📩 The Option Premium Weekly Issue - August 16, 2026

Something is coming on September 21. The Option Premium relaunches that day as one complete platform. More details to come next week. Stay tuned!

Before the data, a word that belongs first this week: thank you. The notes that arrived over the past several days, two of which you'll find below, are the reason this letter exists in the form it does, and I don't take a single one for granted.

Last Sunday, this letter told you a market that repriced the entire monetary argument once in five sessions could do it again. It did. Three prints landed on three consecutive days, all pushing the same way: July CPI arrived tame Wednesday at 0.1% for the month, PPI printed flat Thursday, and Friday delivered the sting, retail sales falling by the most in over a year while consumer sentiment slumped to 51. September hike odds followed the data down the staircase: 55% ten days ago, 42% last Friday, roughly 34% at this week's close. The S&P notched another record Thursday at 7,798.99 before easing to roughly 7,781 Friday, the Dow finished at 53,732, and the VIX closed at 14.25, cheaper than last week, which was already the cheapest insurance of the year.

But the week's most instructive story is the one this letter has to tell about itself. Last Sunday, the scan retired energy: rich premium, broken trend, the dangerous combination. Energy responded with its best week since spring: XLE up 7.7%, XOP up 8.5%, crude up 7.3%. We take that apart honestly below, because a publication that only narrates its wins is running the exact playbook this one was built to replace.

And underneath it all, the sell zone did something it hasn't done all year: held its count at four and replaced three of its four names. XLE, XLK, and SMH out. XLF, XLI, and EEM in. The premium didn't disappear this time. It moved, into financials, which now pair the richest persistent premium on the board with the strongest trend we track. Fewer stories this week, better numbers.

Inside this issue, five pieces I genuinely want you to click through, because each one was written for exactly this tape: the research showing retail traders handed away $2 billion buying the lottery tickets professionals quietly sell, an honest guide to hedging a poor man's covered call that most hedging articles won't write, the complete step-by-step for placing your first cash-secured put, the patience framework that explains why a four-name sell zone is a feature and not a drought, and the expected move method for putting your wheel strikes exactly where the probabilities say they belong. The links are all below.

📰 What the Data Said This Week

Wednesday's CPI was the market's kind of boring: 0.1% on the month, 3.4% annually, core at 2.5%. Read that gap closely, because it's the year's macro story in one line: core is nearly at target while headline runs a point hotter, and the distance between them is mostly energy, with crude up 83% for the year on our USO reading. The Fed isn't fighting the consumer economy anymore. It's fighting a strait.

Thursday's PPI told the same story with a caveat the celebration skipped: flat on the month, the direction doves wanted, but still 4.7% on the year, a level no central banker calls victory. The market chose the direction over the level, stocks made records, and the two-year yield slid toward 4.15%. That's a choice, not a fact, and sellers should file it as one.

Friday was the tell. Retail sales fell by the most in over a year, Michigan sentiment printed 51, and the market eased just 0.2% off a record. For the second straight week, deteriorating consumer data was received as rate relief rather than earnings risk. That trade works until the weakness shows up in guidance instead of government tables, and next week, for the first time, the companies facing the American consumer directly get the microphone.

Energy deserves the honest paragraph. Last week the scan flagged XLE as rich and freshly broken and retired the bull case. This week crude reclaimed its headline bid on renewed Hormuz risk, XLE rallied 7.7%, and its relative strength snapped back above 50. Was the call wrong? Here is the accounting: the filter never said short energy, it said stop selling puts into a broken trend, and that caution cost zero dollars and one week of watching. Avoidance calls are the cheapest calls in trading to be wrong about, which is exactly why the filter is allowed to make them aggressively. What it says now: trend restored, but XLE's IV Percentile sits at 48, two points shy of the persistence bar. Rich for a day is not rich for a living. The name goes back on watch, not back in the zone.

📅 The Week Ahead

The gauntlet. Three of America's largest retailers report within 72 hours of the ugliest consumer data in a year, and Home Depot carries a 69% IV Rank into the print, the second-highest reading on our entire equity board. The AMD lesson from two weeks ago, maximum fear in, minimal move out, gets its retail exam. Wednesday's minutes show how badly the July dissenters wanted that hike, nine days before a meeting the market has mostly priced out of existence. And NVIDIA sits ten days away, still refusing to inflate. More below.

📊 Weekly Market Stats

Two Notes Worth Reading

Two readers wrote this week, and their notes say something about this publication I can't credibly say about myself. Every entry and exit behind them was shared with members in real time and archived, the losses printed next to the wins, because a track record you can't audit is a story, not a record.

