In this clip from The Drift, Adam Mesh poses a question to tastytrade founder Tom Sosnoff that even Sosnoff admitted he'd never been asked and had never researched.
The question: when a stock moves so dramatically that it runs out of available options strikes, does that create even more squeeze potential?
Sosnoff's honest answer was that he didn't know. But he used the opportunity to explain why the scenario can occur at all. Options exchanges build out strike prices based on a stock's expected range of movement covering statistically likely outcomes. Under normal conditions, that's more than sufficient. But occasionally, a stock experiences a move so extreme that it blows past every listed strike.
Sosnoff pointed to Moderna as a probable historical example, estimating that one of its biggest moves may have been a six or seven standard deviation event. Standard options chains don't extend that far out because statistically, nobody models for it.
It's a rare edge case in markets and one...
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