POET Gamma Map: Cleanup Day, and Now There's a Q3 Date

POET Technologies $POET put a date on the board this morning. Third-quarter results land Monday, November 16, at 7:00 a.m. ET, before the open. No call. The mic turns on March 1, 2027, with the fourth-quarter & full-year numbers, and from there the company says it intends a conference call every quarter. Two dates where there had been none. That's not a press release. That's a calendar, & calendars are what the options market eats for breakfast.

It lands the morning after the best day this stock has had in a while. POET stock closed Thursday at $6.07, up 3.9%, while the rest of the basket bled. Coherent $COHR gave up 5%. Lumentum $LITE lost 3%, Applied Opto $AAOI 2%, and Nvidia $NVDA and TSMC $TSM were off close to 2% apiece on the day TSMC printed a record quarter & got sold for it. The semis ETF $SOXX finished down almost 1%. Our name was the best one on the list, and it got there the hard way: 5.56 on the low first, straight through the 5.74 level plenty of you have circled, then a close well back above it. Pre-market this morning it's 5.91. Hold that thought on 5.74. The options board has an opinion on it, and it's not the one you want.

How we got here

Two weeks ago this was a stock pinned at $8 with a $10 bet stacked on top of it, 18,724 October $10 calls at last count. Then somebody walked in Monday and bought about 8,000 $6.50 puts in one sitting. You can guess where this is going. The dealers who sold those puts had to short stock against them, the stock lost $6.50, then $6, and by Thursday it printed 5.56 while the whole AI complex was selling the TSMC beat. The puts won the week. Today they get paid & go away, and that's the whole reason today matters, but keep in mind that the options have been mechanical set against the backdrop of a bond market reeking havoc on the AI complex.

The premium moves first

Until 7:00 this morning nobody could tell you the POET earnings date. Three broker calendars, three dates: Nov 12 after the close on one, Nov 13 on another, and a third had Nov 17. If you were a dealer pricing POET options, you had to charge for that. Every expiry from Nov 13 forward carried a slice of the jump, because any of them might have owned it. That's the dealer premium. A toll booth on a road nobody knew the length of.

Now we know. Oct 23, Oct 30, Nov 6 & Nov 13 can't contain the print, so the toll comes off those expiries and the premium there should simmer down. Nov 20 is the only near expiry that owns the event, which means it should firm up against Nov 13 from here. That kink in the curve is the whole story this week. January already owned it: the $9 call carries a 79% implied vol, about what this stock runs on an ordinary Tuesday, not an event number, so don't expect it to collapse. And nobody in POET options is positioned for the date yet, because until this morning there wasn't one. The Nov 20 board has barely moved since Tuesday. Monday's open interest is the first tell.

Today is the cleanup

October options expiration is today, and the October monthly is the whole show on our screens. It comes down at 4:00. More than 52,000 calls from $7 to $10 go to zero on this screen alone, and the whole-dollar strikes tell you who got hurt: 7,014 at $7, 14,157 at $8, 9,591 at $9, 18,724 at $10. Bought when this was an $8 stock looking up at $10. Confetti now. On the put side, close to 20,000 contracts from $6.50 to $8 expire in the money, the big three being 9,465 at $6.50, 5,725 at $7 and 3,842 at $8. And sitting right on spot at $6, 4,217 puts against 2,566 calls. That's the strike with the most gamma in the building today. It pins or it whips, depending on who's short it.

Scorecard time. We wrote Tuesday that a reclaim of $6.50 would make the put buyers cover. They didn't. The $6.50 puts are still 9,465, give or take a few lots, and they ride into expiration in the money. We also wrote lose $6 and $5 is next. $6 broke Thursday, 5.56 on the low, then the stock turned around and closed at 6.07. $5 never showed. Half right, half wrong, & we'll take the half that kept you off the $5 trade.

Now the part that matters Monday. Those $6.50 puts had a short hedge behind them, somewhere around 900,000 shares by expiration. That's the mechanical selling that leaned on the tape all week, and it comes off with the puts, by assignment or by the holders closing out. Unless they roll. If they roll, the same pressure shows up a dollar lower in November. If they don't, the heaviest hand on this stock all week just let go.

