SharkWater Trading  •  Income Strategies • Options • Private Markets

RVI: The Fund Where Nobody Knows What It Is Worth, And That Is Exactly Why You Sell Puts

August 17, 2026

Bottom Line Up Front

Robinhood Ventures Fund I (NYSE: RVI) went public at $25 in March, ran to $77.39 in May, fell all the way back to $24.10 in late July, and now trades near $28. The last audited net asset value the fund published was $24.05 per share, dated March 31. That number is four and a half months old.

Implied volatility sits near 87 percent against 30 day realized volatility of roughly 61 percent. When a market is charging you 87 percent vol on a fund whose true value updates once a quarter and holds a large slug of money market funds, the cleanest way to play it is not to buy the shares. It is to sell out of the money cash secured puts at or below the last known NAV and get paid to wait for a price that actually makes sense.

First, Almost Everything You Have Read About RVI's Holdings Is Wrong

Search "RVI holdings" and you will find confident pages telling you the fund owns Anthropic, xAI, Perplexity, Anduril, Scale AI, Figma, Notion, Discord, Chime, Brex, Plaid, and Mercury, with a $725 million NAV. Other pages will tell you the NAV is $300 million. One popular page insists RVI does not own SpaceX. Another insists SpaceX is the largest position at 22 percent of the fund.

None of that survives contact with the audited annual report. RVI's fiscal year ends March 31, and the Form N-CSR filed with the SEC lays out the entire schedule of investments, line by line, with cost basis and fair value. Nine private companies. Not twenty. Not one of the exotic names above.

It gets worse. Pull up RVI on some of the major quote sites and the fundamentals block still shows a market cap of $63 million, a 734 percent dividend yield, an industry classification of "Real Estate Operations," and a next earnings date in 2022. That is leftover data from Retail Value Inc., the shopping center REIT that used to trade under this ticker. The vendor never fully flushed it.

Rule of the boat: on a fund this new, with a recycled ticker and a quarterly valuation cycle, you go to EDGAR or the fund's own newsroom. Nowhere else. If your data source cannot tell you whether RVI is a venture fund or a strip mall landlord, it cannot tell you what it is worth.

What RVI Actually Owns

Here is the audited portfolio as of March 31, 2026, straight out of the schedule of investments, plus everything the fund has announced since.

Position	Type	Fair Value / Cost	Status
Databricks (Series K + L)	Preferred	$81.7M	Marked up 26.7% from entry
OpenAI	Class A Common	$75.0M	Added April 17
Revolut	Ordinary	$50.2M	At cost
Mercor	Series C Preferred	$50.0M	At cost
Whatnot	Preferred	$30.0M	Added Aug 5, $20B round
Airwallex	Series G Preferred	$25.0M	At cost
Boom Supersonic	Series B-1 Preferred	$25.0M	At cost
Oura	Series E Preferred	$25.0M	At cost
Ramp (common + preferred)	Both	$25.0M	At cost
Canva	Class A Common	$25.0M	Added June 24
ElevenLabs	Series D-1 Preferred	$20.0M	At cost
Stripe (+ June follow-on)	Class B Common	$14.6M plus	Follow-on June 29
SpaceX	Public common	$6.8M	IPO allocation, June
Money market funds	Level 1	$347.1M at 3/31	53% of net assets

Net assets were $655.3 million across 27,247,215 shares, which is where the $24.05 NAV comes from. The single most important line in that table is the last one. On March 31, more than half of this "venture fund" was sitting in a government money market fund yielding about 3.6 percent.

Since then the fund has deployed roughly $137 million into OpenAI, SpaceX, Canva, and Whatnot, plus an undisclosed Stripe follow-on. Back of the envelope, that still leaves somewhere in the neighborhood of $180 million to $210 million in cash equivalents, or roughly $6.50 to $7.75 per share. Call it a quarter to a third of NAV in T-bill proxies.

That matters enormously for a put seller. It means a meaningful chunk of what you would be buying on assignment is not a Level 3 guess about a private company. It is cash.

The NAV Problem, Which Is Really The Whole Trade

Here is the structural quirk that drives everything. RVI marks its portfolio and calculates NAV once per business quarter. The private positions are Level 3 fair value, determined by the adviser using precedent transactions, funding rounds, and secondary prints. The share price, meanwhile, trades every second the NYSE is open.

Think of it like a boat sitting on a mooring in fog. The NAV is a photograph somebody takes of the boat once every three months. The stock price is a crowd on shore shouting guesses about where the boat is right now. Sometimes the crowd is right. In May, the crowd decided the boat was worth $77 when the last photograph said $24.

The crowd was wrong. It usually is at extremes, in both directions.

