not on the four or five weeks after it, and this cycle those were two different trades.

What Won

Two structural passes were right about a fade that had already mostly happened by the time this page could act on it. Unusual Machines fell 29.76% from its $32.83 entry to September 11's $23.06 close; the pass argued a September-expiry call would lapse before the Annex III tariff date that actually helps UMAC's own products, and the stock never came close to revisiting its August 14 high of $34.93 again. Reddit's pass on chasing the index-inclusion pop is graded the same way: the thesis was RDDT trading back below its $178.69 entry by mid-September, and it has sat well below that level for weeks, closing September 11 at $155.42, down 13.02%.

Rumble's chase-the-run pass won the same way, on a stock that took longer to turn. RUM was passed on at $8.37 intraday on August 17 with a four-week window to close back below that level. It spiked to $10.23 on a GPU-supply contract on August 25, then gave all of it back: five straight closes under $8.37 from September 8 on, closing September 11 at $7.01, down 16.25% from entry, with three days left on the original four-week clock and the direction no longer in question.

Applied Materials' pre-print pass also held, on the one row this cycle with an implied-move comparison. The stand-aside call, logged against the August 13 pre-print close of $534.54, is scored on the close-to-close reaction: AMAT settled the August 14 print at $507.18, a 5.12% move. The one implied-move estimate carrying a clear reference price and timestamp put the options market at roughly 7.5% ahead of the print; other published estimates ran as high as 14% without a clean methodology behind them. Either way, the realized move undershot what the market was charging for it, which is the setup under which avoiding a pre-print structure is the right call.

The oldest open row on this page also closed out a win. AMD's conditional post-print long was promised a final grade "in the next scorecard" back in the site's very first edition and never got one. The trigger was AMD's data-center revenue clearing roughly $6.5bn with a Q3 guide implying acceleration, which it did on the August 4 print; the long was struck off the August 5 opening price of $484.50. It closed September 11 at $513.53, up 5.99%, more than a month after it should have been graded.

Three of the four other triggered longs that won did so cleanly. Palantir's post-print long triggered on a raised FY guide of $8.15-8.16bn against a $7.83bn bar, entered at the August 4 open of $145.15, and closed September 11 at $166.07, up 14.41%. Airbnb's long triggered on EPS of $1.37 against a $1.20 bar (revenue landed $8m above the top of its own guided band, a beat rather than squarely inside it), entered at $164.70, and closed at $170.16, up 3.32%. Disney's long triggered on a reaffirmed ~12% EPS growth guide with Experiences segment operating income up 20% to $3.02bn, entered at $101.99, and closed at $107.09, up 5.00%; worth noting that roughly 4 of those 20 points trace to a one-off tariff refund rather than underlying growth, which makes the beat real but less clean than the headline number.

Circle was the outlier, and by a wide margin. CRCL's post-print long triggered on flat-or-better distribution costs (they were +1% year over year, holding the revenue-less-distribution-costs margin at 41.2%, up 3 points) and growing USDC circulation, which was up 19% year over year at quarter-end and up 25% on a quarterly average basis, per Circle's own release. One secondary source flagged a sequential quarter-end dip that a second outlet did not corroborate; the year-over-year growth the thesis actually asked for is confirmed by the primary source regardless. Entered at $61.96, CRCL closed September 11 at $90.64, up 46.29%, the single largest move logged on this page since it started.

Not Yet Due

Twenty-three positions carry into the next grading cycle, none forced to a checkpoint that hasn't arrived. Two are worth watching closely: Fabrinet's post-print long is 19.5% underwater on a print that beat on revenue and EPS but missed on margin and free cash flow, weighed down by a $56.7m loss on non-marketable securities; and Rumble's separate conditional long, triggered only by a regular-session close under $7.00, missed firing by one cent at Wednesday's $7.01 close.

