Options Overpriced Earnings Moves 57% of the Time. It Still Wasn't an Edge.

"Options overprice earnings" is one of the few things retail and institutional

traders agree on. So we tested it properly: 2,422 earnings prints across 129

liquid optionable US stocks, January 2007 through August 2026, comparing the

options-implied expected move going in against the realised one-day move coming

out.

The headline confirms the folklore. **57.4% of the time, the stock moved less

than the options priced in.**

Then the number that matters, which points the other way.

### A 57% win rate that nets 0.28 points

Sell the straddle every time and collect, then. Except the wins are smaller than

the losses:

|---|---|---|---|---|

| Options overpriced | 1,391 (57.4%) | 8.10% | 3.77% | +4.33 pts |

| Options underpriced | 1,031 (42.6%) | 6.92% | 12.11% | −5.19 pts |

| Net, per print | 2,422 | 7.60% | 7.32% | +0.28 pts |

You win 57% of the time and clear 0.28 percentage points per print — before

commissions, before slippage, before assignment risk.

The market is not mispricing earnings. It is pricing them almost exactly right,

and paying you a rounding error to carry the tail.

### The distribution is barbelled, not clustered

If implied vol were merely a little rich, actual moves would bunch just under

1.0× implied. They do not:

| Actual ÷ implied | Share of prints |

|---|---|

| 0 – 0.25× | 15.9% |

| 0.25 – 0.5× | 14.9% |

| 0.5 – 0.75× | 14.2% |

| 0.75 – 1× | 12.5% |

| 1 – 1.5× | 18.3% |

| 1.5 – 2× | 13.0% |

| 2 – 3× | 8.3% |

| 3×+ | 3.0% |

**30.8% of prints came in under half the implied move. Another 11.3% more than

doubled it.** Both tails are fat. The average is a fiction that describes almost

no individual report.

### It has been getting worse for buyers

|---|---|---|---|

| 2026 (YTD) | 339 | 59.3% | 0.78 |

| 2025 | 512 | 59.8% | 0.81 |

| 2024 | 507 | 52.1% | 0.95 |

| 2023 | 478 | 57.1% | 0.85 |

| 2022 | 424 | 58.3% | 0.84 |

2025 and 2026 are the most overpriced years in the sample. 2024 was close to a

coin flip at a 0.95 median ratio.

### The dispersion is where the information is

The aggregate hides everything useful. Per-name, the same test produces genuinely

different answers.

Most consistently overpriced:

- HUT — 18 reports, 78% overpriced. Options have priced an average ±27.2%

move; the stock has averaged 9.1%. Median ratio 0.37.

- RKLB — 18 reports, 67% overpriced.

Most consistently underpriced:

- SHOP — 19 reports, only 26% overpriced. Implied 9.1%, actual 14.2%.

Median ratio 1.71.

- MDB — 18 reports, 22% overpriced. Implied 11.8%, actual 18.2%.

- TSLA — 19 reports, 37% overpriced. Implied 6.2%, actual 8.9%.

Selling premium into SHOP or MDB earnings is not the same trade as selling it

into HUT, and the 57.4% aggregate tells you nothing about which one you are in.

### The misses that pay for the strategy

2026's largest single-print errors, all in the direction that hurts sellers:

|---|---|---|---|---|

| SLB | 2026-07-24 | ±2.4% | +11.0% | 4.6× |

| RKLB | 2026-05-07 | ±7.4% | +34.2% | 4.6× |

| HUT | 2026-05-06 | ±8.5% | +35.3% | 4.2× |

| UNH | 2026-01-27 | ±5.1% | −19.6% | — |

Note that HUT appears both as the most reliably overpriced name in the sample

and as one of the year's biggest upside misses. That is what a fat tail looks

like from the inside.