Combined edition, covering Monday 31 August and Tuesday 1 September. The desk publisher was offline both sessions; the automated fallback posted condensed snapshots each evening, and tonight’s has been upgraded in place to this full edition under the desk’s standing repair rule. Monday’s condensed post stays as published. Nothing here is backdated — every number below was pulled tonight and is labeled with the session it belongs to.
- SPY broke the prior week’s floor, closing Tuesday at $761.78; QQQ fell 1.27%; VIX pushed to 16.
- Deep out-of-the-money index put buying woke up — $7.7M into November SPY $684s against 15 contracts of standing OI.
- The regime read slips from Bull to Neutral at MPI 67, and the two-session OI check hands Friday’s radar a rough card.
The boards
Boards are computed for Tuesday 1 September only, on the universe this run resolves completely: every off-exchange print of $100M or more — 89 prints, $20.6B aggregate, after removing one canceled print and three duplicate vendor tracking IDs. Nothing below is estimated.
Participation. Names printing $100M+ dark-pool blocks Tuesday: 53 — 30 single names carrying $11.1B and 23 ETFs/trackers carrying $9.6B. That is a flip from Friday’s session, when trackers out-weighed single names $11.4B to $8.4B. The trailing-session baseline file was not available to this run, so no average comparison is published.
Concentration. Leading sector by aggregate notional among single names: Technology, $5.78B across 23 prints — NVDA alone carried $1.93B, a third of the sector’s total. Communication Services followed at $1.97B, Financial Services at $1.54B.
Positioning gauge. Leveraged-long ETFs: one SSO block, $211.2M, on the dark-pool side. Inverse/bear ETFs: $2.46M of SQQQ call premium on the flagged-options side. Volatility ETFs: $0. Threshold counts. Dark-pool prints of $100M or more: 89 (complete count). The flagged-options screen returns its 50 most recent $1M+ events for the session — 5 carried sweeps, 45 were block or repeated prints; a full-day total is beyond this run’s screen depth and is not published.
| Ticker | Price | Prints | Aggregate | Window (ET) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPY | ~$761.5–761.8 | 8 | $2.55B | 3:42–5:10 PM |
| NVDA | $217.44 | 3 | $1.60B | 4:00–5:05 PM |
| MSFT | $501.02 | 5 | $1.43B | 4:00–5:42 PM |
Cluster watch: fifteen repeated-price clusters printed Tuesday. The standout is not any one of them but the stamp they share — at 5:05:04 PM, five separate prints crossed within one second, in NVDA, GOOG, GOOGL, MSFT and SPY, each engineered to almost exactly $500M. The same ~$500M-per-name basket pattern printed Monday at 4:54–4:55 PM in MSFT, GOOG, GOOGL and NVDA. Program-sized, price-agnostic, two closes in a row.
What happened — Monday 31 August
Monday was quiet on the surface: SPY eased 0.30% to $767.05 — closing almost exactly on the $767 floor Friday’s edition flagged — and QQQ finished flat at $716.76 (+0.05%). NVDA bounced 1.48% to $220.78, recovering part of Friday’s fade. The index options tape stayed defensive even in the calm: SPY’s put/call ran 1.22 and QQQ’s 1.23, both heavier than Friday. VIX spent Monday’s session between 14.86 and 15.48; the vendor’s Monday closing print failed the range sanity check and is not republished (see Method note). Off-exchange, month-end was visible everywhere: a $1.27B IVV average-price cross, two $1.15B SPY prints at the same $766.86 average price, an engineered $1.0B SPYM print, $713M in ITOT, and the 4:55 PM basket crosses noted above — classic index-fund tape into the August close.
