You'd Be a Millionaire If you bought $10,000 worth of Cipher Mining Calls Last Friday.

was digging around in some option data last night and the cipher mining calls from last week were dumb enough that i rechecked the number like three times 10k into the 7/24 $25 calls friday morning, when they were a literal penny, would've been around 1.7 million by thursday. 169x. genuinely didn't believe the first pull not a real trade obviously, nobody's getting filled on 10k contracts at a penny, the ask is gone after the first hundred. but i wanted to know why it even moved and it turned into a rabbit hole

hut 8 signed a $9.8B AI data center lease on the 20th and the whole miner to AI basket re rated at once, iren +15, wulf +6, all of em. cipher ran like 47% on the week even with morgan stanley cutting their PT in the middle of it. just momentum dragging the group up

the part that actually humbled me though. that call needed cipher up 42% in a week to be worth a single cent at expiry. so i pulled the last year of weeklies and it's done that exactly twice in 54 weeks. so if you bought this every friday you'd be down 100% like 96% of the time and probably go half a year between hits and the market wasn't even wrong about it. these priced around 190 IV, the stock only realizes \~108 annualized, and even at 190 a 43% otm weekly still comes out to a penny because a move that big is just genuinely rare. the penny WAS the odds. it just happened to print this time so idk.

you see these 100x screenshots constantly and i can't tell if there's any actual edge in systematically buying the penny lotto or if you're just slowly donating to whoever wrote it. does the occasional 169x ever really pay for the 25 losers or is the vol premium too fat. haven't run the full EV, maybe im just bad at this