Wall Street’s speculative darlings have taken a brutal beating in recent weeks, with sentiment swinging hard against pre-revenue and high-growth names across the board.
Semiconductors have led the broader rotation lower, with Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) shedding roughly a third of its value in just two weeks of trading.
Even the buzz surrounding the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: SPCX) IPO has cooled considerably after shares priced above their initial offering range and enthusiasm faded.
Against that backdrop, institutional options traders have begun making unusually large directional bets on some of the hardest-hit names in the market.
Andrew Keene, founder of AlphaShark.com and a 25-year veteran of the Chicago Board Options Exchange trading floor, has been tracking these large institutional call purchases closely.
Three stocks in particular have caught Keene’s attention, all of them down sharply from their highs and all showing abnormally large institutional call buying activity.
Keene’s own positions in these names run out to October, December, and January, giving each trade months to play out rather than days.
X-Energy (NASDAQ: XE), which priced its IPO in April and surged as high as $37 in its first days of trading, has since collapsed by nearly two-thirds to a 52-week low near $13.20.
The nuclear fuel and small modular reactor company, backed by Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), remains pre-revenue, yet an institutional trader recently bought October 35-strike calls before the stock’s steepest slide.
The largest single institutional position Keene is tracking sits in Oklo (NYSE: OKLO), where roughly 50,000 December 90-strike calls represent tens of millions of dollars in notional exposure.
Keene entered his own Oklo position after the stock dropped roughly 8% in a single session, matching its average daily range almost exactly.
He plans to exit before Oklo’s next earnings report, treating the event as too unpredictable to hold through, and typically closes positions once they enter the final 60 days before expiration due to accelerating time decay.
IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) rounds out the three names, having pulled back from a high of $86 to the mid-$30s as part of a broader reset across quantum computing stocks following last year’s rally.
A trader recently placed a roughly $1.5 million bet through November 60-strike calls on IonQ, and Keene has since added to a position of his own alongside January calls further out.
Investors who prefer to avoid the options market entirely can still use these institutional signals as directional cues, whether by buying shares outright, setting stop losses near recent lows, or waiting for a broader sentiment shift before committing capital.