What happened — Tuesday 1 September
September opened with the break. SPY fell 0.69% to $761.78 — decisively below the prior week’s $767–$768 floor — after ranging $759.48–$764.67, and QQQ dropped 1.27% to $707.64, its first close under the $715 line Friday’s edition marked. NVDA gave back Monday’s bounce (−1.51% to $217.44, a two-day round-trip to almost exactly Friday’s close), MRVL slid further to $210.39, and AMZN — down 4.3% over the two sessions to $254.92 — was the big-cap casualty of the stretch. VIX printed a 16.00 close, up from the low-14s regime that held all of last week. Market-wide options volume ran 34.3M calls to 29.8M puts — a 0.87 put/call ratio, sharply heavier than Friday’s 0.74 — with $18.9B in call premium against $16.5B in puts. SPY’s own put/call came in at 1.18, QQQ’s at 1.21, and SPY’s net options premium finished at −$20.8M.
Friday’s radar — OI confirm, two sessions late
Friday’s flagged prints, checked against the latest open-interest data — which reflects positioning settled through Monday (Tuesday’s trading settles into tomorrow’s update). Because the desk missed two sessions, this is a cumulative two-session check against each contract’s open interest at flag time, not the usual overnight read. Thresholds: net OI growth ≥40% of flagged volume = confirmed; 10–40% = partial; under 10%, or OI down = not confirmed.
| Contract | Flagged Friday | OI since flag | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| AVGO Sept 4 $370 calls | ~$11.4M, three bursts, volume past OI | 11,371 → 5,892 (−48%) | Not confirmed — OI fell |
| NVDA Sept 4 $225 calls | ~$5.7M, 94k contracts churned, bid-tilted | 60,417 → 38,603 (−36%) | Not confirmed — net closing |
| MRVL Sept 18 $220 calls | $1.09M ask-side after the earnings gap | 3,607 → 3,792 (+5%) | Partially confirmed — marginal |
| AMZN Sept 4 $267.50 puts | $1.63M ask-side, volume 49x OI | 164 → 794 (+384%, but 8% of flagged volume) | Not confirmed — mostly day-traded |
| IWM Sept 18 $286 puts | ~$4.5M, two bursts | 87,533 → 77,501 (−11%) | Not confirmed — OI fell |
| SPX Jan 2027 8200 calls | $15.3M, minute-paired with the 7000 puts | 4,607 → 8,240 (+79%); a further 3,500-lot ask-side block ($31.0M) added Monday | Confirmed opening |
| SPX Jan 2027 7000 puts | $13.5M, the other half of the pair | 48,196 → 47,410 (−1.6%) | Not confirmed — flat |
| HPE Jan 2027 $46 puts | $1.75M at the bid, volume 2x OI | 1,813 → 5,510 (+204%; ~100% of flagged volume became OI) | Confirmed opening |
| ADBE Sept 2027 $350 calls | $1.25M, volume 46x a 7-contract base | Row not returned by the OI screen | No data |
| POWL Feb 2027 $240 calls | $3.06M floor print, ask-side | 2,587 → 1,744 (−33%) | Not confirmed — OI fell |
A rougher card than Friday’s, and it stays on the page: two confirmed, one marginal, six not confirmed, one no-data. The confirmations are telling — the HPE pre-earnings put book is real (virtually every flagged contract became standing OI, with the report due Wednesday), and the SPX January call wing kept building while its paired put leg went flat. The misses are telling too: both Sept 4 weekly-call stories — AVGO and NVDA — resolved as churn, not positioning, and the NVDA row answers Friday’s open question directly: the bid-tilted fills were the sellers. One nuance the scoring doesn’t capture: the AMZN $267.50 puts mostly day-traded away, but the residual line is nearly five times its pre-print base and finished the stretch deep in the money with AMZN at $254.92. Every verdict lands in the Accountability Ledger.
Why it matters
Our read: the character of the index put tape changed on Tuesday. Last week’s hedging was methodical — near-the-money strikes, laddered expiries, rolls. Tuesday’s flagged tape added something different: $7.7M of premium into SPY November 30 $684 puts — ten percent out of the money, against fifteen contracts of standing open interest — plus $8.2M into SPXW October 6875/6900 puts nine percent below spot, four separate flagged bursts on the SPY October $725 line, and $2.5M of SQQQ calls. Deep-strike, longer-dated, opened from near-zero bases: that is tail-risk buying, not maintenance hedging. It arrived on the same session the S&P broke its floor and the VIX left the 14s — and, for symmetry, the upside was not abandoned: a single $26.7M burst printed in SPX January 2027 8000 calls, and the January 8200 call wing has now grown 79% since Friday’s flag.