Stefan has followed my work for quite some time and enjoyed my content and approach, so when I launched The Option Premium, he did the rational thing: subscribed to the $9 Income Foundation only, and gave me one year to prove the operation would still be standing. A few weeks ago, the year ended, and he upgraded to everything. His verdict, in his words: "I found exactly this mechanical, math based approach very fascinating, and eventually convincing, because I could see the success in my account." Stefan tested this publication the way I'd tell anyone to test any publication: small commitment, long observation, verify in your own account, then decide.

And Bernie, after closing a position: "Thanks for another great trade. For what it's worth, I booked $657.96 profit by closing out all my trades, and that was on a 5 day trade. I put that trade on in five different accounts, several at different strike prices." His sizing, his adjustments, his exits, and no, one reader's five days is not a promise about yours. What it is: a person who took a framework and made it his own. That's the goal. Not followers. Traders.

Now the map. Four situations worth understanding this week.

The new anchor. XLF carries a 40.3% IV Rank with an 80% IV Percentile, premium that is not just elevated but persistently elevated, paired with a 31.6 ADX, the strongest trend we track, and options priced at 1.68 times the stock's actual realized movement. Rich, persistent, trending, overpriced relative to how the asset moves: that combination is what the dual filter exists to find, and it's the cleanest reading on this week's board. The curiosity inside the sector: regional banks sit in the opposite zone, KRE trending higher with a 13.4% IV Rank near its floor. One industry, priced two different ways.

The gauntlet. Home Depot at 69%, Walmart at 58%, Target at 48%, reporting into the ugliest consumer data in a year. Scheduled events with inflated premium are appointments, and the rules haven't changed: defined risk only, strikes beyond the expected move, and the willingness to skip any print where trend and premium disagree. The full setups are in Wednesday's member alert.

The anomaly, week three. NVIDIA reports in ten days and its IV Rank fell again, 28.5% to 25.5%. Either the melt-up has genuinely anesthetized event pricing, or the build compresses into days and arrives violently. The Liquid Ten tracks it every Sunday until the print.

The terrain. The Buy Zone grew from 14 names to 16, and SPY's IV Rank fell below 10. Long-dated exposure on trending, diversified assets got cheaper for the third straight week while the assets underneath made records. This remains the exact ground the Wealth Without Shares portfolios are built to work.

📊 [Every trade, archived in real time, at theoptionpremium.com →]

📰 This Week's In-Depth Articles

👉 The Options Industry's $2 Billion Problem →

Retail traders lost roughly $2 billion on options in under two years, closer to $5 billion counting costs, and the researchers who measured it found something worse than the number: the losses weren't random. They came from three specific, documented, completely avoidable behaviors, and the single most attractive trade to the average options buyer turns out to be one of the statistically worst on the board. This is the article to read if you've ever wondered why this publication refuses to sell excitement, and it ends with the quiet edge the fantasy sellers never mention, because they're on the other side of it. If you share one piece from this issue, make it this one.

👉 How to Hedge a Poor Man's Covered Call (and When Not to Bother) →

The instinct when a leveraged position makes you nervous is to buy protection. This piece walks through all three real hedging tools for a PMCC, then does what most hedging articles quietly skip: it shows you the published research on whether protection actually helps, and the answer will surprise most readers. There's a cheaper fix hiding in plain sight, one honest question that separates thoughtful hedging from spending money to feel safe, and one benefit of hedging that never shows up on a spreadsheet but might matter more than everything that does. Essential reading for every Wealth Without Shares position, and for this Buy Zone moment specifically.

🎓 Options 101: How to Sell Your First Cash-Secured Put

Last issue explained what a cash-secured put is. This week, the part no explainer usually bothers with: actually placing one. Six steps, in order, from confirming the cash and answering the one question that matters more than any Greek, through reading the delta column like a probability table, to the exact order ticket and the two management rules that tell you when you're done. The whole walkthrough runs on a single worked example with real numbers at every step, including the moment most first-timers freeze: what to type, in which field, and why you never, ever use a market order. If you've been reading about selling puts for months and haven't placed one, this is the article that ends the waiting.

