Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on September 16, 2026.
Gina Moon | Reuters
S&P500 futures is trading at an all-time high, but there is an aura of concern among investors trying to make sense of the extremely low breadth of the U.S. stock market. On the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, 75 stocks set new 52-week lows, while just 14 stocks set new highs.
Option traders who have piled up bullish positions in both indexes and major stock leaders are sending a clear message: Hold on.
Monday’s stock rally was so strong that there were signs that even institutional market makers were caught offside and had to buy upside calls to maintain momentum, with the call-to-put volume ratio rising to its highest since May and the highest since the first week of August for the State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), according to Barchart data.
The same thing is Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ)the call-to-put ratio was the highest in at least a year. The probability is Nasdaq 100 According to option pricing on trading platform ThinkOrSwim, the percentage of new highs reached by the end of the week is currently over 67%.
Nasdaq 100 in 2026
Bullish bias is also evident in option prices for the major technology companies driving this latest market rally, with market makers pricing in new records for the following stocks: meta platform, intel and micron By the end of the year. Traders can evaluate these odds by taking the delta (responsiveness to price changes) of a particular option contract and estimating the likelihood that the underlying stock will reach the contract’s strike price before a certain date.
Barchart data shows that in a meta where weekly option trading volume is more than four times the 30-day average, the implied volatility of calls is higher than puts across option term structures. According to ThinkOrSwim’s pricing, there is a 52% chance the stock will reach last year’s closing high of $790 by October 2nd.
Intel is now up 35% in the last month and is the latest leader in semiconductor trading, boasting an implied volatility of 69 as options trading, which once lagged AI trading, picks up steam. Market makers have roughly estimated the probability that the coin toss will exceed the closing high of about $140 between now and October 30th.
The big addition to Tuesday’s rally was a 2% rise in memory stocks. Round Hill Memory ETF (DRAM). shares of sandisk rose more than 6%, and Micron stock rose more than 3%.
Option pricing suggests Micron will hit new highs by October 23rd and SanDisk by December 18th. For the DRAM ETF, whose implied volatility has plummeted since this summer, only 34% of market makers are pricing in a new high by December 18th.
