Category Archives: Daily Pulse

31 August 2026 – condensed auto edition. The full desk edition was not available by 6:45 PM ET, so this post was published automatically from the public data feed. No flow or dark-pool tables tonight; the composite readings below are the same ones the pipeline computes after every close. Published automatically, disclosed automatically – that is the deal.

The Market Pulse Index printed 70 (Bull) with the regime classifier reading Sideways as of the 31 August 2026 close. Sub-indicator detail and the confidence band are on the Pulse Lab; every published read remains subject to mechanical scoring in the Accountability Ledger at +5 and +21 sessions – misses stay on the page.

Method note

MPI score and regime classifier are our internal composite, computed from public market data. This condensed edition was assembled and published automatically from that feed; no vendor flow data was used.

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

Research and journalism — not investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation. Data as of the 31 August 2026 close. Subscribe for daily updates.

28 August 2026 — EOD read. NVDA gave back roughly half of Thursday’s earnings pop while the closing tape filled with S&P-tracker crosses — and this morning’s open-interest update quietly confirmed most of what we flagged yesterday.

The boards

Feed depth on this run resolves the off-exchange tape completely down to $100M per print, so tonight’s boards are computed on that closed universe: 75 prints, $19.8B in aggregate notional. Nothing below is estimated.

Participation. Names printing $100M+ dark-pool blocks today: 53 — 24 ETFs and index trackers ($11.4B of the notional), 29 single names ($8.4B). The trailing-session baseline was not available to this run, so no average comparison is published tonight.

Concentration. Leading sector by aggregate notional among single names: Technology, $3.07B across 13 prints, with NVDA carrying 30% of the sector’s total. Communication Services followed at $2.35B across 9 prints.

Positioning gauge. Leveraged-long ETFs $1.66M (one flagged TQQQ line — and all of it put premium) · inverse/bear ETFs $0 · volatility ETFs $0. No fund in any of the three buckets cleared the $100M dark-pool bar. Threshold counts. Dark-pool prints of $100M or more: 75 (complete count). Flagged options prints of $1M or more: the screen returns its 25 most recent flagged events — 3 sweeps, 22 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)
VOO	~$707.0	3	$2.94B	3:09–4:13 PM
IVV	~$773.0	2	$1.98B	4:02–4:11 PM
SPY	~$769.4	5	$1.31B	4:13–5:05 PM

Cluster watch: twelve repeated-price clusters printed in all. The three above — $6.24B combined, every dollar of it in S&P 500 trackers inside the closing hour — dominated the day. The largest single-name cluster was NVDA at $217.55: two prints, $921.5M, inside three minutes of the close.

What happened

Equities drifted lower into the weekend. SPY closed at $769.35, down 0.23% from Thursday’s $771.10, and finished about a dollar off its $768.31 session low after tagging $775.30 in the morning. QQQ closed at $716.43, down 0.65% from $721.11, likewise settling near the bottom of its $715.09–$724.13 range. The drag was concentrated: NVDA fell 4.6% to $217.55 on more than 190M shares against a 126M-share 30-day average, giving back a little over half of Thursday’s post-earnings jump, and MRVL fell 10.3% to $216.62 after reporting $0.62 in EPS against a $0.93 street estimate in Thursday’s postmarket. VIX spent the session between 14.13 and 14.84; the vendor’s closing print for the index failed our sanity check against that range, so we publish the range rather than the bad print (see Method note).

The options tape kept Thursday’s split personality. Market-wide volume ran call-heavy — 45.8M calls to 33.8M puts, a 0.74 put/call ratio (up from 0.68 Thursday), with $20.4B in call premium against $13.6B in puts. The index tape leaned the other way again: SPY’s own put/call came in at 1.03 and QQQ’s at 1.02. The sharpest single-name shift was NVDA’s: net options premium swung to -$174.7M from +$266.4M on Thursday, with calls hitting the bid (2.12M bid-side vs 1.78M ask-side) and puts lifting the offer — bearish premium of $818M against $640M bullish. One session after the beat, the options tape stopped chasing.

Yesterday’s radar — OI confirm

Yesterday’s flagged prints, checked against this morning’s open-interest update — the tape’s own answer to whether the flow was real positioning. Thresholds: ≥40% of flagged volume became new OI = confirmed; 10–40% = partial; under 10% = not confirmed.