Monday's map is November 20

After today the weeklies are thin: 4,436 calls at $8.50 for Oct 23, a lottery ticket from $6; 2,239 calls at $6 for Oct 30; a few hundred contracts a strike for Nov 13. Translation: dealer hedging stops driving this tape for a couple of weeks, and POET stock trades on actual buyers & sellers. Novel concept.

The real POET gamma map is the Nov 20 monthly, about 46,000 calls against 15,000 puts. $7 is the hinge. 3,402 calls against 3,089 puts, dead even. Below $7 the puts own the strikes: 2,062 at $6, 1,015 at $5, 3,804 at $4. Above $7 the calls own them: 8,169 at $8, 5,320 at $9, 11,823 at $10, 6,722 at $11. Under $7 the hedge flow is a seller of weakness. Get over $7 and it flips, buying strength, until the first brake at $8 where call holders start selling into it.

And 5.74. Everyone's staring at it, us included, and Thursday didn't settle the argument. The low went through it to 5.56 and the close took it back with room to spare. Our problem with it: it's a chart level, not an options level. There's nothing on the Nov board between $6 and $5, and the real shelf doesn't show up until $4. If 5.74 holds, it's because buyers showed up. Not because dealers had to. We'd rather tell you that now than after.

January is a dime from a problem

The January $9 call is a quarter. 6,007 contracts open, delta 0.21, gamma 0.122. That's about 129,000 shares hedged against it today and another 73,000 for every dollar the stock climbs. That same call was about $1.30 on ECOC Monday back in September. Theta runs at under half a cent a day. Call it a dime off that quarter by November 16 if the stock just sits here. January holders need the release to move the stock. If it doesn't, they're the next cleanup.

About that call

Four straight prints with no conference call. Q3 last November, Q4 in March, Q1 in May, Q2 in August: press release, no call, read it yourself. Now the company says it intends to host an earnings conference call every quarter, starting March 1. A management team that's gone four prints without picking up the phone just told you its intention is picking it up every quarter from here and we have no reason to doubt them. In the Q2 release they stated they would give a September update & delivered. Our opinion is they could have left that line out of this release implying that it was well thought out & strategic.

We know the knock. Why wait until March? One machine-written summary on an aggregator already called it “a delay.” We'd flip that. A company that's been heads down building a production ramp doesn't commit to a quarterly call unless it expects to have a quarterly story. You don't open a mic for a quiet quarter. The first call gets a full year behind it and the ramp in it. That's our read, & we'd rather be early on it than clever after.

And November 16 is a document. 7:00 a.m., before the open. Same slot that gave $POET its first green reaction in four releases back in August. The release is the whole event, so the first tick isn't the verdict and it never was. Read the thing.

The arithmetic at $6

Same drill as always: balance-sheet arithmetic only, no price target from us. $POET closed at $6.07. On 173 million basic shares, that's a market cap near $1.05 billion. Cash and short-term investments were $796.3 million at June 30, about 76% of the cap. Strip the cash out and you're paying roughly $254 million for the business. The engines, the ramp, 155 people, a $50 million purchase order from Lumilens with a framework worth up to $500 million behind it. Build your own number. We're just laying out the pieces.

What we're watching into Monday

Monday's open interest, before anything else. If the Nov 20 $6 and $7 puts jump, the October put crowd rolled, and the hedge that leaned on us all week just moved down the calendar. If they don't, that hand is gone. We'll also watch whether the $7 and $8 strikes start filling in for the print month, because that's the board telling us somebody is finally positioning for the date. Then the kink. Nov 13 implied vol should trade cheaper than Nov 20 from here, and if it doesn't, the market hasn't priced the print yet. And 5.74, obviously. Hold it on a close and the chart crowd wins the argument. Lose it and the next number on the options board is $5.

At the close the October board gets hosed down. Monday starts with a cleaner tape, a date on the calendar & a company that just said it'll start talking in March. You can guess which side of that we'd rather be on.

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