Ticker	Entry	Current mark (Sept 11 close unless noted)	Unrealized	Graded at
NTNX straddle pass	$66.61, Aug 14 close	$66.56	-0.07%	Sep 18 2026 expiry
RDDT put-fade pass	$179.09, Aug 14 intraday	$155.42	Right at its own $155.45 breakeven	Sep 18 2026 expiry
RUM conditional long	Triggers only under $7.00 close	$7.01, missed by 1 cent	Not yet triggered	Nov 2026 Q3 report
KLC shares pass	$2.65, Aug 14 intraday	$2.495	-5.85%	Q3 2026 print, date TBD
WTI holds above $80 (via oil hub)	$82.40, Aug 14 intraday	$100.40	+21.85%	End of September 2026
ADI conditional long	$378.55, Aug 19 open	$372.38	-1.63%	1-2 months from Aug 19
DXLG pass, shares and options (2 rows)	$0.6361, Aug 24 close	$0.62, Sep 9 close	~flat	FullBeauty merger vote, date not set
ABUS pass, shares and options (2 rows)	$5.21, Aug 21 close	$5.12, Sep 3 close	-1.7%	Sep 29 2026 tender expiry
AAP $60/$70 call spread	$56.55 ref., Aug 14 close	$44.18, Sep 4 close	Deep below $60 strike	Oct 16 2026 expiry
AVGO $400C Oct calls, pass	$380.00, Aug 18 close	$357.16, Sep 3 close	-6.0%, below $400 strike	Oct 16 2026 expiry
FN post-print long	$513.70, Aug 18 open	$413.48	-19.51%	12-month horizon
BABA scale-in long, both tranches filled	$123.81 + $116.31	$109.27	-8.9% blended	No dated checkpoint
HD conditional long	$340.26, Aug 18 morning	$321.05, Sep 4 close	~-5.6%	No dated checkpoint
MRNA long shares	$174.38, Aug 19 close	$145.61, Sep 4 close	~-16.5%	Data presentation, date TBD
WEAV merger-arb long	$7.28, Aug 18 close	$7.34, Sep 4 close	+0.8%	Deal close, Q4 2026 target
BILL $55/$65 call spread	$49.78 ref., Aug 14 close	$49.16, Sep 4 close	Below $55 strike	Jan 2027 expiry
SNDK confirmation calls	$1,258.58, Aug 6 open	$1,628.57	+29.4% underlying; option leg unmarked	Oct 2026 expiry
SPCX post-print long	$114.92, Aug 6 close	$146.94	+27.86%	No dated checkpoint
SMCI post-print long	$34.99, Aug 12 open	$40.06	+14.49%	No dated checkpoint
SE post-print long	$114.91, Aug 6 close	$107.55	-6.40%	No dated checkpoint
BIDU 12-month long	$90.87, Aug 18 close	$91.99	+1.23%	12-month horizon
NU long shares	$15.23, Aug 14 close	$14.67	-3.68%	Nov 2026 Q3 earnings
AMD long shares and calls (2 rows)	$514.39, Aug 14 close	$513.53	-0.17%	Late Oct 2026 Q3 earnings
NTES long shares	$125.12, Aug 14 close	$115.48	-7.70%	Nov 2026, reversal check

The Calibration Lesson

The one priced comparison this cycle undershot, which is the opposite of July's pattern. Applied Materials' 5.12% earnings reaction landed under an implied move estimated at roughly 7.5% or higher, so buying the print would have lost to time decay. That is one data point, not a trend: the broader ledger since mid-August has kept splitting both ways, straddle passes winning on some prints and losing on others, so this alone does not license a blanket "sell premium" reflex going into the next print. It licenses checking the specific setup, which is what this page is supposed to be doing anyway.

The sharper lesson this cycle is about time horizon, not volatility. Every conditional "post-print long" logged in early August tested one thing: did the print confirm the bullish setup this page named in advance. Every single one of the eight triggered this cycle. Three of them, Shopify, Applied Materials and Eli Lilly, lost money anyway, because a month-plus hold rides through whatever the broader tape does after the reaction session, and September's tape turned hostile in its second week on a hot PPI print and rising Fed hike odds. Confirming the print is necessary for one of these longs to work. It was never sufficient, and this cycle is the clearest evidence of that yet: the earnings call was right on every name, and the stock was the losing side of the bet on three of them regardless.

The Full Ledger

Every row graded 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. entry/implied
CRCL	Post-print long, triggered	$61.96, Aug 5 open	Win	+46.29%
PLTR	Post-print long, triggered	$145.15, Aug 4 open	Win	+14.41%
DIS	Post-print long, triggered	$101.99, Aug 5 open	Win	+5.00%
ABNB	Post-print long, triggered	$164.70, Aug 7 open	Win	+3.32%
AMAT	Pass, any pre-print position	$534.54, Aug 13 close	Win	-5.12% realized vs. ~7.5%+ implied
RDDT	Pass, chase the shares	$178.69, Aug 14 intraday	Win	-13.02% vs. entry
RUM	Pass, chase the run	$8.37, Aug 17 intraday	Win	-16.25% vs. entry
UMAC	Pass, September calls	$32.83, Aug 14 intraday	Win	-29.76% vs. entry
AMD	Post-print long, triggered	$484.50, Aug 5 open	Win	+5.99%
LLY	Post-print long, triggered	$1,174.00, Aug 5 open	Loss	-5.05%
AMAT	Post-print long, triggered	$499.40, Aug 14 open	Loss	-8.56%
SHOP	Post-print long, triggered	$150.00, Aug 5 open	Loss	-12.98%

The One-Line Read

Nine of twelve backlog calls graded right, and the three losses all agreed with this page about the earnings print itself; they just held on for a month afterward, and the month is where the money was lost.