Contract	Flagged	OI change overnight	Verdict
NVDA Jan 2027 $200 calls	~$27.9M premium, volume 4x OI	+188,333 (84,844 → 273,177); 96% of flagged volume	Confirmed opening
NVDA Mar 2027 $260 calls	~$7.6M premium, sweep + repeated hits	+2,403 (24,737 → 27,140); 38% of volume	Partially confirmed
MRVL Sept $300 calls	Pre-earnings sweep, volume 114% of OI	+2,818 (7,911 → 10,729); 22% of volume	Partially confirmed
MRVL Oct $260 calls	Pre-earnings repeated hits, volume 50% of OI	+614 (1,615 → 2,229); 71% of volume	Confirmed opening
PANW Nov $380 puts	$4.47M all-opening block, volume ~6x OI	+1,025 (194 → 1,219); 89% of volume	Confirmed opening
IWM Sept 18 $285 puts	$1.04M repeated hits	-16,855 (116,257 → 99,402)	Not confirmed — OI fell
IWM Oct 16 $285 puts	$1.2M repeated hits, volume 77% of OI	+16,154 (25,367 → 41,521); 79% of volume	Confirmed opening
PCG Dec $21 calls	Sweep-into-floor, volume 80x OI	+26,561 (324 → 26,885); 99% of volume	Confirmed opening

Six of eight flagged prints became real positioning overnight, and the two IWM rows read as one move rather than two: the Sept $285 line shed almost exactly the open interest the Oct $285 line added — consistent with a roll out in time, not a hedge abandoned. The MRVL calls deserve the honest footnote: both confirmed as new open interest the same morning the stock fell 10.3% on its miss. The confirmation loop measures whether positioning was real, not whether it was right — both columns get scored in the Ledger.

Why it matters

Our read: the tell on today’s tape is the change in NVDA’s options character, not the index drift. Thursday’s flow chased a beat across 2027 expiries and this morning’s OI update proved that chase was real — 188,333 new contracts at the Jan 2027 $200 line alone. Today the same tape went the other way: a -$175M net premium day, calls sold on the bid, and the heaviest flagged activity sitting in next-Friday $225 calls that churned 94,000 contracts against 60,000 of standing OI with fills tilted to the bid side. High-turnover, bid-tilted, short-dated — that is a tape trading around a position, and Monday’s OI update will say which side of it actually opened.

Meanwhile the hedge book keeps doing methodical, unglamorous work. The IWM $285 put roll from September into October confirmed cleanly, fresh flagged interest showed up a dollar higher at the Sept $286 line, SPY put prints landed at $750 and $734, and the closing minutes stacked paired SPX structures — 8200 calls against 7000 puts in January 2027, 7720 calls against 7720 puts in September — bracketing spot at 7690. None of that is panic; all of it is a market paying for defined boundaries while the single-name tape digests two earnings reactions.

What to watch into Monday’s session

• $768.31 — Friday’s SPY low, and the level to watch. A close below would put the tape under the whole week’s floor near $767; $775.30, Friday’s high, is the reference on the other side.
• $715.09–$724.13 — QQQ’s Friday range. The close at $716.43 sat within a point and a half of the bottom; a close under $715 would be the first close below the week’s floor.
• NVDA at $217.55 kept about 43% of Thursday’s earnings gain. $216.81 (Friday’s low) and $209.66 (Wednesday’s pre-earnings close) are the references below; $229.26, Friday’s high, above.
• AVGO and HPE both report Wednesday postmarket — the flagged AVGO Sept 4 $370 calls and HPE Jan 2027 $46 puts are pre-earnings positioning on the clock.
• Monday morning’s open-interest update scores today’s flagged prints, including the NVDA $225 weekly churn; results land in Monday’s edition.
• The Weekly Pulse publishes Saturday morning with the full-week decomposition.

