Weekly Pulse · Week of 31 August – 4 September 2026 · Options flow & dark-pool research · AZTMM HLDGS LLC
SPY and QQQ weekly change measured Friday 4 Sep close against Friday 28 Aug close · VIX shown as the week’s session range, see Method note · MPI 67 and regime Bull · early as of the 4 Sep bar, the latest published value
Week of 31 August to 4 September 2026 — the week’s read. The index finished almost exactly where it started, and that is the least interesting thing about it. SPY closed Friday at 770.19, eighty-four cents above the prior Friday’s 769.35, having spent Monday and Tuesday breaking below the August floor and Wednesday and Thursday taking it all back. Underneath the round trip, the desk’s radar had its strongest stretch to date: twenty-two of twenty-eight flagged contracts came back as new open interest, and most of what confirmed was index protection.
Fast read
- SPY +0.11% on the week and QQQ +0.35%, after a Tuesday low of 759.48 and a Thursday high of 774.03.
- 22 of 28 flagged contracts confirmed in open interest, a 79% rate across three checks.
- The regime line went Bull to Neutral to Bull · early, with MPI bottoming at 62 on Tuesday.
The week’s radar — scorecard
| Contracts flagged | Checked against | Confirmed | Partial | Not confirmed | Confirm rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Aug & 1 Sep (10) | 2 Sep open interest | 8 | 2 | 0 | 80% |
| 2 Sep (11) | 3 Sep open interest | 9 | 0 | 2 | 82% |
| 3 Sep (7) | 4 Sep open interest | 5 | 1 | 1 | 71% |
| Week total (28) | Three checks | 22 | 3 | 3 | 79% |
Ratio is next-session open-interest change divided by prior-session volume. At or above 0.40 is confirmed, 0.10 to 0.40 is partial, and anything below that, or an outright fall in open interest, is not confirmed. Friday’s own radar carries into next week and is not scored here.
The strongest confirmation of the week was the SPY November 30 $684 put line. It traded 18,824 contracts on Tuesday against fifteen contracts of standing open interest, and Wednesday morning the line stood at 18,827. A ratio of 1.00 means every contract that traded became a position somebody is still holding, ten percent below spot and three months out. The SPXW September 30 7525 puts did nearly the same thing on Thursday, taking that line from 828 contracts to 12,750 overnight.
The clearest miss was the SPY September 11 $760 puts, flagged Wednesday on 44,705 contracts of volume. Thursday’s update showed 592 fewer open contracts than the line started with, which makes that day’s size a position being closed rather than opened. Two others failed. The TSLA January 2027 $370 calls converted sixty contracts out of 1,902, and the IWM October $285 puts shed 2,620 contracts of open interest on 11,811 lots of bid-side volume. All three stay on the page and land in the Accountability Ledger.
What happened this week
Monday was month-end housekeeping. SPY eased 0.30% to 767.05, closing almost exactly on the floor the prior week’s edition had marked, and QQQ finished flat at 716.76. The regime read slipped from Bull to Neutral on that bar, with MPI at 69.
Tuesday was the break. SPY fell 0.69% to 761.78 after ranging down to 759.48, its low for the week, and QQQ dropped 1.27% to 707.64. MPI fell to 62, the week’s trough, on a sentiment sub-score of 31.3. That was the session the deep-strike put tape woke up: $7.7M into SPY November $684 puts against fifteen contracts of standing interest, and $8.2M into SPXW October puts nine percent below spot.
Wednesday recovered quietly, up 0.44% to 765.16 on a one-way call tide that finished at +$124M, and the regime label crossed back into Bull · early at MPI 65. Thursday was the week’s single decisive session. SPY rose 1.05% to 773.17 and never traded below its open, net call premium finished at +$467M against −$61M of puts, roughly four times Wednesday’s reading, and MPI ticked to 68.
Friday gave a little back. SPY closed 770.19, down 0.39%, while QQQ added 0.18% to 718.96 and NVDA closed 230.36. Net call premium collapsed to +$78M, a sixth of Thursday’s figure, and MPI settled at 67 with the Bull · early label unchanged. The week entered at Bull and traced Neutral, Neutral, Bull · early, Bull · early, Bull · early across its five sessions, which is a classifier that lost its footing on Tuesday and found it again by Wednesday.
Why it matters
A flat week is usually a week with nothing in it. This one was the opposite. The confirm rate says the money we watched was positioning rather than churn, and the shape of what confirmed was consistent across all five sessions: index protection at longer horizons and lower strikes, bought and held. The SPY November $684 line, the SPXW October and September put walls, the QQQ October $700 puts, the AMD January 2027 $460 puts, all of them opened from small bases and stayed open.
The upside was not abandoned. The SPX January 2027 8000 calls accumulated on three consecutive sessions and confirmed each time, taking that line from 25,574 contracts to 32,311 by Thursday morning. Read together, the week’s confirmed book is a bracket rather than a direction: own the melt-up through 2027, pay for insurance against an autumn air pocket. That is what a market with a Bull · early label and a sentiment sub-score in the forties looks like from the inside.
One caution belongs alongside it. A large share of the week’s biggest index prints were matched call and put sizes at identical strikes inside the same timestamp, which is the fingerprint of financing structures rather than opinions. Strip those out and the genuinely directional flow was smaller than the headline premium suggests.
