Amazon Bulls Hold on to $250 Calls as E-Commerce Giant Clears an Overhang: Options Chatter

Shares rose 1% to $220.35 Friday, outpacing the 0.4% gain for the tech heavy after the company that’s also the market leader in cloud services agreed to pay $2.5 billion in penalties and refund to settle a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. That ends the case that accused Amazon of misleading millions of customers into signing up for Prime and making it intentionally difficult for them to cancel the service.

The market is “likely reflecting relief that a regulatory overhang has been removed,” CFRA analyst Arun Sundaram wrote in a note yesterday when the settlement was first reported. “The $2.5B in fines and refunds is modest relative to AMZN’s free cash flow, which we forecast can more than double in 2026 to about $60B and exceed $70B by 2027.”

Call options that give their holders the right to buy the stock at $250 each by Oct. 10 remained the most popular, with open interest, or the outstanding contracts still at 50,638, the most of any options tied to Amazon.

The open interest stayed above 50,000 contracts even after the shares slipped in 10 of the past 18 trading days as it struggled to rise above its all-time high. Amazon has remained relatively flat so far this year, the worst performance among the Magnificent Seven stocks.

Still, six of the nine unusual activities in Amazon options were bullish, reflecting the same positive sentiment seen in nine of the 15 most common technical indicators on the moomoo app.