Expiry Explosion

WHY late poppers happen: near-the-money 0DTE contracts are pennies by 15:45 (theta), and expiring options keep trading until 16:15 — pricing the after-hours underlying while the stock's official close freezes at 16:00. Any late move of ~0.4%+ reprices them 10x+; that size of final-hour move hits on ~41% of popper days vs under 5% of normal days. Volume does not spike at the pop (median ~6% of the contract's day volume prints after 15:45) — it is pure repricing. Calls dominate (QQQ 51/13) because big down days end with dip-buy/short-cover bounces off the low far more often than up days end with late crashes, and on a down day the near-close calls are the cheap lottery side; AMC-earnings rips (AAPL, ADBE, MU, INTC) add more call fuel. Thursday leads because big-tech AMC earnings land Thursday. Put poppers need the market to close on the lows (crash-into-close days like 6/5, FOMC 6/17). Per-day catalysts appear on each date's stock line with a WHY ⚡ tag.

Across all tickers the rule generalizes: the late popper is always the cheap side of that day's trend catching a final-minutes move. SPY/IWM are QQQ echoes (same call skew, same macro/AMC days, lower beta = smaller multiples). Metals flip it: GLD/SLV are put-skewed because gold's relentless 2026 uptrend made the near-close puts the pennies — a late profit-taking fade 10x's them. Friday dominates non-index names (57 of 124 events) purely because WEEKLY/MONTHLY tickers only have Friday expiries; only the 0DTE trio can pop Mon–Thu. High-vol speculative names (SATS 604x, UVXY) break the pin rule — they pop on genuinely huge late swings, with strikes ~3–4% out instead of ~0.2%. Side vs day direction: calls pop on up-day momentum chases AND down-day bounces; puts almost never pop unless the day closes on its lows.

WHY early poppers happen: the morning mirror of the late popper. When a ticker gaps up on premarket news and the gap FAILS (goes negative in the first hour), the whole near-money put ladder opened priced for a green day — pennies — and the open-to-trough slide reprices it 10x+ at once (symmetrically, a gap-down that rips green does it to the calls). The trigger is the fail depth (~0.4%+ through flat from the open), not the gap size. Unlike late poppers these usually decay — whether they hold depends on the rest of the day — so this chip includes rescued contracts that never made the held-into-close list. The peak uses the contract's running day high (cumulative, so one snapshot carries the whole peak) and only counts a high set after the opening print — a pre-anchor opening spike was never buyable. The measurement window is per-ticker, shown as a badge (e.g. 60m) next to the date: the every_5min and first-60-min trending tiers sample the full 09:35–10:35 hour, but a name whose pulls stopped earlier is a shorter measurement, and a pop after its last pull is simply invisible. Names in the hourly-only tier can't appear at all — their first pull is 10:00, after the 09:45 anchor deadline — unless they also trend that morning, which now grants the first-60-min pulls too.