The premium round trip on this thing has been violent:

Date	Price	vs Last Published NAV
March 6, IPO	$25.00 issue, opened near $22	Discount on day one
March 31	$26.54	+10% to $24.05 NAV
May 13, peak	$77.39	Roughly +220%
July 29, trough	$24.10	Roughly flat to NAV
Mid August	~$28.20	About +17%

A 68 percent drawdown from peak to trough in eleven weeks, on a fund holding money market funds and a dozen private marks. Nothing in the portfolio moved 68 percent. Only the story did.

Why The Options Are Rich

Metric	Reading
Implied volatility (30 day)	~86.6%
Historical volatility (30 day)	~61.3%
IV rank / IV percentile	~33% / 26%
IV high / low, trailing year	120.6% (June 9) / 69.6% (Aug 6)
Expected move, 10 DTE	+/- 11.8%, range $24.88 to $31.56
Put / call open interest ratio	1.21
Total open interest	~11,400 contracts

Roughly 25 volatility points of spread between what the market is charging and what the stock has actually delivered over the last month. That gap is your edge, and it exists for a reason worth naming out loud: the market genuinely does not know what this fund is worth between quarterly marks, so it prices uncertainty into every contract.

Note also that IV rank is only 33 percent. Vol is elevated in absolute terms but it is not stretched relative to this fund's own short history. It has been much higher. That argues for selling premium in size you can defend, not backing up the truck.

The Trade: Selling Out Of The Money Puts Below NAV

The setup writes itself. You have a fund trading at a 17 percent premium to a stale NAV, with roughly a quarter of that NAV sitting in cash equivalents, an 87 percent implied vol, and a demonstrated willingness to trade all the way back down to the low twenties. You do not want to buy $28 shares. You want to get paid for agreeing to buy $20 to $22 shares.

That is the entire thesis. You are selling insurance against a price you would happily pay anyway.

Strike Selection Logic

Anchor your strikes to NAV, not to the current share price. Three reference points:

• $24.05 is the last published NAV. Anything above that strike and you are agreeing to pay a premium to stated value.
• $24.10 is the July low. The market has already tested and defended roughly this level once.
• $21.00 is the 52 week low and represents about a 13 percent discount to the last NAV. At that level you are buying private venture marks at a real discount with cash backing part of it.

The ladder below uses model derived premiums at the observed volatility surface. These are theoretical values, not live quotes. Pull the actual chain before you place anything. On a name with 11,400 total open interest, the bid ask spread will take a real bite.

Expiry	Strike	Est. Premium	Breakeven	vs $24.05 NAV	Return on Cash
Sep 18 (32d)	$25.00	~$1.50	$23.50	-2.3%	6.1%
Sep 18 (32d)	$22.50	~$0.85	$21.65	-10.0%	3.8%
Sep 18 (32d)	$20.00	~$0.45	$19.55	-18.7%	2.3%

The sweet spot in my read is the October and November $22.50 strikes. They sit below the last published NAV, below the July low, collect a genuinely meaningful premium, and give you enough calendar to survive one full quarterly NAV print. The September $20 line is the sleep at night trade: small premium, but your breakeven is nearly 19 percent under stated NAV, and roughly a third of what you would own at that basis is money market funds.

The Catalyst Nobody Is Marking On Their Calendar

The March 31 shareholder update was published on May 29, about sixty days after quarter end. Which means the June 30 quarterly NAV update should land in the back half of August, along with the corresponding portfolio schedule filing. That is a defined, dateable event that will replace a four month old number with a fresh one.

This is the closest thing a closed end fund has to an earnings print, and unlike an earnings print, almost nobody is watching for it. If you are selling premium here, know that this date is inside your September and October contracts. That is a feature if you are short strikes well below NAV and a problem if you are short strikes near the money.

Bull Case

The fund is still roughly a quarter to a third in cash, which means the adviser has real dry powder to deploy into new rounds at current marks. The Databricks position is already marked 27 percent above entry, and Whatnot came in through a priced $545 million Series G at a $20 billion valuation, which is a hard valuation event rather than a model guess. There is no carried interest, which is a genuine structural advantage over a standard two and twenty venture fund. And if the OpenAI, Databricks, or Revolut positions get repriced upward at the June 30 mark, the NAV anchor moves up under the share price and the current 17 percent premium suddenly looks a lot more modest.

Bear Case

Three things worry me, in order.

One, the overhang. Robinhood Markets owned 52.18 percent of the fund as of March 31, and the fund has filed to register 14,217,271 of those shares for resale. That is more than half the share count sitting in a registered resale shelf above a thinly traded security. If that supply starts hitting the tape, the premium does not just compress, it inverts.

