Daily Pulse — Options Flow + Dark Pool, 11 September 2026

Daily Pulse · Friday, 11 September 2026 · EOD options flow & dark-pool research · AZTMM HLDGS LLC

11 September 2026 — EOD read. The index went up and the options tape did not follow it. SPY closed at 764.29, higher by 0.85%, while SPY option buyers paid $943.1M for puts against $702.0M for calls and every heavy strike shelf within eight per cent of spot except one carried more put premium than call premium. The $100M-and-larger dark-pool board shrank to $21.63B across 44 names, the narrowest breadth in the four sessions we have on record, and three S&P 500 vehicles took 40.6% of it.

SPY opened at 764.69 and spent the whole session inside a band barely three points wide. The first fifteen minutes set an opening range of 764.23 to 765.99, and the day never escaped it by much: the highest five-minute bar reached 766.37 at 9:55 ET, the lowest touched 763.60 at 10:45 ET, and the official close came at 764.29. All fifteen of the SPY dark-pool prints shown carry the vendor’s contingent or derivative-priced sale condition, so they are drawn hollow and none of them marks a level where stock changed hands on the tape. The largest was $694.4M at 1:03 PM ET. Fifteen prints share the single reference price 757.85, which sits below the day’s range entirely. Of the five heaviest premium shelves, three sit inside the drawn range: 765 at −$34.6M, 764 at −$24.4M and 760 at −$40.8M, each one put-led. The figure lists 755 at −$34.3M and 750 at −$25.2M as off the price scale below.

This is the observation that argues with the SPY put tape. Market-wide net call premium opened $22.0M above net put premium, climbed to a peak of +$120.4M at 11:45 ET, fell back to a trough of +$15.9M at 12:35 ET and finished at +$25.7M. All 78 of the five-minute readings sat above zero and none below, so the series never crossed the zero line once. Both legs went deeply negative in absolute terms through the afternoon, net call premium to −$148.9M and net put premium to −$174.6M by 3:55 ET. The call side simply stayed the less negative of the two for every reading of the day.

10 September’s radar — OI confirm

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

Four of the ten contracts we flagged on 10 September came back as new open interest outright, two came back partially and four did not. The cleanest builds were the single-name call lines: ORCL March 2027 $175 calls added 6,008 contracts of open interest against 6,094 of prior volume, a ratio of 0.99, and BSX January 2028 $40 calls added 3,803 against 3,896, a ratio of 0.98. UAL November $125 calls added 5,648 on 5,964 of volume. The failures cluster on the hedging side: both FXI September put lines saw open interest fall despite more than 120,000 contracts of combined prior volume, and the IEF $94 puts shed 2,500. Volume that large with open interest falling describes closing or rolling activity rather than new positioning.

What happened

A quiet grind higher on the screen, with a much busier argument underneath it. SPY added 0.85% to close at 764.29 and QQQ added 0.87% to 714.88, both on ranges that would have fit inside a single bar on a weekly chart. NVDA did nothing at all, closing at 218.29 against 218.36 the session before, a move of 0.03% lower. Market-wide the day printed 39.33M call contracts against 30.95M puts, a put-call ratio of 0.79.

The index options tape told the other half of the story. SPY put premium of $943.1M against $702.0M of call premium left net premium at −$36.7M, and QQQ came in at −$16.3M on the same measure. The flagged-events screen was dominated by SPX and SPXW lines rather than by single names. The loudest was a matched pair at the 7700 strike for 20 November expiry, 1,500 calls at $186.02 for $27.9M and 1,500 puts at $179.04 for $26.9M, printed in the same second. That shape is a straddle, not a direction.

Beneath the index, the single-name flow leaned the other way. GOOGL January 2028 $410 calls took $4.40M and $2.83M in two sweep clusters against open interest of 261, and MU September $975 calls took $2.48M and $2.42M ahead of a 30 September earnings date. The largest single-contract print of the day by contract count was on the put side: 10,000 SE December $105 puts crossed the floor for $9.65M against open interest of 79.

Why it matters

The gap between a rising index and a put-heavy strike ladder is the thing worth holding onto from this session. Nine of the ten heaviest premium shelves within eight per cent of spot carry more put premium than call premium, and the single exception sits at 757, seven points below the close. That is what protection buying looks like when it is bought into strength rather than into a decline.

