📩 The Option Premium Weekly Issue - August 23, 2026

Before anything else this week: thank you. Three reader notes arrived that I want to share below, one of them critical, and I'm publishing it anyway, because the notes you send are the closest thing this publication has to an editorial board and I'm grateful for every one. Now to the tape, because it finally moved.

Last Sunday's issue made three forward statements. This week, all three came due. The letter wrote that the bad-news-is-good-news trade "works until the weakness shows up in guidance instead of government tables." On Thursday it showed up in guidance: Walmart posted its slowest comparable sales growth in more than six years, trimmed its outlook, and fell 10%, its worst day in over four years, dragging the whole tape with it. The letter wrote that if GLD crossed the dual filter it would be "the board's most interesting new trade." It crossed: a 42.5% IV Rank at the 74th percentile, with gold up 5.5% and the miners up 14.3% in a single week. And the letter wrote that NVIDIA's suppressed premium "tends to build suddenly." It built suddenly: from a 25.5% IV Rank to 37.0% in five sessions, with the report now four days away.

The market's first losing week since late July came with the S&P down 1.4%, the Nasdaq complex down 2.4%, four red days in five, the VIX up 6% to 15.13, and the summer's breadth thrust finally giving ground, 62.6 to 56.2. Underneath: a Treasury market in open turmoil, long yields near multi-year highs, the federal debt crossing $40 trillion, and a doubled government buyback operation that steadied things for roughly a day. Crude pushed to a near four-week high as Iran talks froze. None of this is a siren. All of it is a change in weather, and the premium board repriced accordingly: the sell zone turned over again, into metals and medicine, and the buy zone, sixteen names two weeks ago, is down to eleven. The clearance sale is not over. But it is visibly ending.

📰 What the Data Said This Week

The retail gauntlet resolved, and it resolved three different ways, which makes it the most instructive 72 hours of the quarter for premium sellers.

Home Depot was the textbook: a 69% IV Rank in, a muted reaction out, premium crushed to 44%. The AMD template, executed on schedule. Target was the surprise: the stock jumped 7% on results, and its premium didn't just deflate, it evaporated, from a 48% rank to below 2%, the single deepest crush on the board. And Walmart was the tail. The market priced a normal earnings move; the stock fell 10% through it, on comp sales that missed and guidance that blinked, with average ticket growth collapsing from 3.1% to 1.1%. Read the three outcomes together: two prints paid sellers on schedule, and one blew through every fence the options market had built. That one-in-three is not a failure of the framework. It is the entire reason the framework insists on defined risk, strikes beyond the expected move, and position sizes that assume the tail shows up eventually. This week, it showed up wearing a smiley face logo.

The Walmart print also settled a macro argument this letter has carried for a month. For two straight weeks, deteriorating consumer data was celebrated as rate relief. On Thursday, the same weakness arrived through a corporate income statement instead of a government table, and the market treated it as what it is: an earnings problem. Stocks fell, and no rate-cut arithmetic saved them. File the lesson: the consumer didn't change this week. The messenger did.

The other half of the week belonged to hard assets and health care. Gold rose 5.5% and the miners 14.3% as the bond market wobbled and the debt clock rolled past $40 trillion. Health care posted its best week since June on genuinely important news, a successful mRNA cancer-treatment readout that sent Merck up 12%, though the sector's dispersion was violent, with Moderna surging and then giving back 24% in a single session. Energy ground higher again on frozen Iran talks. And crypto ripped, with the bitcoin complex up 22% or more across the board, one week before a Jackson Hole symposium whose official theme is payments and financial innovation. Which brings us to the calendar, because next week is the densest of the quarter.

🚀 September 21. Everything at Once.

I want to give you a date, and then I want to explain why it took this long to give you one.

On September 21, four weeks from today, The Option Premium relaunches as a single, complete platform. Not a redesign. Not a feature. All of it, at once:

A new website. Rebuilt from the ground up. Faster, cleaner, and organized the way an education library should be organized: by strategy, by skill level, by what you actually need next. If you have ever tried to find an older article on the current site and given up, that problem dies on September 21.

Full, structured courses. Total Access subscribers will have access to courses covering every topic taught across all three publications: credit spreads and iron condors, the Wheel, cash-secured puts and covered calls, and Poor Man's Covered Calls with LEAPS. Every one of them built on 24 years of professional options trading, not theory pulled from a textbook. Step-by-step, strategy by strategy, in the order a serious trader should actually learn them.

Live webinars. Regular sessions where we work through positions, adjustments, and the questions you send me all week. Recorded and archived, so missing one live costs you nothing.