Two, the fee step up. The management fee is 2.00 percent of net assets, waived to 1.00 percent for the first six months after the IPO. That waiver runs out around early September. The all in expense ratio for the stub year already ran about 2.7 percent. On a fund holding a third in money market funds, you are paying venture fees on Treasury bills.

Three, Level 3 marks can gap. Every private position in this book is valued by the adviser using unobservable inputs. A down round at any one of Mercor, Boom, Oura, or ElevenLabs shows up as a step function in NAV, not a gradual drift. And RVII just listed on August 13 at $25 with roughly 80 Y Combinator names, which gives the same retail dollar somewhere else to go.

The SharkWater Take

I do not want to own RVI at $28. Paying a 17 percent premium to a NAV that is itself a quarterly estimate, in order to pay 2 percent a year on a portfolio that is one third cash, is not an edge. It is a subscription fee for a story.

But I very much want to own it at $20, and I am happy to be paid 5 to 11 percent on my collateral for saying so out loud. That is the entire trade. Sell the puts well below the last published NAV, size them so that assignment is a good day rather than a margin call, and let the 25 point vol spread work.

If you get assigned, you own a basket of Databricks, OpenAI, Stripe, Revolut, Canva, and a pile of T-bills at a real discount to stated value, and you flip straight into the wheel by selling calls into the next premium spike. If you do not get assigned, you keep the money and reload. Both outcomes are acceptable, which is the only kind of trade worth putting on.

Execution Notes

• Use limit orders, always. Average daily option volume is under 700 contracts across the whole chain. Market orders here are donations.
• Cash secured, not margin. A fund with a 68 percent peak to trough drawdown in eleven weeks is not where you want leverage on short puts.
• Size for full assignment. One contract equals 100 shares. At the $22.50 strike, that is $2,250 of real obligation per contract. Only sell what you can take delivery of without flinching.
• Close at 50 to 60 percent of max profit rather than riding to expiration. On a name with this much headline risk, the last 40 percent of the premium is the worst paid part of the trade.
• There is no dividend to cushion assignment. The fund has stated it does not anticipate being a predictable distributor. Your entire return on an assigned position is price plus whatever calls you write against it.
• Watch the quarterly update, not the ticker. Set an alert for the June 30 NAV publication and the corresponding portfolio filing. That number is the only thing that resets your anchor.

Fair winds and following seas.

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Disclaimer: This post is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Option premiums shown are model derived estimates, not live market quotes, and will differ from actual executable prices. Selling puts carries the obligation to purchase shares at the strike price and can result in losses substantially greater than the premium collected. RVI is a non diversified closed end fund holding illiquid Level 3 private securities whose fair values are estimates and may differ materially from realizable value. NAV figures cited are as of March 31, 2026 and are stale. Portfolio and financial data sourced from the fund's SEC filings and company announcements. Verify all figures independently before trading. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Do your own diligence and consult a licensed financial professional regarding your specific situation.

Novel Trading Ideas for the AI Titans: OpenAI vs. Anthropic Exposure, Relative NAV, and Proxy Trading Strategies

A slightly different way to trade.

The foundation model landscape in 2026 has fundamentally reshaped the definition of mega-cap tech. With OpenAI commanding an $852 billion post-money valuation and Anthropic filing for an IPO that targets an astronomical $965 billion, these private entities are structurally larger than almost every publicly traded pure-play software company on earth. For traders and portfolio managers, the challenge isn't recognizing the macro trend—it's determining how to efficiently trade private-market behemoths using public-market instruments.  

Here is a breakdown of the relative valuation landscape and the capital-preserving strategies required to trade the proxy spread.

The Tale of the Tape: Relative NAV and Growth Velocity

We are currently witnessing multiple expansions that completely defy traditional SaaS metrics.

 OpenAI: Following its unprecedented $122 billion funding round in March 2026, OpenAI's implied NAV sits at $852 billion. With an officially confirmed annualized revenue run-rate crossing $24 billion, the market is pricing the company at roughly a 35x to 39x revenue multiple.  

 Anthropic: The growth velocity of Anthropic has been staggering. After exiting 2025 at a $9 billion run-rate, Anthropic hit a $47 billion annualized run-rate by mid-May 2026. Valued at $380 billion in February, secondary markets and their Fall 2026 IPO filings point to a valuation approaching $965 billion. Despite the higher gross valuation, Anthropic's explosive revenue acceleration brings its forward multiple into a comparable orbit relative to OpenAI.  

