Daily Pulse — Options Flow + Dark Pool, 28 August 2026

28 August 2026 — EOD read. NVDA gave back roughly half of Thursday’s earnings pop while the closing tape filled with S&P-tracker crosses — and this morning’s open-interest update quietly confirmed most of what we flagged yesterday.

The boards

Feed depth on this run resolves the off-exchange tape completely down to $100M per print, so tonight’s boards are computed on that closed universe: 75 prints, $19.8B in aggregate notional. Nothing below is estimated.

Participation. Names printing $100M+ dark-pool blocks today: 53 — 24 ETFs and index trackers ($11.4B of the notional), 29 single names ($8.4B). The trailing-session baseline was not available to this run, so no average comparison is published tonight.

Concentration. Leading sector by aggregate notional among single names: Technology, $3.07B across 13 prints, with NVDA carrying 30% of the sector’s total. Communication Services followed at $2.35B across 9 prints.

Positioning gauge. Leveraged-long ETFs $1.66M (one flagged TQQQ line — and all of it put premium) · inverse/bear ETFs $0 · volatility ETFs $0. No fund in any of the three buckets cleared the $100M dark-pool bar. Threshold counts. Dark-pool prints of $100M or more: 75 (complete count). Flagged options prints of $1M or more: the screen returns its 25 most recent flagged events — 3 sweeps, 22 block or repeated prints; a full-day total is beyond this run’s screen depth and is not published.

Cluster watch: twelve repeated-price clusters printed in all. The three above — $6.24B combined, every dollar of it in S&P 500 trackers inside the closing hour — dominated the day. The largest single-name cluster was NVDA at $217.55: two prints, $921.5M, inside three minutes of the close.

What happened

Equities drifted lower into the weekend. SPY closed at $769.35, down 0.23% from Thursday’s $771.10, and finished about a dollar off its $768.31 session low after tagging $775.30 in the morning. QQQ closed at $716.43, down 0.65% from $721.11, likewise settling near the bottom of its $715.09–$724.13 range. The drag was concentrated: NVDA fell 4.6% to $217.55 on more than 190M shares against a 126M-share 30-day average, giving back a little over half of Thursday’s post-earnings jump, and MRVL fell 10.3% to $216.62 after reporting $0.62 in EPS against a $0.93 street estimate in Thursday’s postmarket. VIX spent the session between 14.13 and 14.84; the vendor’s closing print for the index failed our sanity check against that range, so we publish the range rather than the bad print (see Method note).

The options tape kept Thursday’s split personality. Market-wide volume ran call-heavy — 45.8M calls to 33.8M puts, a 0.74 put/call ratio (up from 0.68 Thursday), with $20.4B in call premium against $13.6B in puts. The index tape leaned the other way again: SPY’s own put/call came in at 1.03 and QQQ’s at 1.02. The sharpest single-name shift was NVDA’s: net options premium swung to -$174.7M from +$266.4M on Thursday, with calls hitting the bid (2.12M bid-side vs 1.78M ask-side) and puts lifting the offer — bearish premium of $818M against $640M bullish. One session after the beat, the options tape stopped chasing.

Yesterday’s radar — OI confirm

Yesterday’s flagged prints, checked against this morning’s open-interest update — the tape’s own answer to whether the flow was real positioning. Thresholds: ≥40% of flagged volume became new OI = confirmed; 10–40% = partial; under 10% = not confirmed.

Six of eight flagged prints became real positioning overnight, and the two IWM rows read as one move rather than two: the Sept $285 line shed almost exactly the open interest the Oct $285 line added — consistent with a roll out in time, not a hedge abandoned. The MRVL calls deserve the honest footnote: both confirmed as new open interest the same morning the stock fell 10.3% on its miss. The confirmation loop measures whether positioning was real, not whether it was right — both columns get scored in the Ledger.

Why it matters

Our read: the tell on today’s tape is the change in NVDA’s options character, not the index drift. Thursday’s flow chased a beat across 2027 expiries and this morning’s OI update proved that chase was real — 188,333 new contracts at the Jan 2027 $200 line alone. Today the same tape went the other way: a -$175M net premium day, calls sold on the bid, and the heaviest flagged activity sitting in next-Friday $225 calls that churned 94,000 contracts against 60,000 of standing OI with fills tilted to the bid side. High-turnover, bid-tilted, short-dated — that is a tape trading around a position, and Monday’s OI update will say which side of it actually opened.