A video library. Strategy walkthroughs, trade breakdowns, and the visual explanations a written newsletter can only take so far. Organized, searchable, and growing every month.

New portfolios. Wealth Without Shares expands with new portfolios, each with its own written rules, its own watchlist, and the same full transparency you get everywhere else: every trade, every fill, every loss, on the record.

A private community hub. This is the piece I have wanted longest and resisted hardest. A place where members can talk to each other and to me, organized into channels so the credit spread conversations do not bury the Wheel conversations. No Discord. No Facebook. No algorithm deciding what you see. Just members, in one room, behind one door.

Why it took this long. The honest answer: I refused to rent you out. Every platform I evaluated over the past year wanted the same thing. Move your readers to us. Another login. Another company sitting between you and me, treating you as their user instead of my reader, monetizing your attention with notifications you never asked for. The Option Premium was built on a direct relationship: you subscribe, I write to you, nobody stands in the middle. Splitting that across a course platform, a community platform, and a video host so I could launch a few months sooner was never a trade I was willing to make. So I waited. And in July, the waiting paid off: the platform this publication runs on shipped the exact infrastructure I had been holding out for. Community channels, webinars, private podcasts, gated member areas, all native, all under one roof, all under my control rather than someone else's. The moment I saw it, the date went on the calendar. Waiting cost me revenue. I know that. But I have spent 24 years in a business where the impatient trade is usually the losing one. Probabilities over predictions applies to building a business too.

Why I am genuinely excited. I have been writing to you for a long time, and writing is a one-way street. I explain, you read, and the best I get back is a reply in my inbox. What launches on September 21 turns this into something closer to what I actually experienced learning this craft: sitting next to someone who had done it for decades, asking questions in real time, watching decisions get made. That is what the webinars are. That is what the community is. That is what the courses, the videos, and the library add up to. A better way to learn this.

What it costs you. If you are a Total Access member, here is the entire pricing section: nothing. The website, the courses, the webinars, the video library, the new portfolios, the community hub. All of it is included in your existing membership, added automatically on September 21, at no additional cost, ever. You did not sign up for any of this when you joined. You are getting it anyway. That is how I treat the people who showed up early, and it is not changing now.

And one more thing, coming this week. If you are not yet a Total Access member, I will be sending a separate email in the next few days, something I almost never do. It contains the one piece of this announcement deliberately left out of today's issue, and the single offer I will make before launch. No countdown timers, no last-chance sequences. Watch for it.

📅 The Week Ahead

Everything lands at once. Wednesday alone stacks the quarter's most important report, NVIDIA, on top of two more heavily priced software prints, Salesforce at an 81st-percentile premium and CrowdStrike at a 92nd, plus the Fed's preferred inflation gauge that morning. Then the Fed chair delivers his first Jackson Hole keynote Friday, at a symposium themed around payments and stablecoins, into a Treasury market that just forced its government to double its own buybacks. The options market has spent three weeks refusing to price any of this. It spent this week starting to.

📊 Weekly Market Stats

Three Notes Worth Reading

Three readers wrote this week, and together they say more about this publication than any pitch I could write. One praises, one pushes back, and one says goodbye, and I'm sharing all three, because a letter that only prints its fan mail is running the playbook this one was built to replace.

The pushback first. Stephen subscribes to all three services and wrote, kindly and directly, that the Income Foundation's pace has him wanting more: five open positions, and a week that "felt like sitting on our hands." He's right about the feeling, and he deserves a straight answer: the sitting was intentional. The filter sets the cadence, not a publishing schedule, and two weeks ago the sell zone was the thinnest of the year while index premium sat at 52-week lows. The honest trade was mostly no trade, and this week's Walmart tail is the argument: forcing entries into thin premium is how sellers end up holding the one print in three that goes through the fence. On the cash-secured put watchlist, fair question on conviction: every name on it passes the same quality and willingness-to-own tests as an alert, and it exists so that when premium returns, and it is returning, the shopping is already done. Stephen, thank you for pushing. I'd rather earn your patience with reasons than with noise.

The result. A longtime reader, who asked me not to print his name this time because he doesn't want it to come off as bragging, closed the GLD bull put spreads this week: "I traded the GLD Bull Put Spreads across 5 accounts, with half of my trades at the recommended strikes and about half at strikes that were $5 lower. I closed all my GLD trades today based on your rec and booked $693 in profits, pretty good results for trades ranging from 2 to 12 days." His sizing, his strike adjustments, his accounts, and no, one reader's twelve days is not a promise about yours. What it is: the gold setup this letter has tracked publicly for three straight weeks, traded with adaptations he chose himself, and closed by rule. Not followers. Traders.