The Public Proxy Ecosystem

Because pure-play access remains locked behind private secondary markets or impending IPO lockups, public equity exposure requires navigating the massive tech conglomerates. It is a tangled web of overlapping investments, compute agreements, and circular spending:

 Amazon (AMZN): Originally Anthropic's primary backer with an $8 billion stake, Amazon dramatically expanded its foundation model footprint by committing $50 billion to OpenAI's March 2026 round.  

 Microsoft (MSFT): The legacy proxy for OpenAI is now actively hedging its bets. Microsoft recently committed up to $5 billion to Anthropic, coupled with a $30 billion Azure compute deal.  

 Alphabet (GOOGL): Committed roughly $3 billion to Anthropic alongside a massive TPU supply agreement.  

 Nvidia (NVDA): The ultimate picks-and-shovels hardware play, investing $30 billion into OpenAI and $10 billion into Anthropic to ensure its GPUs remain the industry standard.

 SoftBank (SFTBY): A heavily leveraged proxy, holding over $71 billion in total OpenAI commitments.

Equity and Option Trading Strategies

Direct directional bets on AI via these public proxies can subject portfolios to heavy beta drawdowns if the broader market contracts. A sound, capital-preserving approach requires structuring trades that isolate the AI exposure or strategically monetize the inherent volatility.

1. Relative Value Pairs Trading

Rather than taking a naked long position in a tech giant, a market-neutral pairs trade can isolate the relative success of these foundation models while dampening broader market noise.

 The Trade: Long AMZN / Short GOOGL.

 The Rationale: Amazon has effectively cornered equity exposure to both OpenAI and Anthropic while driving massive AWS compute consumption across both ecosystems. Alphabet, while partnered with Anthropic, is simultaneously forced to defend its core search monopoly from both entities. This pairs trade capitalizes on Amazon's dominant compute-and-equity moat while neutralizing general tech beta.

2. Proxy Collars for Downside Protection

For those holding legacy long equity positions in Microsoft or Nvidia but wary of multiple compression or sudden AI capital expenditure fatigue, an options collar provides structured downside protection while maintaining exposure to the underlying growth.

 The Trade: Sell an out-of-the-money (OTM) Covered Call, and use the collected premium to finance the purchase of an OTM Put.

 The Rationale: This defines the exact risk/reward parameters. If the hardware or compute providers experience a rapid drawdown, the put rigidly caps the loss. The sold call caps extreme upside, efficiently financing the protection and maintaining a hedged posture.

3. Automated SPX Premium Collection

The S&P 500 has effectively become an AI proxy index. The companies providing compute, hardware, and capital to Anthropic and OpenAI command a massive weighting in the SPX. Instead of attempting to pick the winner between the foundation models, a highly robust strategy focuses on the systemic volatility their capital wars create.

 The Trade: Deploying automated SPX option rulesets (e.g., selling systematic short strangles or iron condors on the SPX index) while maintaining heavy cash positions.

 The Rationale: AI headlines—whether it is OpenAI's next funding round or Anthropic's IPO pricing—inject structural implied volatility into the broader index. By keeping capital secure in cash and deploying automated SPX premium collection strategies, traders can consistently harvest the inflated premiums generated by the AI hype cycle. You don't need to predict whether Anthropic or OpenAI wins the model war; you simply collect the premium generated by the market's uncertainty over the outcome.

🦈 The Trillion Dollar Waiting Room: Trading Anthropic and OpenAI Before the Bell Rings

SharkWater Trading | August 2026

In May, a private company you cannot buy raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation. Nine days later it confidentially filed for an IPO. Its chief rival, valued at $852 billion, filed its own confidential paperwork the same month and is reportedly holding out for a trillion dollar sticker before it lists.

Anthropic and OpenAI are the two largest IPOs in the pipeline, possibly the two largest in history. Neither trades. But the market has already built a shadow order book around both of them, and if you understand how NAV works, you can trade it today.

This post maps the exposure vehicles, explains the premium and discount math that actually drives returns in these wrappers, and lays out equity and options structures for playing the runway into the listings.

The Scoreboard

Quick state of play as of mid August:

Anthropic: $965B post-money after the Series H in May. Revenue run rate crossed $47B. Confidential S-1 filed June 1. The chatter points to a fall 2026 window, which would put it public before OpenAI.

OpenAI: $852B after the record $122B round in March. Confidential filing in June, but reporting suggests a 2027 listing because leadership will not accept a valuation below $1 trillion. Cash burn is the elephant here, reportedly on the order of $27B this year with a bigger number projected next year.

The race matters for trading purposes. Whichever lists first sets the comp for the second, and every vehicle holding either name gets re-marked off that print.

The Exposure Map

Think of this like a water table. The companies are the aquifer. Every vehicle below is a well drilled at a different depth, with different pipe losses along the way.