👉 Read the full article: How to Sell Your First Cash-Secured Put →

🧠 Mental Capital: The Setup Is the Signal

A four-name sell zone will tempt you to manufacture trades, which makes this the exact week to read this piece. It draws the line most traders never draw, between a signal, which says a market might move, and a setup, which says the conditions have aligned into repeatable, probabilistic edge, and then hands you the three filters that separate one from the other. The uncomfortable truth inside it: the trades that look the worst often price the best, the comfortable market pays pennies, and the edge professionals actually collect comes from something the article calls the Setup Premium, which most traders unknowingly give away. It closes with a full checklist run on real panic-scenario numbers, so you can see exactly what "the market coming to you" looks like before the next time it does.

👉 Read the full article: The Setup Is the Signal →

📐 Educational Corner: Expected Move and the Wheel

Every wheel trader eventually faces the same question twice a cycle: which strike? This piece replaces the guessing with a number the market hands you for free, the expected move, and shows how to use it on both sides of the wheel: puts below the floor the market itself is pricing, calls above the ceiling, every strike chosen by rule instead of feel. Inside: two ways to pull the number in seconds, the delta range that keeps you in the probability sweet spot, a complete worked example from put entry through call exit, and the four pitfalls that quietly undo good strike selection even when the math was right. If your wheel strikes have ever been chosen by round numbers and gut feel, this one upgrade changes every cycle you run from here forward.

👉 Read the full article: Using Expected Move to Optimize Strike Prices in the Wheel Strategy →

💡 Did You Know?

When traders say Home Depot is "pricing a 4% move," they're quoting the at-the-money straddle, and the logic predates the listed options market. Nineteenth-century marine underwriters priced policies by asking one question: what premium makes us indifferent to whether the ship sinks? The straddle is the same question in equity form: the combined price of the at-the-money call and put is the swing at which buyers and sellers, in aggregate, break even. Every earnings week, the market publishes its own confession, in dollars, of how much fear is priced in, and across large samples, stocks move less than the pre-earnings straddle implies more often than not. That gap is the insurance premium, the same margin that has funded underwriters for two centuries, and this week's Educational Corner shows you how to put it to work on every wheel strike you choose from now on.

📊 The Implied Truth: ETF Watchlist

The Weekly ETF Volatility and Trend Intelligence Report

🔟 The Liquid Ten

Three readings carry the week. NVIDIA is the anomaly, deepening: 28.5% last Sunday, 25.5% now, ten days out from the report the whole market is waiting on. The suppression is no longer a curiosity; it's a setup, because premium that refuses to build slowly tends to build suddenly. AMD is the after-photo completing: 36%, down from 75% pre-earnings, the crush fully digested. And Tesla is the quiet extreme: a 5.7% IV Rank with a 2% percentile, the cheapest optionality among the mega caps by a wide margin.

The Sell Zone: Four Names, Three of Them New

XLF (40.3% IVR / 80% IVP), XLI (39.3% / 51%), EEM (40.3% / 57%), XHB (51.3% / 53%). Last week's zone was XLE, XLK, XHB, SMH. Only homebuilders held their seat. XLK's rank collapsed from 60% to 37% in five sessions as tech premium deflated into the rally; SMH followed it out; XLE lost its slot on persistence, not level. The zone's new character matters more than its names: last week's was tech and energy premium on shaky trends. This week's is financials, industrials, and emerging markets premium on rising ones. When the sell zone turns over 75% of its membership without changing size, that isn't noise. That's fear, rotating.

The Buy Zone: Sixteen Names, and Still Widening

Screening for IVR at or below 25% with IVP at or below 50%:

Cheap and trending, the LEAPS terrain: SPY (9.9% IVR), the equal-weight RSP (6.6%, the only ETF on the board with relative strength above 70), VTI (9.3%), DIA (8.9%), IWM (1.1% IVR, a 1% percentile, effectively the cheapest small-cap optionality of the past year), EFA (16.2%), KRE (13.4%), XLV (16.4%, with an IV Percentile of 3), XLP (8.6%), XBI (21.9%), and SLV (21.4%, silver joining the metals bid). The index complex has been on clearance three consecutive weeks, and each week the discount deepened while the trend improved.

Cheap and broken, the warning column: FXI (down 3.5% on the week), IBIT (0.1% IVR near its floor, down 28% for the year), XLU, XRT, and HYG. The rule is unsentimental: a discount on a falling asset is a discount on regret. XRT earns a special note: retail sector premium sits at a 4% percentile three days before the sector's biggest names report into the worst consumer data in a year. Cheap is not the same as safe.

Notable Readings

The pilot light, burning brighter. The VIX closed at 14.25, its calmest read of the summer, while the options on the VIX itself are pricing volatility-of-volatility at the 89th percentile, up from 75 last week. Recall the sequence three weeks ago: the same gauge touched 96 while the VIX napped, and a spike followed within days. This is the second time this summer the surface has priced calm while the market paid up for chaos insurance underneath. Not a siren, a pilot light, and the reason this month's education keeps circling timing frameworks and hedges while both are cheap.