And the goodbye. Joanna wrote to say her needs have evolved: "Over the past few months I've learned how to roll options effectively, and I've been focusing more on premium-selling strategies across my portfolio," to the point where she's now generating consistent monthly premium on her own and no longer needs the alerts. She's staying a reader and rooting for September 21st. Here is why I'm printing a cancellation notice in my own newsletter: that email is the mission statement, completed. An education service that works should graduate people. If this publication only ever created dependence, it would be selling the same thing as everyone else with better manners. Joanna, the door stays open, and I could not be prouder of the reason you walked through it.

Now the map. Four situations worth understanding this week.

Metals and medicine. The sell zone rotated for the second consecutive week, and for the first time all year, every name in it pairs rich premium with a rising trend: GLD (42.5% IVR / 74% IVP), GDX (68.4% / 82%), XLV (56.1% / 71%), XBI (45.9% / 74%), EEM (35.3% / 51%). No broken trends, no traps, just five markets where fear and strength are rising together. Gold is the headline: the setup this letter flagged for three weeks arrived exactly as described, a confirmed trend with premium inflating behind it, and it's now the richest persistent reading on the board alongside its own miners.

The fuse. NVIDIA's premium finally ignited, 25.5% to 37.0% in five sessions with four days to the print, and it did not come alone: CrowdStrike sits at a 92nd-percentile premium, Salesforce at an 81st, both reporting the same Wednesday evening, with Marvell, Dell, Palo Alto, and Broadcom stacked behind them over the following week. After a month of famine, scheduled-event premium is suddenly everywhere in tech. The rules don't change with the excitement: defined risk, strikes beyond the priced move, and Walmart's chart taped to the monitor.

The closing sale. The Buy Zone shrank from sixteen names to eleven, and the survivors got less cheap: SPY's rank rose from 9.9% to 12.5%, the equal-weight index and developed international exited entirely, and QQQ's premium has climbed to 33%. The three-week window when the market sold long-dated time on trending indexes at yearly lows is narrowing in real time. It isn't shut. SPY, DIA, VTI, IWM, and XLB all still qualify with trends intact. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and windows like this close without ringing a bell.

The reversal ledger. Honest accounting, two items. XLF, last week's anchor, saw its premium collapse from an 80th percentile to a 29th in five sessions; for anyone short that premium, the crush is the paycheck, and that's what the anchor was for. And IBIT, printed in the warning column seven days ago, rallied 22.6%, the second straight week a warning-column name led the board. The column's rule is unchanged, a discount on a falling asset is a discount on regret, but the scan holds no grudges: bitcoin's trend has now flipped decisively higher with premium still at a 17% rank, so the name migrates to the trending column this week. The filter is a Sunday photograph of trend and price, not a prophecy, and when the picture changes, so does the answer.

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

📰 This Week's In-Depth Articles

👉 The Jade Lizard: High-Probability Income When Volatility Pays You to Wait →

Published Tuesday, and the board caught up to it by Friday: a structure that can be built with literally zero risk to the upside, not as a slogan but as arithmetic guaranteed by one defining rule most traders have never heard stated. If you already sell cash-secured puts, you're one component away from it. The piece walks the full construction on a real chain, including a failed attempt shown on purpose, because the most common mistake in building this trade is one the marketing versions never admit exists. It also explains why the strategy flatly refuses to work in cheap volatility, which is a feature, and why a week like this one, with a sell zone finally paying, is exactly when it earns its keep.

👉 Retirement Income with Options: Safe Strategies for Seniors →

Thursday's piece is the one to forward to anyone being sold monthly-income dreams: a blunt accounting of why most retirees who try options lose money, the five criteria a strategy must meet before it belongs anywhere near retirement capital, and the three frameworks that actually pass. It names what to avoid as plainly as what to use, puts realistic numbers on what options income can and cannot do, and explains why position sizing, not strategy selection, is the difference between supplemental income and a blown-up account. If Joanna's note above is what graduation looks like, this article is the curriculum it starts with.

🎓 Options 101: The Wheel Strategy, Complete

The cash-secured put got its explainer two issues ago, and the step-by-step last week. This week the series arrives at the destination: the Wheel, the system that turns those two strategies into one continuous income cycle. The new installment covers all three phases and the exact moment each one hands off to the next, what actually happens to your cost basis with every premium you collect, and the single question that matters more than any Greek before the first put is ever sold. It closes with a complete worked cycle, five months, every premium and every assignment accounted for, honest numbers with no projection attached, plus the four criteria that separate a genuine Wheel candidate from a stock that will grind you down while you wait. If you've ever wanted one framework that tells you what to do next in every scenario, this is the article the whole series was building toward.

