Someone Just Spent $21 Million Betting Nvidia Falls Below $180 by January Omor Ibne Ehsan Mon, October 12, 2026 at 8:46 AM EDT 5 min read NVDA -0.52% MU -0.66% SMH -0.65% Explore stocks on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
A trader spent $21M on 100,000 Nvidia put options at a $180 strike expiring January 2027, requiring a 22% drop just to break even.
Traders also piled $270M into Micron puts and spent $46M on semiconductor ETF SMH puts, signaling broad bearish chip-sector positioning.
Nvidia's January put-to-call ratio of 3.61 dwarfs its full-chain ratio of 0.76, even as revenue surged 106% to $96B last quarter.
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A trader recently paid a large sum for the right to sell Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) shares well below their market price. The position was 100,000 put options with a $180 strike expiring January 15, 2027, bought for about $21 million.
A put gives its owner the right to sell shares at a fixed price, so it gains value when the stock falls. Nvidia closed down 0.52% at $229.28 that session, which valued the company at $5.54 trillion.
The day's largest Nvidia options trade barely moved the stock. For shareholders, the useful question is whether the buyer expects a decline or simply wants protection.
Exchange data show 101,416 contracts traded in that put, against open interest (contracts still outstanding) of 155,649.
By our own calculation, the premium works out to about $2.10 per share. The strike sits 21.5% below the October 9 close, so the stock has to fall past $180 and far enough below it to cover that cost before the trade makes money at expiration.
The contract also loses value every day as expiration approaches. Its delta of -0.09102 means the market sees only a slim chance that the stock ends below the strike.
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If this is a directional position, the buyer needs a decline of about 22% in roughly three months just to reach the strike.
Hedging is the more common explanation. A fund can buy puts to limit its losses. For a fund holding billions in Nvidia, this means avoiding selling shares and paying taxes; in that case, the premium is simply the cost of insurance with no forecast attached.
The buyer has not been identified, and the trade data cannot show whether the contracts were part of a spread, meaning a combination of options bought and sold together.
About $270 million of premium is deep in-the-money Micron (NASDAQ:MU) puts expiring June 2028. Plus, there's more than 180,000 puts against about 50,000 calls in the VanEck Semiconductor ETF (NASDAQ:SMH) by noon, with $46 million spent on puts and $26 million on calls.
Deep in-the-money puts move closely with the share price, so they work like a synthetic short, a way to profit from a decline without borrowing stock. ETF puts, however, often insure a whole basket of chip holdings and say little about any one company.
Nvidia's January expiration shows a put-to-call ratio of 3.61, compared with 0.76 across its full options chain.
Nvidia closed at a record $239.24 on October 6, then fell 2.94% on October 8 after a report said OpenAI's revenue came in below investor expectations. That report raised the question of whether AI spending is driven by real customer demand or by outside funding.
Customer concentration adds exposure. Management said in August that AI labs could account for roughly a quarter of its business next year, with some of that infrastructure backed by Nvidia's own balance sheet.
The strike still sits above the past-year low of $164.27, which makes the position aggressive but possible.
Nvidia's fundamentals remain strong. Revenue for the second quarter of fiscal 2027 rose 105.8% to $96.22 billion, and the company guided to $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, for the third quarter, excluding China data center compute.
At a P/E of 46x, the stock already assumes strong growth. Management, however, says supply will hold back sales at least through the end of fiscal 2028 because demand runs higher, and heavy put buying can lift the stock when those hedges are unwound.
A single hedge like this one says little about fundamentals. For long-term shareholders, though, record highs are exactly when exit planning matters most, which is the whole subject of our free bubble survivor's handbook.
The test is the next earnings report, expected November 17, 2026. The bullish case weakens if Nvidia falls short of its $108 billion guidance or closes below CNBC's reported $180 strike before January 15, 2027.
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