What to watch next week
- US equity markets are closed Monday 7 September for Labor Day. The week opens Tuesday.
- SPY 774.03 is Thursday’s high and the week’s ceiling; 769.00 is Friday’s low and the nearest floor. Friday already printed a lower high than Thursday.
- SPY 759.48, Tuesday’s low, is the level the recovery has to keep clear of for the week’s round trip to mean anything.
- QQQ 721.86 and 704.66 are the week’s outer brackets.
- Net call premium above +$200M would end the two-session decay from Thursday’s +$467M. A second sub-$100M session would not.
- Friday 18 September is quarterly expiration, and the SPX 7680 and 7720 straddles that confirmed this week are struck into it.
- No large-cap earnings for next week were verifiable at this run’s screen depth. The dated reports on our board are MU on 30 September and INTC on 22 October, both taken from the flow records themselves.
Themes on our radar
| Ticker | What kept printing | Read |
|---|---|---|
| SPX / SPXW | Both wings, every session. January 2027 8000 calls three days running, October and November put walls opened from near-zero bases, and matched straddles at 7680 and 7720 pinned to September expiration. | The most persistent structure on the board, and the one with the highest confirm rate. Positioning for a wider distribution rather than a direction. |
| IVV / VOO / SPY | Average-price crosses at or just after every close, $1.2B to $1.6B each, in the same three vehicles. | Calendar money being put to work, not a view. Its size says how much cash arrived to start September. |
| MU / SNDK / WDC | Two-way size all week. MU $960 calls and $950 puts confirmed on consecutive mornings, SNDK $1390 calls converted 1,524 of 1,620 lots, WDC June 2027 $420 puts converted 410 of 487. | The memory and storage complex drew opening money on both sides. A volatility argument, not a directional one. |
| NVDA | $1.64B of dark-pool notional Wednesday in four prints, all at the closing mark, on options volume 1.57 times its 30-day average. Closed the week at 230.36. | Leadership carried the recovery. The block tape marked it rather than chased it. |
| VIX | Friday: 269,424 November calls at the $31 and $34 strikes for $23.1M, against combined open interest of 1,266, nearly all at the offer, with spot at 14.00. | Far upside volatility bought outright in the last session of the week. The open-interest update settles it on Tuesday. |
| TSLA | The January 2027 call line walked from $380 to $370 across two sessions. The first came back partial at 0.12, the second not confirmed at 0.03. | The only recurring name whose positioning failed to stand up twice. Worth naming for that reason alone. |
The set-up
The week was a round trip in price and a straight line in positioning. Two sessions down, two up, one flat, and a net move of eighty-four cents in SPY. Against that, twenty-two contracts confirmed as new open interest and almost all of the confirmed size was index protection bought at lower strikes and longer horizons, financed alongside an upside call wing that kept accumulating into 2027. The hedge vehicles themselves stayed silent: the named leveraged, inverse and volatility ETFs printed nothing above $100M for the last three sessions of the week, and then $23.1M went into VIX index calls on Friday instead. The regime label says Bull · early. The book says somebody expects that to be tested.
Notable data points
- SPY closed the week at 770.19 against 769.35 the prior Friday, a gain of $0.84 or 0.11%, inside a 759.48 to 774.03 weekly range.
- QQQ closed at 718.96 against 716.43, a gain of $2.53 or 0.35%, inside a 704.66 to 721.86 range.
- 22 of 28 flagged contracts confirmed, 3 were partial and 3 were not confirmed, a 79% outright confirm rate.
- The SPY November 30 $684 puts went from 15 contracts of open interest to 18,827 in one session, a ratio of 1.00.
- The SPXW September 30 7525 puts went from 828 contracts to 12,750 overnight on 12,124 lots of volume.
- The SPX January 2027 8000 calls grew from 25,574 to 32,311 contracts across the week, confirming on three consecutive checks.
- The SPY September 11 $760 puts traded 44,705 contracts and finished with 592 fewer open contracts than they started with.
- MPI ran 69, 62, 65, 68, 67 across the five sessions, with the regime label moving Neutral, Neutral, Bull · early, Bull · early, Bull · early.
- Net call premium ran +$124M Wednesday, +$467M Thursday and +$78M Friday.
- 269,424 VIX November calls traded Friday for $23.1M against combined open interest of 1,266.
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, so every contract flagged in a session is scored against the following session’s update and published in that session’s post. Friday’s radar is therefore unscored at the time this edition goes out, and the week’s scorecard covers the 28 contracts flagged between 31 August and 3 September. The 31 August and 1 September flags were checked cumulatively across two sessions because the desk publisher was offline for both, and that check is labelled as such in its own edition.
Degradations disclosed for this edition. The vendor’s VIX closing rows failed our close-versus-range sanity check on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and on the prior Friday, so no weekly VIX change is claimed and the strip carries the week’s session range of 13.80 to 16.82 instead. Friday’s own close of 14.00 sits above its 13.80 low and passes. The weekly dark-pool composition figure is not published: Monday’s edition computed no ETF versus single-name split, so a five-session total would have been partial, and no figure is estimated in its place. The upcoming-earnings screen returned only the week just past at this run’s depth, so no named earnings slate for next week is published.
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 and not trade signals. Options involve substantial risk, including losses that may exceed the initial investment. Full disclaimer.
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