Daily Pulse — Options Flow + Dark Pool, 10 September 2026

Daily Pulse · Thursday, 10 September 2026 · EOD options flow & dark-pool research · AZTMM HLDGS LLC

10 September 2026 — EOD read. Put premium led every one of the ten heaviest SPY strikes today, and the market-wide options tide spent 76 of its 78 five-minute readings below zero. SPY gave back 0.60% and QQQ 1.06%, but the tape itself was quiet: a 3.47-point range, an opening range never decisively broken, and a close 1.19 above the low. The conviction was in the options, not the price.

SPY opened at 758.02 and set its opening range between 757.57 and 758.72 in the first fifteen minutes. The low came early, at 756.64 in the 10:05 bar, and the high at 760.09 in the 10:20 bar, giving a session range of 3.47 points against a 757.83 close. Every one of the fifteen SPY dark-pool prints shown is contingent, the largest at $95.8M, and all fifteen carry the same 762.2675 price. That level sits above the day’s high and is priced off a derivative leg rather than the tape, so it is not a price at which stock changed hands. Of the five heaviest premium shelves, none fell inside the day’s range: 750, 760, 755, 745 and 720 all sit outside it, and the figure lists them in the gutter with their net figures of −$82.5M, −$49.5M, −$48.3M, −$39.8M and −$44.7M.

The tide opened at −$21.2M, touched its only meaningful positive reading of the morning at +$14.4M at 9:35, and was back under zero five minutes later. It fell away through the middle of the session to a −$132.3M trough at 12:30, recovered about half of that into the afternoon, and finished at −$56.6M. Two of the 78 five-minute readings sat above zero and 76 below, with four crossings in all, three of them inside the first twenty minutes. After 9:45 the series printed above zero exactly once, at +$2.4M at 3:30.

9 September’s radar — OI confirm

Verdict describes the open-interest update only, never the contract.

Six of the ten contracts flagged on 9 September came back as new open interest, one partially, three not at all. The COPX November $105 calls converted almost exactly one for one, 22,975 contracts of new open interest against 23,015 of prior volume. The two SPXW December 31 lines split cleanly: the 8140 calls added 22,713 contracts while the 8160 calls lost 22,800, which reads as one line being rolled into the other rather than two separate positions being built. The SNDK 11 September $1,750 puts expire tomorrow and added almost nothing, at a 0.07 ratio.

What happened

This was a session where the price did very little and the options did a great deal. SPY traded a 3.47-point range, the narrowest of the week so far, and closed at 757.83 after finding its low inside the first forty minutes. QQQ lost more, at 1.06%, with NVDA down 2.37% on the day it went ex-dividend for 25 cents. Beneath that quiet tape the options market was one-directional. SPY put volume ran 6.15 million against 4.64 million calls, a 1.33 ratio, and QQQ printed 4.11 million puts against 3.28 million calls. Market-wide, put premium of $19.40B edged out call premium of $18.79B.

The strike ladder is where it shows most plainly. Across all expiries, the ten SPY strikes carrying the largest net premium today were put-led without exception. The heaviest sits at 750, seven points under the close, at −$82.5M net. The nearest strike where call premium actually leads is 746, at +$4.9M, roughly one-seventeenth the size. The flagged-events screen tells the same story from the index side: the single loudest line was 1,500 SPX December 18 7100 puts for $15.0M, and 5,000 SPXW September 30 7100 puts printed for $8.5M against open interest of 4,135.

The dark-pool board is a different animal today, and it needs saying plainly. The $100M-and-above universe came to $36.23B across 103 prints in 60 names, but $19.49B of that, or 53.8%, is two S&P 500 index trackers settling at the close: ten IVV prints at 761.4376 between 4:06 and 4:13 for $10.11B, and thirteen VOO prints at 696.60 between 3:59 and 4:13 for $9.38B. Prints of that shape are creation and redemption mechanics rather than a directional view, and they are why the ETF share of the universe reads 72.6% tonight against 53.6% yesterday.

Why it matters

A flat tape with one-sided option premium is a different condition from a selloff, and it is worth keeping the two apart. Nothing broke today: the range was small, the opening range held, and the close sat above the low. What changed is the price of protection below the market. Premium is stacking at 750, 745 and 720, none of which the index came near, which describes demand for downside cover rather than a reaction to damage already done.

The regime line stays at Bull · early on an MPI of 61, unchanged from yesterday’s published read, and it is scored in the Ledger. That read is as of the 9 September close and does not yet carry today’s session. The honest description of tonight is a market whose price has not confirmed what its options are paying for.

