The Ugliest Stocks in the Market Just Got a Very Expensive Vote of Confidence

The broader market has been in a mood lately, and it's not subtle. Semiconductors have led a sharp rotation lower.

Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) has shed a third of its value in two weeks, and even the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ: SPCX) IPO story that had everyone dreaming about space-based data centers has cooled off since shares priced above their offering range. Sentiment has swung hard against anything pre-revenue and speculative, and the sell-off has been broad enough that even strong long-term narratives are getting caught in the downdraft.

That's exactly the environment where institutional options traders start making their move.

Andrew Keene, founder of AlphaShark.com and a 25-year veteran of the Chicago Board Options Exchange trading floor, tracks large institutional bets in the options market. His approach is to watch for oversized call purchases in specific stocks and expirations, then follow the money.

Keene says he rarely even looks at what a company does before entering a trade. What matters is size, timing, and conviction, along with technical signals like relative strength and average daily trading range.

Three names have caught his attention this week, all of them down sharply from their highs, and all of them showing unusually large institutional call buying. Keene's own positions run out to October, December, and January, giving each trade months to play out rather than days.

Investors who would rather skip the options market entirely can still use the same signals, whether that means buying shares outright, setting a stop loss near recent lows, or simply watching for a shift in sentiment before stepping in.

Nuclear Newcomer Draws an October Bet

X-Energy (NASDAQ: XE) priced its IPO in April and jumped as high as $37 in its first days of trading. The stock has since fallen, cutting its value by nearly two-thirds. The nuclear fuel and small modular reactor company, backed by Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), remains pre-revenue, but an institutional trader recently bought October 35-strike calls, a bet placed weeks before the stock's slide to a 52-week low near $13.20.

Keene added to the position himself as the option's price fell toward $25 per contract, well below the roughly $170 the institution originally paid. The stock's relative strength index has dropped below 30, a level traders watch for oversold conditions, and its average daily move of roughly $1.70 gives the options room to react quickly. What could change the picture: any sign that nuclear policy support or data center demand firms up again after a rough stretch for the sector.

Oklo Attracts the Biggest Bet on the List

Oklo Inc. (NYSE: OKLO) has fallen from a high near $194 to the low $40s, alongside a broader pullback across small modular reactor and AI data center names.

The largest institutional position Keene is tracking sits here: roughly 50,000 December 90-strike calls, a bet worth tens of millions of dollars in notional exposure. Keene entered his own position after the stock dropped roughly 8% in a single session, matching its average daily range almost exactly.

He plans to exit before Oklo's next earnings report and typically closes positions once they're within 60 days of expiration, since time decay accelerates quickly in that window.

What to watch: how the stock behaves around its next earnings date, an event Keene treats as too unpredictable to hold through.

IonQ Leads a Quantum Rebound Bet

IonQ, Inc. (NYSE: IONQ) has pulled back from a high of $86 to the mid-$30s, part of a broader reset across quantum computing stocks after last year's rally.

A trader recently bought November 60-strike calls in a roughly $1.5 million bet, and Keene has since added to a position of his own, along with January calls further out. IonQ's relative strength index sits at 26, deep into oversold territory, with average daily swings near $4.

Rigetti Computing (NASDAQ: RGTI) and D-Wave Quantum (NYSE: QBTS) round out the small group of quantum names Keene watches most closely, though he notes IonQ tends to move the most on a dollar basis. Keene has traded the name profitably before and says he still believes in the long-term case for quantum computing, separate from this short-term trade.

Weighing the Risk and the Reward

None of the three companies is profitable yet, and all three could keep falling if sentiment toward pre-revenue growth stories stays sour or interest rates move higher. Keene is candid that not every trade works out, and institutional buying doesn't guarantee a stock's direction. Valuations across this corner of the market have already come down hard once this year, and a further leg lower is possible.

The upside case rests on how these bets are structured rather than on a full recovery. Keene isn't looking for these stocks to reclaim their old highs. A modest bounce over a few sessions, in line with each stock's typical daily range, could be enough to move the options meaningfully, given how far out the expirations sit.

Stay focused on the setup, not the headlines, because that's what tends to move options pricing more than any single day's news.

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The article "The Ugliest Stocks in the Market Just Got a Very Expensive Vote of Confidence" first appeared on MarketBeat.