Tier 1: Listed closed-end funds (tradeable, premium risk)

DXYZ (Destiny Tech100) is the retail favorite. Per its SEC filings, in January it put $100 million into an SPV holding economic exposure to Anthropic Series B preferred shares. Read that sentence twice. Not common stock, not direct shares. Economic exposure, through a special purpose vehicle, to an early preferred series. That structure means layered fees, stale marks between funding rounds, and liquidation preference mechanics that most holders have never modeled.

DXYZ already ran this playbook once. It spiked hard on the SpaceX IPO filing in May, and now that SpaceX is public, the fund is rotating and the Anthropic stake becomes the marquee private asset. Sell-side estimates put projected NAV somewhere in the $33 to $47 range depending on how aggressively you re-mark Anthropic, and the stock has swung from a 52-week low near $20 to a high near $73. Short interest has run in the mid-teens. This is a NAV re-marking story with a squeeze chaser attached.

VCX (Fundrise Innovation Fund) is the more concentrated AI bet. Roughly 20.7% Anthropic, 9.9% OpenAI, about 5% SpaceX, with AI-related names near 44% of the book. It is the only listed wrapper with meaningful exposure to both horses. The catch: after listing it ripped several hundred percent above a stated NAV around $18. When you pay a large premium to NAV, you are not buying Anthropic. You are buying other people’s excitement about Anthropic, and excitement mean-reverts.

Tier 2: Interval funds (buy at NAV, no listing pop)

ARKVX (ARK Venture Fund) holds both names and prices at NAV with quarterly liquidity windows. No premium to pay, no premium to capture. This is the boring well. It is also the only one where your entry price equals the fund’s stated look-through value. For a long-horizon core position, boring is a feature.

Tier 3: Public equity proxies (liquid, options-rich, diluted)

MSFT is the single largest look-through position in either company. Microsoft owns roughly 27% of OpenAI on an as-converted basis, marked around $135B at the October 2025 recap and worth potentially $270B if the IPO prices at $1 trillion. Here is the interesting part: MSFT is down roughly 19% this year, the worst of the Magnificent Seven, while sitting on a stake worth as much as 9% of its own market cap that the market is arguably assigning little credit. That is a stub trade hiding inside a mega cap.

GOOGL and AMZN are the Anthropic side of the same coin. Amazon has $8B invested plus participation in later rounds, and Google has been a major holder since the early days. The stakes are smaller relative to their market caps than Microsoft’s OpenAI position, so the look-through torque is weaker, but the Anthropic S-1 will force a public mark on both.

The NAV Math That Actually Matters

Premium and discount to NAV is the whole game in the Tier 1 wrappers. Three mechanics to internalize:

1. Marks lag reality. A fund’s Anthropic position gets re-marked at funding rounds and audits, not continuously. Anthropic went from $380B in February to $965B in May. Any fund still carrying the position at the old mark has embedded NAV growth that shows up on the next report. That re-mark is a scheduled catalyst, and the market front-runs it.

2. The wrapper’s scarcity value dies at the IPO. This is the trade everyone gets wrong. The premium on DXYZ or VCX exists because they are the only liquid doors into a locked building. The day Anthropic lists, anyone can buy ANTH or whatever the ticker becomes, and the wrapper’s reason to trade above NAV evaporates. SpaceX just demonstrated the pattern: filing announcement pops the wrapper, the actual listing deflates it. The pre-IPO run is a rental, not a marriage.

3. Preferred is not common. SPV exposure to Series B preferred behaves differently from common stock in a down scenario and converts on specific terms in an IPO. In a strong listing this mostly washes out. In a weak one, the waterfall matters.

Equity Strategies

The premium rental (DXYZ, VCX). Long into re-mark and S-1 catalysts, with a hard rule to be flat or short-biased by the time the underlying actually prices its IPO. You are trading the anticipation, not the event. Position sizing should assume 30% drawdowns are normal here, because they are.

The NAV accumulator (ARKVX). Dollar-cost average at NAV through the quarterly windows. No premium risk, no timing genius required. This is the sleep-well allocation for the thesis that both companies are worth owning through the IPOs and beyond.

The stub trade (MSFT). Long MSFT on the argument that a beaten-down 2026 tape is giving you Azure at a discount and the OpenAI stake nearly free. If you want to isolate the stub, pair it: long MSFT against a partial short in QQQ or a basket of the other mega caps strips out the market beta and leaves you with mostly the OpenAI optionality plus the relative valuation gap.

Options Strategies

Liquidity check first. MSFT, GOOGL, and AMZN have deep, tight chains. DXYZ options exist but trade wide with fat spreads, so use limit orders and small size or skip them entirely. VCX has no practical options market. Structure accordingly.