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
AVGO	Three flagged bursts at the Sept 4 $370 call between 2:51 and 2:57 PM, ~$11.4M combined premium; cumulative volume ran past the 11,371 open interest.	Short-dated call accumulation five days ahead of Wednesday’s postmarket report — first in line for Monday’s OI check.
NVDA	Four flagged bursts at the Sept 4 $225 call, ~$5.7M combined; 94,121 contracts traded against 60,417 OI, fills tilted to the bid side.	Heavy short-dated turnover on a -4.6% day. Bid-tilted fills on a falling tape read as supply, but only the OI update says which side opened.
MRVL	$1.09M at the Sept 18 $220 call, ask-side fills, volume 49% of OI — printed after the -10.3% earnings gap.	Flagged call interest at the new at-the-money level on crash day; worth tracking whether it becomes standing OI.
AMZN	$1.63M at the Sept 4 $267.50 put, all ask-side; volume ran 49x the 164 contracts of standing OI.	Fresh short-dated put interest where almost none existed — a size-to-OI multiple well outside routine.
IWM	~$4.5M across two flagged bursts at the Sept 18 $286 put; volume 49% of OI.	One dollar above the $285 line that just rolled September into October — the small-cap hedge tape stays busy.
SPX	Minute-paired prints in the closing rotation: Jan 2027 8200 calls ($15.3M) with Jan 2027 7000 puts ($13.5M); Sept 18 7720 calls and puts at ~$4.8M each, volume ≈ OI; Oct 16 7900 calls with 7500 puts.	Range-shaped structures bracketing spot at 7690 across three expiries — positioning for boundaries, not direction.
HPE	$1.75M at the Jan 2027 $46 put, fills at the bid; volume 2x the standing OI.	Long-dated put print landing five days ahead of Wednesday’s postmarket report.
ADBE	$1.25M at the Sept 2027 $350 call; volume 46x the 7 contracts of open interest.	A LEAP line opening from a near-zero base, two weeks ahead of the Sept 10 report.
POWL	$3.06M floor print at the Feb 2027 $240 call, ask-side, volume just over open interest; flagged as low-historic-volume.	Floor prints in thinly traded lines are the tape’s least ambiguous size; the OI check lands Monday.

The set-up

Put the day together and Friday reads as a controlled digestion, not a rejection. The indices gave back fractions of a percent while the week’s two big earnings reactions — NVDA’s fade, MRVL’s drop — supplied the tape. The closing hour belonged to S&P-tracker crosses: $6.2B across VOO, IVV and SPY at the bell, consistent with index-fund flows into the final trading days of August rather than directional conviction. Under that, the confirmation loop did its job: yesterday’s hedges and yesterday’s chases both became real open interest, the IWM book rolled rather than folded, and the new flagged prints cluster around next week’s earnings dates. Monday’s OI update — on the NVDA weekly churn above all — is the next hard checkpoint.

Notable data points

1. NVDA printed $921.5M of off-exchange notional in two prints at $217.55, both inside three minutes of the close.
2. The session’s three largest dark-pool clusters — VOO, IVV, SPY — totaled $6.24B, all of it in S&P 500 trackers.
3. VEEV’s single $491.1M block equaled 91% of its average full-day volume over the past 30 sessions.
4. AFRM’s 5.68M-share, $462.6M block printed at $81.50 in the extended session — 4.8% above the standing quote at execution.
5. PCG’s Dec $21 calls added 26,561 contracts of open interest overnight, 82 times the prior standing OI of 324.
6. NVDA’s Jan 2027 $200 calls now carry 273,177 contracts of open interest, up 3.2x in one session.
7. Market-wide put/call rose to 0.74 from 0.68; call premium $20.4B against $13.6B in puts.
8. IWM’s Sept 18 $285 puts shed 16,855 contracts of OI while the Oct 16 $285 line added 16,154.

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.

The vendor’s VIX close for 28 August printed at 14.00 — below the session low of 14.13, failing the close-versus-range sanity check — so this edition publishes the session range (14.13–14.84) rather than an impossible close.

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

27 August 2026 — EOD read. NVDA’s post-earnings pop set the tone for a broad, if unevenly hedged, advance.

What happened

Equities closed higher across the board Thursday, with NVDA doing the heavy lifting. The stock closed at $227.98, up roughly 8.7% from Wednesday’s $209.66, after beating Wall Street’s EPS estimate ($2.22 actual vs. $2.091 expected) in Wednesday’s postmarket report. SPY closed at $771.10 (+0.66% from $766.08), and QQQ closed at $721.11 (+1.37% from $711.37) — QQQ finished within 24 cents of its session high of $721.35, a strong close for the tech-heavy index. VIX settled at 14.00, down a full point from Wednesday’s 15.00 close.

Market-wide options volume ran call-heavy — 40.5M calls against 27.4M puts, a 0.68 put/call ratio — but that skew was driven largely by single-name activity; NVDA alone traded over 5 million calls against 2.3 million puts today. The index-level tape told a more balanced story: SPY’s own put/call ratio came in at 1.03 and QQQ’s at 1.09, both modestly put-heavy even as the broader market skewed toward calls.

Why it matters

Our read: the NVDA options activity is the dominant tell on today’s tape. Call buying wasn’t confined to a single expiry — positioning stacked at the Jan 2027 $200 strike and the Mar 2027 $260 strike, both with volume well ahead of open interest. A spread across expiries like that reads as more than a same-day reaction to the earnings beat; it reads as an extension of bullish positioning well past this print.