Meanwhile the hedge book keeps doing methodical, unglamorous work. The IWM $285 put roll from September into October confirmed cleanly, fresh flagged interest showed up a dollar higher at the Sept $286 line, SPY put prints landed at $750 and $734, and the closing minutes stacked paired SPX structures — 8200 calls against 7000 puts in January 2027, 7720 calls against 7720 puts in September — bracketing spot at 7690. None of that is panic; all of it is a market paying for defined boundaries while the single-name tape digests two earnings reactions.

What to watch into Monday’s session

• $768.31 — Friday’s SPY low, and the level to watch. A close below would put the tape under the whole week’s floor near $767; $775.30, Friday’s high, is the reference on the other side.
• $715.09–$724.13 — QQQ’s Friday range. The close at $716.43 sat within a point and a half of the bottom; a close under $715 would be the first close below the week’s floor.
• NVDA at $217.55 kept about 43% of Thursday’s earnings gain. $216.81 (Friday’s low) and $209.66 (Wednesday’s pre-earnings close) are the references below; $229.26, Friday’s high, above.
• AVGO and HPE both report Wednesday postmarket — the flagged AVGO Sept 4 $370 calls and HPE Jan 2027 $46 puts are pre-earnings positioning on the clock.
• Monday morning’s open-interest update scores today’s flagged prints, including the NVDA $225 weekly churn; results land in Monday’s edition.
• The Weekly Pulse publishes Saturday morning with the full-week decomposition.

Names on our radar

Every row below is frozen at publication and scored mechanically in the Accountability Ledger at +5 and +21 sessions — misses stay on the page. Options prints are checked against the next morning’s open-interest update in the following session’s post.

The set-up

Put the day together and Friday reads as a controlled digestion, not a rejection. The indices gave back fractions of a percent while the week’s two big earnings reactions — NVDA’s fade, MRVL’s drop — supplied the tape. The closing hour belonged to S&P-tracker crosses: $6.2B across VOO, IVV and SPY at the bell, consistent with index-fund flows into the final trading days of August rather than directional conviction. Under that, the confirmation loop did its job: yesterday’s hedges and yesterday’s chases both became real open interest, the IWM book rolled rather than folded, and the new flagged prints cluster around next week’s earnings dates. Monday’s OI update — on the NVDA weekly churn above all — is the next hard checkpoint.

Notable data points

1. NVDA printed $921.5M of off-exchange notional in two prints at $217.55, both inside three minutes of the close.
2. The session’s three largest dark-pool clusters — VOO, IVV, SPY — totaled $6.24B, all of it in S&P 500 trackers.
3. VEEV’s single $491.1M block equaled 91% of its average full-day volume over the past 30 sessions.
4. AFRM’s 5.68M-share, $462.6M block printed at $81.50 in the extended session — 4.8% above the standing quote at execution.
5. PCG’s Dec $21 calls added 26,561 contracts of open interest overnight, 82 times the prior standing OI of 324.
6. NVDA’s Jan 2027 $200 calls now carry 273,177 contracts of open interest, up 3.2x in one session.
7. Market-wide put/call rose to 0.74 from 0.68; call premium $20.4B against $13.6B in puts.
8. IWM’s Sept 18 $285 puts shed 16,855 contracts of OI while the Oct 16 $285 line added 16,154.

Method note

Flow and dark-pool data sourced from Unusual Whales. MPI score and regime classifier are our internal composite; daily synthesis is AI-assisted from those inputs.

Volume-over-OI activity is unconfirmed as new positioning until the next morning’s open-interest update; confirmations are published in the following session’s post.

Board baselines are trailing-session averages computed from our own archived pulls; derived indicators are computed by AZTMM from licensed market data. The trailing baseline was offline for this edition, so boards publish without average comparisons rather than with estimated ones.

The vendor’s VIX close for 28 August printed at 14.00 — below the session low of 14.13, failing the close-versus-range sanity check — so this edition publishes the session range (14.13–14.84) rather than an impossible close.

This is research, not advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security.

AZTMM HLDGS LLC is not a registered broker-dealer, investment adviser, or FINRA member. All content is retrospective research published for general circulation — not personalized advice, not trade signals. Options involve substantial risk, including losses that may exceed the initial investment. Full disclaimer.

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