MSFT long-dated call spreads. The cleanest expression of the OpenAI IPO catalyst. Jan 2027 or Jun 2027 call spreads financed partly by the elevated put skew a down 19% stock carries. The spread caps your cost against the real possibility that the IPO slips or prices soft. Buying the spread rather than naked calls matters because IV will inflate into the IPO date and collapse after pricing, and a spread is largely immunized against that vega crush.

The MSFT wheel. Regular readers know this is home turf. Selling cash-secured puts at technical support on a Mag Seven laggard with a $270B lottery ticket attached is about as good as wheel candidates get. If assigned, you own a quality name at a discount and roll into covered calls above cost basis. The IPO catalyst gives the covered call premium a persistent bid.

Calendar spreads into S-1 events. When the confidential filings go public, the amendment and roadshow dates become known events. Front-month IV inflates around those dates while back-month stays calmer. Selling the inflated front expiry against a longer-dated long leg harvests that event premium. Works on MSFT for OpenAI dates and, with wider tolerances, on DXYZ for Anthropic dates.

DXYZ put protection on core longs. If you are running the premium rental into the Anthropic listing, cheap out-of-the-money puts a few months out are the insurance against the wrapper deflation described above. Spreads are ugly, so buy them on green days when the market maker is happy to sell you downside.

What Kills This Trade

IPO slippage is the obvious one. A 2027 OpenAI listing means a full year of theta on anything short-dated. A broad AI multiple compression re-marks everything down at once and the wrappers fall faster than NAV because premiums compress into discounts. And the burn numbers in the actual S-1s could shock a retail base that has only seen the revenue headlines. $47B of run rate is real. So is $27B of cash burn.

The waiting room is crowded and the door has not opened yet. Trade the line, not the room.

Nothing here is financial advice. I trade some of these names and structures. Do your own homework, size like you can be wrong, and read the actual filings before you touch an SPV wrapper.

🦈 ASTS

SharkWater Trading  •  Income Strategies • Options • Space

Turning the Wheel on ASTS: How I'm Getting Paid While a $134 Rocket Drifts Sideways at $56

Six weeks ago, AST SpaceMobile was a $134 stock and every timeline on the internet was screaming to the moon. Today it's drifting in the mid-$50s, chopping between roughly $55 and $60 like a boat with no wind in its sails.

For the buy-and-hold crowd, that's purgatory. You bought the story, the story got cut in half, and now it just… floats.

For a premium seller, it's payday. Because a stock that can't decide which way to go is a stock whose options are stuffed with rich implied volatility — and rich IV is chum in the water. When the tape won't hand you a trend, you stop betting on direction and start charging rent on the chop.

Here's how I'm turning the wheel on ASTS.

Why the Rocket Is Drifting

To sell premium on a name, you first have to understand why it's stuck. ASTS is caught in a genuine tug-of-war:

Pulling up: The BlueBird Block 2 birds launched in June — the largest commercial comms arrays ever put in low Earth orbit. Piper Sandler named it their preferred space stock and slapped an Overweight on it. The bull case (direct-to-phone, from space, no tower) is still very much alive.

Pulling down: A billion-dollar convertible note raise dropped a dilution anvil on the chart. Revenue is real but still a rounding error against a ~$22B market cap. And there's a Q2 earnings date circled in early August that nobody wants to be offside on.

Bulls and bears pulling equally hard is the definition of lateral. And lateral, high-IV chop is the exact ocean the wheel was built to sail.

The Wheel, Plainly

The wheel is three moves that feed each other:

1. Sell cash-secured puts below the stock to get paid for agreeing to buy shares cheaper.
2. If assigned, take the shares at a net cost below today's price.
3. Sell weekly covered calls against those shares to get paid again while you hold.

Then it repeats. You are, quite literally, getting paid at every point on the compass.

Step 1 — Ladder the puts, don't stack them on one strike

I don't sell one fat put and pray. I spread a ladder across several strikes below the current price, so I'm not all-in at any single level. Something like (illustrative — pull the live chain for real numbers):

Sell-to-open put	Cushion below spot	Why
$52.5	~7%	Closest to the money — richest premium, highest assignment odds
$50.0	~11%	The psychological round number, strong support zone
$47.5	~15%	Deeper cushion, lighter premium, "I'd genuinely love it here"

Each rung throws off weekly or bi-weekly premium. If ASTS keeps drifting sideways above them, every one of those puts bleeds to zero and I keep 100% of the credit as income. The ladder means a dip might assign me the top rung while the lower rungs keep printing — I get paid and I get my shares at a discount.

