A $24M QQQ Call Spread Bets on Nasdaq 100 Highs by July 31

A single trade in the Invesco QQQ Trust ETF on Thursday stood out from the noise. Someone spent $24 million on a three-part call spread that needs the Nasdaq 100 to reach an all-time high by the end of July. It was the third-biggest trade among all options exchanged that day, according to data from ThinkOrSwim.

The structure is worth unpacking. About 90 minutes after the opening bell, the trader bought 28,000 contracts of the 736-strike call expiring July 31, paying roughly $30 million. At the same time, they sold a 730/740 call spread for about $6 million, reducing the net cost to $24 million. That sale pushed the breakeven up to roughly $750, less than $2 above the QQQ high from early June.

Scott Bauer, CEO of Prosper Trading Academy, said the setup demands a sharp rally. "If he doesn't have another position against this, he needs Qs to explode higher," Bauer said by phone. "The spread reduces his cost but pushes up the level for the breakeven. If the index just grinds he's going to get killed."

Open interest in the 736-strike calls matched the trade volume at execution. That pattern sometimes means the buyer was closing a short position, which would be a lower-conviction bet but still a neutral-to-positive view on the index. ThinkOrSwim data showed roughly equal numbers of calls bought and sold across all QQQ options on the day, despite $944 million of the $1.6 billion total volume being tied to calls, per SpotGamma.

The day's two larger trades were also bullish. In the SPDR S&P 500 ETF, someone bought 2,000 deep in-the-money 500-strike calls expiring July 24 for $50 million. The second-biggest single trade was in nuclear startup Oklo, where a buyer spent $46 million on 200-strike calls expiring January 2028 and $21 million on 90-strike calls expiring mid-December. Oklo shares trade near $50.

The QQQ trade lands in a market that has gone nowhere for weeks. The Nasdaq 100 has been effectively flat since May 14, with the index last making a high on June 3. The S&P 500 has traded in a roughly 200-point range since early May. AlphaScala's proprietary score for QQQ sits at 44 out of 100, a mixed reading that aligns with the sideways grind.

For the trade to pay off, the index needs to break out of that range and push through the June high before July 31. A slow grind higher would leave the calls underwater. The next few weeks will show whether the buyer saw something the rest of the market missed.