At the same time, the index-level puts (SPY, IWM) and the PANW pre-earnings put print are a reminder that the hedging book didn’t go away just because NVDA had a strong day. Bullish single-name conviction sitting next to systematic index and earnings-specific hedging is consistent with a market that’s still buying protection even as it participates in the upside.

What to watch into Friday’s session

• $767 — Thursday’s SPY low, and the level to watch. A close below would mark the first break of this week’s range; $772 is the reference on the other side, today’s high.
• $714.50–$721.35 — QQQ’s full range today; a close outside either bound would be the first meaningful move away from Thursday’s tight band.
• MRVL reports after tonight’s close — that puts both call prints flagged below first in line for tomorrow’s open-interest check.
• NVDA’s Aug 28 $220 calls expire tomorrow — the shortest-dated print in today’s flow, worth watching purely for how it settles.
• The IWM $285 puts and the SPY/AVGO dark-pool blocks are both first up for tomorrow morning’s open-interest confirmation.
• VIX at 14.00 — the lowest close of the past two sessions; a move back above 15 would mark a reversal of this week’s calm.

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
NVDA	Two prints at the Jan 2027 $200 call, ~$27.9M combined premium; combined volume of roughly 370,000 contracts ran more than 4x the 84,844 open interest.	Size like that relative to standing OI marks this as fresh interest rather than an add to an existing position — confirmation comes with tomorrow’s OI update.
NVDA	A further ~$7.6M in call premium at the Mar 2027 $260 strike — a sweep plus a repeated-hit cluster, combined volume near 42% of the 24,737 open interest.	Positioning stacked at two different strikes and expiries in the same session reads as conviction extending well past the earnings pop itself.
MRVL	Two prints ahead of tonight’s earnings: a sweep at the Sept $300 call (volume 114% of OI) and repeated hits at the Oct $260 call (volume 50% of OI).	MRVL reports after tonight’s close — both are pre-earnings positioning, not a reaction to a number that hasn’t printed yet.
PANW	A $4.47M block at the Nov $380 put, flagged as an OTM-earnings-floor print, all-opening; volume ran nearly 6x the 194 open interest.	A full opening trade at that size and multiple, a week ahead of PANW’s Sept 1 earnings date, reads as a fresh hedge or bearish bet rather than a close-out.
IWM	Repeated interest at the $285 put strike across two expiries — Sept 18 ($1.04M premium, volume 38% of OI) and Oct 16 ($1.2M premium, volume 77% of OI).	The same strike showing up twice, in two different expiries, in one session is worth tracking into next session.
SPY	A 414,244-share, $319.4M print in the extended session, tagged prior-reference-price.	The session’s largest print by premium — prior-reference-price tags on extended-hours prints like this typically mark administrative crosses rather than fresh conviction, so we’re not reading directional intent into it.
AVGO	A 304,535-share, $113.1M extended-hours block, also tagged prior-reference-price.	Same caveat as the SPY print above — the tag points to a technical cross, not a standalone directional tell.
PCG	A sweep-into-floor call print at the Dec $21 strike; volume of 26,789 against open interest of just 324 — over 80x.	The volume-to-OI multiple is the standout here, well outside the range we’d call routine, even before OI confirms it tomorrow.

The set-up

Take the pieces together and Thursday reads as a market digesting a large positive surprise from one of its most important names without abandoning its hedges. NVDA’s options tape shows conviction extended across multiple expiries rather than a single-day pop trade; the index puts and the PANW earnings hedge show the other side of that same book still active. Tomorrow’s MRVL print, plus the morning’s open-interest update on today’s largest prints, are the two checkpoints that will tell us which side of that tension is actually driving the tape.

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.

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

26 August 2026 – condensed auto edition. The full desk edition was not available by 6:45 PM ET, so this post was published automatically from the public data feed. No flow or dark-pool tables tonight; the composite readings below are the same ones the pipeline computes after every close. Published automatically, disclosed automatically – that is the deal.

The Market Pulse Index printed 70 (Bull) with the regime classifier reading Bull as of the 26 August 2026 close. Sub-indicator detail and the confidence band are on the Pulse Lab; every published read remains subject to mechanical scoring in the Accountability Ledger at +5 and +21 sessions – misses stay on the page.

Method note

MPI score and regime classifier are our internal composite, computed from public market data. This condensed edition was assembled and published automatically from that feed; no vendor flow data was used.

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