What to watch into Friday’s session

• 756.64 — today’s low, and the level to watch. A close below would put the 750 shelf in play as the next reference.
• 760.11 — the session high. Reclaiming it undoes the day without needing a catalyst.
• 757.57 to 758.72 — the opening range. The close sits inside it, which is why neither side of today reads as resolved.
• The 750 strike, at −$82.5M net premium across all expiries, is the heaviest shelf on the board and sits seven points under the close.
• VIX printed a 16.29 to 18.17 range against a whole-point 17 close. The 18-handle high is the first this week.
• The tide has now finished negative on consecutive sessions. A positive finish would be the first genuine change of tone since Tuesday.

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.

Positioning into Friday

The board reads defensively without reading fearfully. Put premium leads at every heavy SPY strike, the two FXI floor lines are the loudest thing outside the index complex, and the one substantial upside print on the index board is a December 8100 call line $8.8M in size. Against that, the positioning gauge is close to empty: no leveraged-long ETF print cleared $100M today, no listed volatility ETF did either, and the only inverse print on the board is a single $113.4M PSQ block. One inverse block and no leveraged length is light hedging by any measure, which reads as modest caution rather than a directional short.

The tension worth carrying into Friday is that the protection is being bought at strikes the index has not visited. The close at 757.83 sits inside its own opening range with the heaviest shelf seven points beneath it. Either the price comes to the premium or the premium decays away from the price.

The boards — data appendix

Tonight is the largest $100M-plus session of the four on record at $36.23B, 27.4% above 8 September and 79.5% above 9 September, and it is also the most ETF-weighted at 72.6%. Both readings come from the same source. The close-of-day IVV and VOO blocks are worth $19.49B between them, and stripping them out would leave $16.74B, which is below Tuesday’s whole-session figure. Print count and name count rose more modestly, to 103 and 60.

The heaviest shelf on the board is 750, seven points and 1.0% below the close, at $102.2M of put premium against $19.7M of calls for a net of −$82.5M. Not one of the ten strikes shown carries more call premium than put premium. The nearest strike that does is 746, at +$4.9M net, which is roughly one-seventeenth the size of the 750 shelf. These figures aggregate every expiry at each strike, so they describe where premium is stacked, not same-day positioning.

The universe below is the complete set of off-exchange prints of $100M or more on 10 September 2026, collected by pagination until exhausted: 103 prints in 60 names totalling $36.23B, with canceled rows dropped. No trailing-session baseline is computed in the cloud, so none is stated.

Relative size is each print’s share count divided by that name’s 30-day average daily volume. The boards universe is a $100M screen and the relative-size tape is a $10M regular-hours screen, so a name can appear in one and not the other. PEGA leads the tape below at $46.0M and never reaches the $100M board; the headline notional figure of $36.23B comes from the $100M screen alone.

Cluster watch. Prints grouped where a ticker repeated within 0.1% of the same price. Eleven clusters formed today; the three largest are below, and their prints are not re-narrated individually elsewhere.

Notable data points

1. Two of 78 five-minute tide readings finished above zero; the series crossed zero four times, three of them before 9:50.
2. All ten of the heaviest SPY strikes by net premium were put-led, the widest at 750 with −$82.5M.
3. The $100M-plus dark-pool universe reached $36.23B, of which $19.49B was IVV and VOO settling between 3:59 and 4:13.
4. Every one of the fifteen SPY dark-pool prints in the regular session was contingent, all at 762.2675, above the day’s high of 760.11.
5. SPY put volume of 6,154,825 against call volume of 4,635,986 gives a 1.33 ratio; QQQ printed 1.26.
6. The COPX November $105 calls flagged yesterday converted 22,975 contracts of new open interest against 23,015 of prior volume, a 1.00 ratio.
7. NVDA fell 2.37% on its ex-dividend date, with $366.8M of put premium against $571.7M of calls.
8. The positioning gauge recorded $0 in leveraged-long and $0 in listed volatility ETF prints at the $100M threshold.

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. Relative size is a print’s share count divided by that name’s 30-day average volume as reported with the print, computed by AZTMM; it is not any vendor’s relative-size or relative-strength score. Option premium by strike is aggregated across all expiries. The session map is drawn from 5-minute bars; the opening range is the first fifteen minutes; dark-pool prints marked contingent carry the vendor’s contingent or derivative-priced sale condition. Board baselines are trailing-session averages computed from our own archived pulls; derived indicators are computed by AZTMM from licensed market data. The flagged-events screen shows the 50 most recent prints above $1M in premium, and every statement about it is bounded by that depth. The vendor returned today’s VIX close as a whole number, 17, against a 16.29 to 18.17 session range; because the prior close is truncated the same way, no percentage change is derived from it and the session range is printed instead. This edition was published by the desk watchdog after the 5:05 PM scheduled publisher completed without producing a post.

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.

New here? Start Here · Pulse Lab · Accountability Ledger · Trading Academy · Subscribe for daily updates