Step 2 — Get assigned, and mean it

Here's the rule that separates wheel traders from wheel victims: only sell a put at a strike where you'd be genuinely happy to own the stock. Assignment isn't the accident — it's a designed outcome. When ASTS taps $52.5 and puts those shares in my account, I'm not panicking. I wanted them at $52.5 minus the premium I already pocketed. My real cost basis is lower than the strike.

Step 3 — Sell weekly covered calls on the assigned shares

Now I own shares, and idle shares are a lazy crew. So I put them to work selling weekly covered calls above my cost basis — say the $60 or $62.5 line. High IV means even a one-week, out-of-the-money call pays real money. Three outcomes, all of them fine:

• Stock stays flat → call expires, I keep the premium, I sell another next Friday.
• Stock drops → the call cushions the loss, and I keep wheeling.
• Stock rips through my strike → my shares get called away for a gain plus all the premium, and I start the whole wheel over selling puts again.

That's the machine. Puts pay me to wait. Assignment hands me shares cheap. Calls pay me to hold. The wheel turns as long as the water stays choppy — and choppy is exactly what ASTS is serving.

The Sharks Circling This Particular Wheel

Now the part most "passive income" posts conveniently skip. ASTS is not a sleepy dividend stock you can wheel on autopilot. This is a high-voltage name, and the wheel has real teeth pointed back at you:

The earnings landmine. There's a Q2 report due in early August. Selling puts or calls across an earnings date on a stock this volatile is picking up coins in front of a freight train — one gap can blow through every rung of your ladder at once. I either close the wheel before the print or size it knowing the whole thing is a binary bet. No pretending otherwise.

It can be a falling knife. This stock has already put down 36% in nine days on the tape this year. The wheel is beautiful in a range and brutal in a sustained downtrend — you get assigned on the way down, then your covered calls are stranded underwater while the shares keep sinking. The strategy assumes the chop holds. If the bottom falls out, you're a long-term bag-holder collecting nickels against a boulder.

Your calls cap the moonshot. ASTS ran to $134 once. If the next catalyst reignites that move, my $60 covered calls hand the upside to someone else. Selling premium on a rocket means agreeing, in advance, to get off before orbit.

High IV is high for a reason. The fat premiums aren't free money — they're the market pricing in exactly the gap risk above. You're being paid well because the danger is real. Respect the quote.

Rules of the Deck

• Only wheel a name you'd hold through a drawdown. If you don't believe in the ASTS story long-term, you have no business getting assigned its shares.
• Size it small. This is a speculative, cash-burning story stock — wheel a slice, never the whole account.
• Mind the calendar. Earnings and big launches change the whole risk picture. Trade around them deliberately, not by accident.
• Take the premium and stay humble. The wheel is a rent-collection business, not a lottery ticket. Consistency beats hero trades.

The Takeaway

You don't need ASTS to go up to make money on ASTS. You need it to keep doing what it's doing right now — drifting, chopping, going nowhere in particular while its options stay fat with fear. Sell the puts, take the shares on the dips, sell the calls on the shares, and let the wheel turn.

Just keep one eye on the August print. That's the wave that can flip the whole boat.

Watch the water. 🐚

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SharkWater Trading is educational content, not financial advice. Options carry substantial risk of loss and are not suitable for every investor. ASTS is a highly volatile, speculative security capable of large, sudden moves; the strategies described can result in assignment, capped gains, and losses exceeding the premium collected. Strike and premium figures are illustrative — always pull the live option chain. Do your own diligence and size for the storm, not the calm.

🦈 Trading Space

 Trading the Space Lane: An Options Playbook for the Cosmos Watchlist

BLUF: Space stocks are volatility machines right now, and that is exactly what an options trader wants. The playbook splits in two. Around a hard, dated catalyst (a launch, a landing, an earnings print) you either buy cheap directional exposure before the event or sell the fat premium and let the volatility crush work for you after. In the quiet windows between catalysts, you harvest income by selling cash secured puts on the names you actually want to own.

The one rule that governs all of it

Implied volatility is the price of the option. It swells before a known event and collapses the moment that event passes. That collapse is the “IV crush,” and it is the most important thing to understand before you trade any of these names.

Think of it like flood insurance on the Gulf. The week a hurricane is forecast, premiums spike because everyone wants coverage. The day after the storm passes, hit or miss, that same policy is cheap again. Buying options into a catalyst is buying insurance at hurricane prices. Selling options into a catalyst is writing that policy and collecting the fear premium. So the question before every trade is simple: am I buying insurance or writing it?

The Core Traders: liquid options, real catalysts

RKLB — Rocket Lab (High IV)

Next earnings Aug 6, 2026, after close (confirmed).  The bigger prize is the Neutron rocket’s first flight, targeted for Q4 2026.  Over the past eight quarters the stock has averaged roughly an 8% move around earnings.