👉 Read the full article: The Wheel Strategy: When Covered Calls and Cash-Secured Puts Become a System →

🧠 Mental Capital: Conviction Over Confirmation

The market just had its first losing week in a month, the VIX woke up, and NVIDIA reports Wednesday, which makes this the precise week for this piece: why the most profitable trades feel terrible at entry, and why waiting until one feels good is where edge goes to die. It opens with a confession few traders make out loud, dismantles the comfort myth with the wiring underneath it, and then replaces feelings with five objective conviction triggers, written while you're calm so your gut doesn't get a vote at entry. A fully worked panic-day trade shows what the moment actually looks like in numbers, and a case study walks a position that never felt safe until it was over, which is precisely the point. The market doesn't pay you to feel good. This piece is about what it pays for instead.

👉 Read the full article: Conviction Over Confirmation →

📐 Educational Corner: The Vertical Spread Manual

Walmart just spent Thursday demonstrating why defined risk exists, so this week's deep dive covers the structure that defines it: the vertical spread, the Swiss Army knife of options trading. All four variants and the three-decision setup sequence, direction picks the family, volatility picks the structure, width sizes the bet. Then the parts most guides skip: the exact probability trade-off at every point on the spectrum with the math shown, the objective delta alarm that tells you when a position needs attention before hope gets a vote, the short menu of legitimate adjustments, and the exit rules for profits, stops, and the clock, all decided before entry. If you trade credit spreads, or if Thursday made you glad you do, this is the reference to keep.

👉 Read the full article: Why Vertical Spreads Deserve a Spot in Every Trader's Toolkit →

💡 Did You Know?

The most important monetary-policy meeting of the year happens at a fly-fishing lodge, and the reason is a bribe. In 1982, the Kansas City Fed had a problem: its annual symposium was a sleepy affair nobody attended, and the one guest who could change that, Fed Chair Paul Volcker, kept declining. So the organizers studied the man instead of the agenda. Volcker loved fly fishing. Jackson Hole, Wyoming sits on some of the finest trout water in America, and late August is prime season. The Kansas City Fed moved the conference there, Volcker came, and the world's central bankers have been following him up the mountain every summer since. This week, a new Fed chair delivers his first keynote from that lodge, at a symposium officially themed around payments and financial innovation, while the bond market wobbles and a $40 trillion debt clock turns. Whatever gets said Friday, remember the founding lesson of the venue itself: even the most powerful economic actors respond to incentives, and the market spends every August trying to guess which fly the Fed is about to cast.

📊 The Implied Truth: ETF Watchlist

The Weekly ETF Volatility and Trend Intelligence Report

🔟 The Liquid Ten

Three readings carry the week. NVIDIA is the fuse, lit: four straight Sundays this space tracked a premium that refused to build, and then it built all at once, 25.5% to 37.0% at the 57th percentile, with the stock down 4.6% into Wednesday's print. AMD is the postscript: down 8% on the week with its premium still low, a reminder that the crush trade only exists where premium was rich to begin with. And Walmart is the scar: a 58% IV Rank going in, a 10% collapse through the priced move, and a 24% rank left over. The Liquid Ten's whole philosophy in one week: the premium tells you what the market fears. It cannot tell you what actually happens.

The Sell Zone: Five Names, Metals and Medicine

GLD (42.5% IVR / 74% IVP), GDX (68.4% / 82%), XLV (56.1% / 71%), XBI (45.9% / 74%), EEM (35.3% / 51%). Only EEM held its seat from last week; financials, industrials, and homebuilders all rotated out as their premium deflated. What rotated in is remarkable for one shared trait: every name is trending higher. GDX carries a 75 RSI with the strongest directional reading on the board, gold itself just crossed into leadership, health care posted its best week since June on the mRNA readout, and biotech's premium sits at the 74th percentile with the sector up 36% on the year. Two names knock on the door: XLE and XOP both sit at exactly the 50th percentile, one tick from qualifying, with energy's trend fully restored. For sellers who spent three weeks waiting, the board finally pays.

The Buy Zone: Eleven Names, and the Door Is Narrowing

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

Cheap and trending: SPY (12.5% IVR), DIA (12.6%), VTI (9.8%), IWM (6.0%), XLB (10.6%), URA (21.1%, uranium quietly trending with an 8th-percentile premium), FXI (9.2%, China's trend flipped positive this week), and the week's migrant, IBIT (16.8% rank, 48th percentile, with bitcoin's trend now decisively higher after a 22.6% week). The index core is still here, still cheap by any yearly standard. It is simply less cheap than it was, and losing members weekly: RSP, EFA, and XLP all exited since last Sunday.

