Above the Wall: The Pre-Market Read on Release Day

Updated with pre-market price data and overnight open interest as of approximately 7:35 AM ET, Thursday, August 13, 2026.

POET Technologies (NASDAQ: POET) released its second-quarter results at 7:00 AM this morning. Ten minutes later, the stock traded at $9.26 in the pre-market, up 4.4% on roughly 383,000 shares. The release confirmed a sixth consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth and $796.3 million in cash and short-term investments. Our full read of the report runs separately. This piece covers the market structure the release just landed on, because the first hours of trading will be shaped as much by positioning as by the numbers.

The Conversion Happened

Yesterday's piece flagged one overnight question: would Wednesday's heavy $10 call volume convert to open interest, so that the board above the wall entered Thursday loaded? It did. The $10 line now holds about 12,400 calls of open interest across the two front expirations: 7,345 in the August 14 series that expires tomorrow, and 5,030 in August 21. That is more than double the roughly 5,600 contracts the line carried earlier in the week. The $9.50 tier holds nearly 6,900. The $9 wall itself settled at roughly 30,200 calls combined, with 20,409 in the expiring series and 9,801 the week after. The structure above the wall is no longer a hypothesis. It is the heaviest upside board POET has carried into any session this cycle.

What Above the Wall Means Mechanically

In the pre-market, the stock is trading through $9 rather than pinned beneath it. If that holds into the regular-session open, the hedging math flips. Dealers who are short roughly 30,000 calls at $9 are no longer supplying stock into rallies at the strike. They are buying stock to stay hedged as those calls move into the money, and the $9.50 and $10 tiers extend the same dynamic overhead. This is the fuel-not-friction scenario described yesterday. One caveat applies: a pre-market print on 383,000 shares does not settle anything. The wall gets tested at 9:30, on real volume, with the options market open.

The Map Below Is Unchanged

The $8.50 strike remains the two-sided magnet, with 10,990 calls against 4,559 puts in the Friday series. Near-dated put protection stays thin: about 1,800 August 14 $8 puts and roughly 2,800 $7 puts across both weeks. The August 21 $8 puts hold 5,803, essentially flat from Wednesday. If the familiar first-session fade reasserts itself, these are the levels where dealer hedging flow starts to matter again on the way down.

Two Clocks Today

The first clock is macro. July PPI and weekly jobless claims print at 8:30 AM, and the 30-year bond auction lands at 1:00 PM. This morning's pre-market strength precedes all of it. The 7:00 AM release bought the document a 90-minute clean read; the tape from 8:30 forward belongs partly to the rates market.

The second clock is expiration. The August 14 series expires tomorrow, and it carries the heaviest layer of the wall: 20,409 of the 30,200 $9 calls. That cuts two ways. Into Friday's close, pin risk back toward $9 is real, because the strike acts as a magnet while time value collapses. After Friday, that entire layer clears the board, and the remaining structure overhead is far lighter. A close above $9 on Monday would face less resistance than a close above $9 today.

The Discipline, Updated

POET's three prior earnings releases were each followed by a red first session. All three were released after the close. This is the first pre-market release in that sample, so this morning is genuinely new information. But the rule stands until the closing bell says otherwise: a green pre-market print is not a green session, and a green session is not a verdict. The test that matters is whether the stock holds above the wall through tomorrow's expiration. That is the point where positioning stops explaining the tape and the execution story has to carry it.