Against that, the market-wide tide never once put net put premium ahead of net call premium, across all 78 readings. The two observations are not in conflict, they are describing different books. The put weight is concentrated in SPY and SPX at index size, while the call demand is spread across single names. The dark-pool board says the same thing from the other side: breadth fell to 44 names from 60, and the money that did print concentrated into S&P 500 vehicles.

What to watch into Monday’s session

• 763.60 — today’s low and the bottom of a three-point range. A close below it would mark the first break of the week’s floor.
• 765.99, the top of the opening range. Four separate pushes stalled within a point of it.
• The 760 put shelf at −$40.8M net, the heaviest single strike on the ladder and the nearest support level the options book has priced.
• 757, the only call-led shelf on the ladder at +$8.3M net, and the same neighbourhood as the 757.85 contingent print reference.
• SPX 7700 for 20 November, where a 1,500-lot straddle now sits against open interest of 9,734 calls and 12,480 puts.
• The $100M+ dark-pool universe, which has now swung between $20.19B and $36.23B in four sessions with no trend to it.

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 Monday

Our internal composite reads 59 with a Bull · early regime, scored to the 10 September close rather than to today’s. Nothing in this session argues against that reading and nothing much supports it either. The leveraged-long, inverse and volatility ETF baskets all registered $0 across both screens, which is itself information: no leveraged or volatility vehicle printed a block large enough to cross a $100M dark-pool threshold or a $1M options threshold today. That is an absence of the loud hedging instruments, not an absence of hedging, which showed up instead as index put premium and put-led strike shelves.

The boards — data appendix

Today’s $21.63B across 77 prints in 44 names sits 40.3% below the 10 September reading of $36.23B, and just above 9 September’s $20.19B. Distinct names fell to 44 from 60, the lowest of the four sessions on record, while prints fell to 77 from 103. ETF share of notional came in at 56.9%, down 15.7 points from 72.6% and close to the 53.6% of 9 September. Four sessions is too short a record to call a trend, and we will say so until it is not.

The heaviest shelf on the ladder is 760, four points below the close, at −$40.8M net on $35.4M of call premium against $76.2M of puts. The nearest shelf on the other side is 757, the only call-led strike in the ten, at +$8.3M net. Premium here is aggregated across all expiries at each strike, so these are standing books rather than same-day positioning.

Universe. Every board below is computed on the complete set of off-exchange prints of $100M or more for 11 September 2026, paginated to exhaustion and deduplicated on tracking identifier, premium and size: 77 prints, $21.63B, 44 distinct names. No trailing baseline is available in this environment, so no comparison against a prior average is offered and none is estimated.

Relative size is each print’s share count divided by that name’s 30-day average daily volume.

The relative-size tape runs on a $10M screen while the boards above run on a $100M screen, so a name can appear in one and not the other. NHIC at 8.66 times its 30-day average volume is the most unusual print of the session by size, and its $20.2M notional is far too small to reach the boards; the headline dark-pool figure of $1.27B uses the $100M screen. Nothing on the relative-size tape crossed $100M except PG at $187.1M, which appears on both.

Cluster watch. Same ticker, same price to within 0.1%, two prints or more.

Notable data points

1. Market-wide option volume ran 39.33M calls against 30.95M puts, a put-call ratio of 0.79.
2. SPY net premium finished at −$36.7M on $702.0M of calls and $943.1M of puts.
3. The $100M+ dark-pool universe fell 40.3% to $21.63B from $36.23B a session earlier.
4. Distinct names on that board fell to 44, the fewest of the four sessions on record.
5. IVV, SPYM and SPY together took $8.77B, 40.6% of the board.
6. META printed $1.52B across three prints at 648.03, the largest single-name aggregate of the day.
7. All 78 five-minute tide readings sat above zero, with no zero crossings.
8. NHIC traded 1,900,000 shares off exchange, 8.66 times its 219,346-share 30-day average.

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. The flagged-events screen covers the 50 most recent alerts at or above $1M of premium for this session, so it is a sample of the tape and not the whole of it. 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 session map, the boards strip and the strike ladder ship a single figure variant in this edition to keep the page within its payload budget; the session tide and the confirm scorecard ship both. The vendor’s VIX close for this session arrived at 15, below the same session’s low of 15.59, so no percentage change has been computed from it and the session range is printed instead.

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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