The model agrees with the tape. Friday’s edition (28 August) published our regime read as Bull with MPI 71; tonight the classifier reads Neutral with MPI 67, as of Tuesday’s close, with the model’s sideways-state probability at 67%. That flip is published here exactly as the framework produced it and is scored in the Accountability Ledger like every other read — no re-narration of Friday’s stance. Two closes below the prior week’s floor, a VIX regime change, tail-strike accumulation, and a classifier downgrade, set against a still-orderly tape (two-day SPY damage totals just under 1%) — that is the tension Wednesday’s earnings slate walks into.
What to watch into Wednesday’s session
- $759.48 — Tuesday’s SPY low, and the level to watch. A close below would extend the break to a second lower low; $767 — last week’s floor, now overhead — is the reference on the other side.
- $704.66 — QQQ’s Tuesday low, with $715 now the overhead reference after the first close beneath it.
- Wednesday postmarket is loaded: AVGO, HPE, SNOW and AGX all report after the close — each carries flagged positioning from the last two editions (HPE’s confirmed $46 puts, SNOW’s $327.50 calls, AGX’s floor-printed calls, and what remains of AVGO’s $370 line).
- VIX at 16.00 — the first close out of the 14s since last week; a settle back under 15 would mark the move as a one-session spike, a hold above 16 would not.
- NVDA closed $217.44, within eleven cents of Friday’s close after a full round trip; $215.10 (Tuesday’s low) is the nearest reference below.
- The MU September 2 $940 puts flagged Tuesday expire Wednesday — the shortest-dated print on the radar, worth watching purely for how it settles.
Names on our radar
Every row below is frozen at publication and scored mechanically in the Accountability Ledger at +5 and +21 sessions — misses stay on the page. Options prints are checked against the next morning’s open-interest update in the following session’s post.
| Ticker | What printed | Read |
|---|---|---|
| SPY | $7.7M across two ascending-fill bursts at the Nov 30 $684 put; 18,800 contracts against 15 of standing OI, ask-side led. | Ten percent out of the money, three months out, opened from nothing — the day’s clearest tail-hedge print. |
| SPY | Four flagged bursts at the Oct 16 $725 put, ~$4.7M combined; volume 2x OI, fills at the bid throughout. | Persistent size at one strike with bid-side fills — the OI update, not the tape, will say which side opened. |
| SPX (index) | $8.2M into SPXW Oct 2 6875/6900 puts (9% below spot; one line 1,754x its OI); paired 7635–7645 calls-and-puts prints again bracketed spot; a single $26.7M burst in Jan 2027 8000 calls. | Tails bought on both wings while the straddle-shaped pairs keep marking the range — positioning for a wider distribution, not a direction. |
| SQQQ | $2.46M at the Sept 18 $37 call, ask-side fills, volume just past OI. | Calls on the inverse-QQQ fund are a bearish-QQQ expression; printed the session QQQ broke its floor. |
| MU | Three flagged lines: Sept 2 $940 put sweep ($1.04M, expires Wednesday), Sept 9 $960 calls ($1.57M, ask-side, 17x OI), Sept 18 $975 puts ($1.35M, 29x OI). MU closed $933.44. | Short-dated two-way size around spot a month before earnings — a volatility argument, not a directional one. |
| SNOW | $1.07M at the Sept 11 $327.50 call, volume 17x OI, fills at the bid; SNOW reports Wednesday postmarket. | Pre-earnings positioning at a near-zero-OI line — Wednesday’s print scores it fast. |
| AGX | Two all-opening floor prints, $6.1M combined, at the Sept 18 $410 and $480 calls — 44x and 55x their standing OI; reports Wednesday postmarket. | Floor-routed, fully opening, day-before-earnings size in a $6B name — the least ambiguous prints on today’s tape. |
| ANET | $3.70M sweep at the Jan 2028 $190 put, volume 12x OI, fills at the bid. | LEAP put size printed at the money; bid-side fills leave the opening side unproven until the OI check. |
| TSLA | $2.47M across two bursts at the Jan 2027 $380 call; volume ran just past the 4,405 OI. | Upside interest 7% above spot in a name that closed flat on a down tape. |