• Bull: record revenue, a backlog north of $2B, stacking defense awards, Neutron finally in sight.

• Bear: valuation prices in near flawless execution; any Neutron slip and it gives back 10% on a headline.

• SharkWater Take: two catalysts stacked into the back half of the year make this both a premium seller’s dream and a lottery buyer’s playground.

• Play it: into earnings, sell a cash secured put or put credit spread below support to harvest IV and let the crush do the work. For Neutron, a call debit spread dated past the launch window caps cost and defines risk on a binary event.

ASTS — AST SpaceMobile (Highest IV)

Next earnings around mid August 2026.  The rolling catalyst is the launch cadence: BlueBird satellites launching every one to two months on average toward 45 to 60 in orbit by end of 2026.  Beta near 2.7 with short interest close to 18%.

• Bull: FCC commercial authorization in hand, ~60 carrier agreements, a fresh catalyst almost every launch.

• Bear: serial earnings misses, heavy cash burn, a prior launch failure write off, and a valuation that lives on flawless deployment.

• SharkWater Take: highest octane name on the board, and the short interest means squeezes are real.

• Play it: IV is expensive, so naked long calls bleed. Prefer a call debit spread ahead of a scheduled launch, or sell weekly cash secured puts into the fear if you want the shares. Size small; this gaps 15% overnight.

LUNR — Intuitive Machines (Binary catalyst)

Next earnings early August 2026.  The real event is the IM-3 lunar landing; the mission timeline currently runs through March 2027 after a launch delay.  Backlog is roughly $1.1B.

• Bull: now a vertically integrated prime after the Lanteris deal, record backlog, positive adjusted EBITDA.

• Bear: success based missions mean one tipped over lander re-rates the story, as IM-1 and IM-2 taught traders.

• SharkWater Take: the truest binary on the list. A landing is a coin flip the market treats as a referendum.

• Play it: for the landing, a cheap call spread is pure speculation, not a position. For income, the weekly put premium is generous; sell cash secured puts on dips to get paid to wait for a lower entry.

FLY — Firefly Aerospace (Newer chain)

Next earnings around late September 2026.  Firefly still expects three more Alpha launches in 2026, with Flight 8 targeted for late summer.  Earnings prints have averaged roughly a 9% move.  Note it has only traded publicly since August 2025,  so the chain is young.

• Bull: record revenue growth, expanding NASA lunar opportunity, SciTec adding missile warning exposure.

• Bear: wider spreads, thinner open interest, and the market has punished record prints on margin slips.

• SharkWater Take: great story, thinner plumbing. Respect the bid ask and skip market orders.

• Play it: stick to defined risk spreads and work limit orders. A put credit spread into a launch you expect to succeed collects premium with a known max loss.

PL — Planet Labs (Quiet window)

Fell about 26% the day after its June 4 report;  next earnings land around September 8 to 14, 2026.  Record quarterly revenue of $94M, up 42%, with backlog over $906M.

• Bull: recurring revenue base is real, defense and intelligence revenue up more than 65%, three straight quarters clearing Rule of 40.

• Bear: the market just knocked it down 26% on a solid print, so positioning matters more than fundamentals short term.

• SharkWater Take: with earnings behind it, PL sits in a catalyst quiet window until September, the cleanest premium selling setup on the board.

• Play it: this is a wheel candidate. Sell cash secured puts where you would happily own it, collect through the quiet weeks, and if assigned, sell covered calls. No binary event risk until the September print.

The ETFs and thin names: different rules

ARKX (ARK Space & Defense) and NASA (Tema Space) are diversified baskets with lower IV and thin options interest. Treat them as directional core positions or covered call vehicles, not premium farms. The basket smooths out the fear premium you are trying to sell. YSS (York Space Systems) is newer and thinly covered; confirm the chain has real open interest and tight spreads before trading options at all. If the plumbing is not there, trade the shares.

Bottom line

Two clean ways to make money here. Sell rich premium in the quiet windows on names you would own anyway (PL now, LUNR and RKLB on dips), and buy cheap, defined risk directional exposure ahead of the hard catalysts (Neutron on RKLB, the launch cadence on ASTS and FLY, the IM-3 landing on LUNR). Let the IV crush be your tailwind. Size for double digit overnight gaps, keep event bets small enough to lose, and always know whether you are buying insurance or writing it.

Fair winds and full premium. Keep your risk tight and your powder dry. ⚓

Disclaimer: Educational content only, not financial advice or a recommendation. Options carry substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor. Earnings dates and launch windows shift; confirm with a live source before trading. Past performance does not guarantee future results.