Trading volume across Meta’s options contracts skyrocketed on Monday, hitting roughly 4.5 times the tech giant’s 30-day average. According to comprehensive data compiled by Cboe LiveVol and SpotGamma, an astonishing $3.9 billion in total option premium was exchanged during the session, underscoring a massive surge in market participation. The sentiment underlying this trading frenzy leaned heavily toward the optimistic side: market participants purchased more than twice as many call options as put options, and an impressive seven out of the top ten trades executed during the day were classified as either bullish or neutral.
This extraordinary options market activity accompanied a robust rally in the underlying equity. Shares of the social media behemoth surged 12% on Monday alone, pushing the stock within striking distance—just 7% away—of its all-time high recorded in August 2025. This powerful single-day leap further extended a broader upward trajectory, bringing Meta’s cumulative rally to 21% since the company officially unveiled detailed specifications for its new personal AI assistant, Muse. Alongside the artificial intelligence rollout, Meta also announced its ambitious plans to develop a new subsea telecommunications cable, tentatively named Petal, designed to handle heavy data transmission across the Atlantic Ocean and bolster its global infrastructure backbone.
The technical breakdown of Monday’s options trading reveals where market participants are placing their financial bets. The most actively traded contracts of the session were zero-day-to-expiry options with strike prices that are now firmly in the money. Specifically, trading activity concentrated heavily on in-the-money call options ranging from the 720 to the 745 strikes. Looking further out on the calendar, heavy volume also materialized in contracts expiring in mid-October, particularly around the 775 and 800 strike prices, demonstrating that institutional and retail investors alike are anticipating sustained upward momentum over the weeks to come.
"The inflows in options are huge," noted Brent Kochuba, founder of options analytics platform SpotGamma. "It seems like AI hype around their Muse."
The catalyst driving this unprecedented market enthusiasm, Meta’s Muse AI personal agent tool, has been available to the public for less than two weeks, yet it has already made a dramatic impact on mobile application distribution channels. According to a CNBC report citing data from digital market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, Muse raced to the top of the app store charts, accumulating an impressive 730,000 downloads over a roughly five-day period following its official launch on September 8. This rapid adoption rate has convinced traders that Meta has successfully transitioned from an enterprise-focused AI player into a dominant force in consumer-facing artificial intelligence applications.
Despite the overwhelming bullish sentiment and the rush into call options, the market dynamics also reflect a degree of prudent risk management and complex positioning among sophisticated investors. Data from SpotGamma indicates that of the total call premium traded during the session, more than $1.3 billion was likely initiated by aggressive call-buyers seeking to capture further upside. Concurrently, about $1.1 billion was tied to options selling activities, suggesting that the prevailing bullish bias is being carefully balanced by professional traders hedging against potential near-term volatility or overextension.
Illustrating this nuanced institutional approach, the single largest dollar-size trader of the session executed a complex strategy that resulted in a net short position of approximately $20 million. This position was spread across a handful of derivative transactions centered primarily around the sale of a one-by-two 710/765-strike call spread expiring on October 16. Market structure analysts point out that this specific configuration is designed to generate a profit if Meta’s share price experiences a pullback and slips below the $740 threshold, highlighting that while the broader market narrative is dominated by AI optimism, some major players are simultaneously preparing for potential consolidation following the stock’s double-digit weekly advance.