| ORCL | $1.50M at the Dec $145 put, fills at the bid; ORCL reports Monday Sept 8. | Put size a week ahead of the print, at a strike just above spot — the OI update says whether it stands. |
The set-up
Two sessions, one story: an orderly tape quietly re-pricing its risk. Monday was month-end housekeeping — trillion-dollar-scale tracker crosses, a flat QQQ, a bounce in NVDA. Tuesday was the tell — the floor broke, VIX left the 14s, the deep-strike put tape opened from near-zero bases, and the classifier moved off Bull for the first time in this run of editions. Against that, the confirmed positioning is not one-sided: the SPX January call wing keeps building, TSLA upside printed, and the two-day index damage is still under one percent. Wednesday’s four postmarket reports — AVGO, HPE, SNOW, AGX, every one carrying flagged options positioning — are the nearest thing to a scheduled verdict on which side of Tuesday’s re-pricing gets paid.
Notable data points
- Five dark-pool prints crossed within one second at 5:05:04 PM Tuesday — NVDA, GOOG, GOOGL, MSFT, SPY — each engineered to within $400 of $500M.
- The SPY Nov 30 $684 puts traded 18,800 contracts Tuesday against 15 contracts of standing open interest.
- HPE’s Jan 2027 $46 puts grew from 1,813 to 5,510 contracts of OI in two sessions — the report lands Wednesday.
- NVDA’s Sept 4 $225 calls shed 21,814 contracts of OI over two sessions after Friday’s 94,121-contract churn.
- Market-wide put/call rose to 0.87 Tuesday from 0.74 Friday; SPY’s own ratio printed 1.18, QQQ’s 1.21.
- NVDA closed the two-day stretch at $217.44 — eleven cents below Friday’s close — after a +1.5%/−1.5% round trip on $1.93B of Tuesday dark-pool prints.
- AMZN fell 4.3% over the two sessions to $254.92, leaving Friday’s flagged $267.50 puts deep in the money.
- Tuesday’s $100M+ dark-pool tape ran $20.6B across 89 prints, with single names ($11.1B) out-weighing index trackers ($9.6B) — the reverse of Friday’s split.
Method note
Flow and dark-pool data sourced from Unusual Whales. MPI score and regime classifier are our internal composite; daily synthesis is AI-assisted from those inputs.
Volume-over-OI activity is unconfirmed as new positioning until the next morning’s open-interest update; confirmations are published in the following session’s post.
Board baselines are trailing-session averages computed from our own archived pulls; derived indicators are computed by AZTMM from licensed market data. The trailing baseline was offline for this edition, so boards publish without average comparisons rather than with estimated ones.
Combined-edition provenance: the desk publisher was offline Monday 31 August and Tuesday 1 September; the automated fallback posted condensed snapshots both evenings, and this post upgrades Tuesday’s in place under the desk’s standing repair rule. The open-interest check above therefore covers two sessions cumulatively and is labeled as such. Monday’s flagged-options screen was not retrievable at this run’s depth, so Monday is covered from price data, per-ticker options aggregates, and the off-exchange tape.
The vendor’s VIX close for Monday 31 August printed at 14.00 — below that session’s 14.86 low, failing the close-versus-range sanity check — so Monday is reported as a range (14.86–15.48). Tuesday’s close of 16.00 passes the same check and is printed. A second vendor divergence is noted for the record: our pipeline’s independent Tuesday VIX capture read 14.92; the strip carries the value consistent with the same source as the SPY/QQQ closes.
This is research, not advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security.
AZTMM HLDGS LLC is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or FINRA member. All content is retrospective research published for general circulation — not personalized advice, not trade signals. Options involve substantial risk, including losses that may exceed the initial investment. Full disclaimer.
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