META Options Flow: $151.5M Net Bearish Premium, Led by a March $700 Put
A $1.77M put at the $700 strike for March 2027 anchors the tape as weekly contracts expire
Photo by Mariia Berezovsky on Unsplash
META's net options premium reads negative $151.5M today. A $1.77M March 2027 $700 put leads the whale tape as weekly contracts expire.
The $1.77M put at the $700 strike
The largest whale-sized print on META today is a $700 put expiring March 19, 2027, for $1.77M. It accounts for roughly 74% of the $2.39M across the eight alerts on the tape. The expiry is five months out, so the buyer is paying mostly for vega (sensitivity to implied volatility) and time, not near-term gamma.
We don't know the side of the trade, and that matters. A buyer lifting the offer on a put at $700 is a protection or bearish bet. A seller hitting the bid is the opposite. It could also be one leg of a spread or a hedge against stock held elsewhere. Headline premium alone can't settle it.
The $151.5M net figure is mostly not in the alerts
Net premium impact for META stands at negative $151.5M. The eight alerts we're tracking sum to about $2.39M, with $2.09M in puts and $0.30M in calls. The whale-sized prints therefore explain a small slice of the day's skew. The rest comes from flow below the whale threshold, and from many mid-sized orders that individually don't stand out.
That's a broad pattern of premium flowing to puts or away from calls across the chain, not one oversized bet. Broad skew like this usually reflects dealers and funds adjusting exposure after a large move, and it carries less directional information than a single block would.
Expiring weeklies bracket $630 to $657.5
The October 23 contracts cluster in a tight band. A $630 put printed $0.04M and a $632.5 put printed $0.14M. On the call side, a $655 call printed $0.05M and a $657.5 call printed $0.16M. Together they mark out a roughly $27 range where traders were active on expiration day.
With expiry hours away, gamma on those strikes is extreme. Dealer delta on near-the-money contracts can swing sharply on small moves in the stock, and that forces hedging in the underlying. The sizes here are small, so we don't read this as a pin or a directional bet. It's routine expiration activity, and the two sides are close to balanced.
Post earnings context
META reported on October 21 after the close. Revenue came in at $64.6B against a $63.34B estimate, but capital spending of $34.91B exceeded cash from operations. That's the argument bears are making, and put demand in the back months fits it.
After the print, front-month implied volatility typically resets lower while longer-dated protection holds its bid. A March put at $700 is the kind of contract that stays priced for uncertainty about spending, and not for the next five sessions.
What to watch next
Further out, the October 30 $612.5 put printed $0.14M and the October 30 $700 call printed $0.03M. A $750 call for November 13 printed $0.06M. All of these are small, but they show where traders are placing short-dated bets beyond today's expiry.
The read changes if the March $700 put's open interest grows tomorrow. That would confirm new positions opened, not an existing hedge being rolled. Watch the $700 strike across the October 30 and March expiries, and watch whether the $612.5 puts draw repeat volume.