Cheap and broken, the warning column: KRE (a 0% IV Rank, the exact 52-week floor, with regional banks down 3.9% and trend broken, the sharpest one-week reversal on the board), XLU (RSI at 33, the weakest trend we track), and HYG. The rule stands, this week's IBIT migration notwithstanding: a discount on a falling asset is a discount on regret, and the column exists to make you check the trend before you buy the time.

Notable Readings

Gold, the three-week setup, delivered. The full sequence, on the record: August 9, a confirmed reversal with premium starting to inflate. August 16, rank at 29.8%, closing on the line, "the board's most interesting new trade" if it crossed. August 23: crossed, 42.5% at the 74th percentile, price through $420, miners up 14% in a week, and silver and the streamers running with it. Setups that announce themselves this slowly are rare, and the readers who tracked it had three Sundays of notice. That is what the scan is for.

The pilot light, answered and banked. For two weeks this space flagged the options on the VIX pricing chaos at the 75th, then 89th percentile while the surface slept. This week the surface woke: the VIX rose 6%, the market had its first losing week since July, and the vol-of-vol gauge promptly cooled to the 28th percentile, its bid spent. The sequence, 96th percentile then a spike, 89th percentile then a down week, is two-for-two this summer as an early-warning flag. It's quiet now. When it lights again, this letter will say so.

The bond market is the story under every story. TLT's premium crossed the 52nd percentile as long yields pressed multi-year highs, the Treasury doubled its buyback operation mid-rout, and the debt clock crossed $40 trillion the same week the world's central bankers pack for Jackson Hole. Equity sellers should care for one reason: every violent equity week this year has started in the bond market. It remains the board's most plausible source of the next premium spike.

The Trend Picture: Hard Assets Take the Board

The leadership column turned over with the zones: GDX (75 RSI, 48.4 on the positive directional line, the board's strongest reading), GLD (New Above 70), XLE and XOP (both above 70, energy's second week back), XLV, CVX, and the crypto complex in full sprint, with IBIT at a 79 RSI. The equal-weight index and the S&P still hold above 50, but the character changed: the leaders are no longer the indexes, they're the things you can drop on your foot. The broken column: KRE (new), XLU, XLI, XHB, XLK, and SMH, with tech's pullback putting semiconductors below trend despite a 56% year. TLT sits at the bottom, its downtrend intact through all the drama.

The Indexes and Breadth: The Thrust Gave Ground

$MMFI fell from 62.59 to 56.22, a ten-percent give-back in five sessions, with the negative directional line taking dominance for the first time since the July thrust. $MMTH held better at 60.06. Neither reading is broken, 56% of stocks above their 50-day average is a pullback, not a breakdown, but the direction flipped, and it flipped in the same week the VIX woke and the buy zone shrank. The market's health and the market's pay spent three weeks at record distance from each other. This week they started walking toward each other, from both directions.

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 earnings-week 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

Three flags, planted in public over three Sundays, all cashed in the same five sessions: the consumer's weakness moved from government tables into guidance and took 10% off Walmart; gold crossed the filter it had been approaching for weeks; and NVIDIA's premium did what suppressed premium does, nothing, nothing, nothing, then everything. That's not a victory lap, it's a method statement: none of those calls predicted a price, a date, or a direction. Each one named a condition and reported the Sunday it changed. Now the densest week of the quarter arrives, NVIDIA plus two 90th-percentile software prints Wednesday, the Fed's inflation gauge that morning, and a new chair's first Jackson Hole speech Friday. The instruction follows the board: sellers finally have a real zone, metals and medicine plus the earnings complex, provided every position is defined-risk with Walmart-sized humility built into the sizing. Buyers of time still have eleven names, but the sale ends a little more each week. And everyone gets one more reminder that the scan doesn't predict. It notices, out loud, on schedule.

A Quick Note

One piece of housekeeping, and it matters: this week, I'll be sending you a separate email about September 21, something I almost never do. One send, everything explained, the full picture of what The Option Premium becomes next month. When it lands, you'll understand why the weekly letter wasn't the right container for it. Watch for it.

Beyond that, just this. The three notes above, praise, pushback, and a graduation, arrived in a single week, and I read every word of every email you send. Thank you for the trust, thank you for the corrections, and thank you for being the kind of readership that makes an honest publication possible. If this issue taught you something, 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, and every share helps tremendously.

See you next Sunday, after the biggest week of the quarter.

Trade Smart. Trade Thoughtfully. Probabilities over predictions.

🔗 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.