NVIDIA isn’t just a stock anymore. It’s a religion.
But, most importantly, it’s the market’s adrenaline button.
It’s the one position everyone brags to their buddies about over a round of beers (or a bottle of Dom if they got in early).
Every quarter, investors gather around the same ritual:
Whisper numbers
Options volume exploding
Analysts predicting “the most important print of the year”
A stock everyone assumes must go up
But this time, something different is happening, and there’s a good chance you didn’t notice it.
The entire options market has stopped believing in the upside.
Not “less upside.”
Not “muted upside.”
Zero upside.
And when you look at the numbers, the illusion becomes impossible to ignore.
What’s Inside This Week’s Letter
Free Section:
✓ The psychology of the NVIDIA adrenaline cycle
✓ The earnings-path chart: why NVDA pops then fades
✓ The real-time options signals: zero upside priced in
✓ The probabilities of a +10% rally vs –10% drop (shocking)
Members Section (Paywalled):
🔒 The full implied distribution (including skew)
🔒 3 tactical expressions to trade the fade or protect gains
🔒 A neutral/balanced AI positioning framework for late cycle
🔒 “House Positioning” and allocation map
I. The Adrenaline Cycle: How NVDA Became the Market’s Favorite Drug
Everyone knows the pattern:
NVDA rallies into earnings
NVDA “beats”
Retail screams “moon”
The stock… stalls
Two weeks later, it often underperforms while no one is paying attention
The behavior is consistent.
NVDA’s pre-earnings path is all anticipation.
NVDA’s post-earnings path is all comedown.
The excitement is real, but the upside rarely is.
Odd, isn’t it?
II. The Chart That Ruins the Upside Myth
When you index NVDA and the S&P 500 to 1 on earnings day and look at the average path, two things jump out immediately:
• NVDA runs up before the print
• NVDA fades after the print
• The S&P barely responds at all
The NVDA earnings illusion: a pre-earnings ramp, a brief pop, and two weeks of underperformance, while the S&P 500 moves sideways.
This is the hallmark of a story stock whose upside has been front-run so aggressively that the actual event carries no reward (just risk).
It’s about positioning.
And nowhere is positioning revealed more clearly than in options markets.
III. The Options Market Prices In Zero Remaining Upside
Even with this past week’s earnings release behind us, NVIDIA’s options are still behaving as if the story has nowhere left to go.
Normally, after a major catalyst, you’d see the wings (out-of-the-money options) reprice, upside if momentum is alive, downside if the risk has passed.
But neither happened.
A tight straddle after a major earnings beat isn’t normal, and a tight straddle with heavy downside skew is the late-cycle signature most investors miss.
The entire earnings-week straddle is only implying a 3–4% move.
For NVDA, that’s unusually low. It tells you the market expects almost nothing from here.
Then you look at the wings and the picture becomes even clearer.
The +10% upside call is trading for pennies.
The market is effectively saying the odds of a major upside follow-through are near zero.
The –10% downside put, meanwhile, is still heavily bid or roughly 300 times richer than the upside wing.
That means:
A big upside continuation is being treated as virtually impossible.
A sharp downside gap, while still unlikely, is materially more plausible.
And the overwhelmingly likely outcome is that NVDA goes nowhere.
That imbalance is not normal.
It’s classic late-cycle megacap behavior: the upside is exhausted, positioning is crowded, and only the left-tail still carries real premium.
If you hold NVDA (or any part of the AI complex) this matters far more than the earnings number itself.
Even days after the print, the options market still treats the upside as nonexistent.
Probability Snapshot: What the Market Is Really Pricing
The table below explains how the upside is gone, the downside is real, and the base case is that nothing happens.
Here’s how the market was pricing the final 24 hours of the earnings window (based on Nov. 20 data):
Outcome | What the Options Market Is Signaling |
+10% rally | Nearly impossible. The upside call is priced at pennies; essentially a zero-chance event. |
–10% drop | Small but real. Downside protection remains heavily bid; roughly 300× richer than the upside. |
No meaningful move | Overwhelmingly likely. NVDA is being priced to simply stall out. |
The market isn’t betting on upside.
It’s betting on one thing: that most investors have no idea how the real odds stack up.
But once you see the actual distribution and the trades it points to, you’ll never look at NVDA the same way again.
That part lives behind the paywall for Pro readers.
Upgrade to Pro to read the rest.
Get the handful of trades that exploit the distorted earning setup while everyone else keeps cheering the headline.
Upgrade NowUpgrading to Pro gets you:
- The real probability distribution (not the guesswork)
- How this setup fits into 8 past NVDA earnings cycles
- Three defined-risk trades built around the imbalance
- A clear AI positioning map for late-cycle markets
- House positioning and the exact execution plan