Gold and silver, the premium keeps building. GLD held above $400 with its rank climbing to 29.8%, closing on the 35% line, GDX at 45%, and silver carrying the second-strongest directional reading on the board. The setup flagged last week, a confirmed reversal with premium inflating behind it, is maturing on schedule. If GLD crosses the dual filter, it would be the board's most interesting new trade.

Financials, priced twice. XLF carries an 80% IV Percentile while KRE, one layer down in the same sector, carries a 5%, both trending higher together. The market is paying up for protection on the giants and giving away optionality on the regionals. Gaps like that rarely persist a full quarter.

The Trend Picture: The Core Holds, the Metals Join

The leadership board: RSP above 70 relative strength, the only name there, with VTI, SPY, XLF (31.6 ADX, strongest trend), EFA, GDX, GLD, XLE (back above 50 after one week away), XOP, and IWM behind it. When the equal-weight index leads, breadth isn't a talking point, it's the trend itself. The broken column: TLT (bond downtrend fully intact), FXI, IBIT, XLU, and XRT. Note what's no longer broken: energy, after exactly one week in the penalty box. The scan holds no grudges and keeps no streaks. It just reports.

The Indexes and Breadth: The Thrust Held

$MMFI closed at 62.59, up from 61.43, and $MMTH held at 61.25. After the strongest breadth thrust of the year, the common outcome is a give-back; instead, participation widened further. Sixty-two percent of stocks above their 50-day average with the equal-weight index leading is the healthiest internal picture of 2026, and the index premium closed at its lowest. The market's health and the market's pay have never been further apart. The Buy Zone is where that gap gets resolved.

Everything above is the free edition, published every Sunday. The Implied Perspective ($129/month) adds the full 100+ name scan behind the Liquid Ten and both zones, the individual setups including this week's retail earnings playbook, and the model portfolio with every entry and exit in real time. The Income Foundation ($9/month) teaches the Wheel from the first trade. Wealth Without Shares ($49/month) runs the LEAPS and PMCC portfolios the Buy Zone was built for. All three: $149/month, or $1,495/year with every course included.

📊 [Compare the three services at theoptionpremium.com/upgrade →]

The Bottom Line

The hike died this week, in public, one print at a time, and the market threw it a party at record highs. But hold both Fridays in your head at once: the consumer posted its worst spending month in over a year, and in 72 hours the three companies closest to that consumer report with some of the richest premium on the board. The sell zone rotated toward exactly that fear while the Buy Zone widened to sixteen names. So the instruction splits cleanly: sellers get a genuinely good week, the gauntlet plus the new XLF anchor, provided every position is defined-risk and sized like the 89th-percentile pilot light is real. Buyers of time keep working the widest clearance sale of the year. And everyone watches NVIDIA, because a market that refuses to price its biggest event ten days out is either supremely confident or about to reprice in a hurry, and the scan will say which, the same Sunday it happens.

📊 The Retail Gauntlet, Priced

A Quick Note

Eighteen months ago, more than one financial publisher told me, flatly, that this wouldn't work. I couldn't grow a newsletter organically. People don't care about my style of trading. It's too complicated.

Huh. It's how professionals trade. Every single one I know who has lasted two decades in this business trades some version of exactly what fills these pages, yet very few will teach it, because it's easier to sell lottery tickets, dreams and riches, than strategies that take a little more thought but realistically and consistently build wealth over time. There are no easy outs here. It takes work. And the growth of this publication over the past eighteen months, all of it organic, all of it reader to reader, has defied every one of those predictions. You did that. The kind, generous, encouraging notes that arrive every single week, the testimonials, the questions that become features, I'm amazed by them, every Sunday, without fail. Keep it up.

And if this issue taught you something, the most valuable thing you can do costs nothing: forward it to one person trying to learn options from services that promise everything and teach nothing. Every reader here arrived because someone they trusted passed it along. Every share helps tremendously, and it is the only way this publication grows.

See you next Sunday.

🔗 Let's Stay Connected

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Thanks again for reading. I hope you found today's insights valuable and worth your time.

Trade Smart. Trade Thoughtfully.

Andy Crowder

Founder | Editor-in-Chief | Chief Options Strategist | The Option Premium

The Option Premium is published for educational purposes only and does not constitute personalized investment advice. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Always confirm details and manage risk prudently.