My Earnings Options Playbook: Showdown During Earnings Week! My Pre-Flight Strategy for NVDA's Takeoff

The fire of earnings season has been ignited! Among all stocks, nothing captivates the market's attention quite like NVIDIA (NVDA.US). As the absolute core of AI, its pre-earnings period is always rife with underlying volatility.

This season, I’m not planning to bet on the 'outcome' on the day of the earnings release. Instead, I will focus on market expectations in the few weeks to days leading up to the announcement. Today, I’ll share My Earnings Options Playbook—a guide on how to capture the 'pre-earnings hype.'

Task 1 - My Choice: Tools and Objectives (My Instrument & Target)
Trading Instrument: NVIDIA (NVDA.US) $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ or $GraniteShares 2x Long NVDA Daily ETF (NVDL.US)$ Short-term, out-of-the-money call options (Short-Term, OTM Call Options).

Reasoning: I chose NVIDIA because of its powerful market narrative. Before the official earnings release, the market often pre-trades on 'expectations'—analysts upgrading ratings, optimistic media coverage, and strong hopes for sustained AI demand. This 'hype' frequently drives both stock prices and implied volatility (IV) higher before earnings. My goal is to capture this 'pre-heating momentum.' NVDL amplifies potential gains.

Task 2 - My Strategy and Objective (My Strategy & Objective)
Core Strategy: Buying call options to capture the pre-earnings upward momentum and IV inflation.

My Plan: My plan is clear: to take profits before the earnings announcement and never hold positions overnight to gamble on the results. I aim to profit from market "expectations," not from the "facts."

Execution: To maximize leverage, I have chosen a high-risk, high-reward instrument: $NVDA 251024 $182.5 Call.

Rationale:

Short-term: It expires this Friday (October 24), with rapid time decay (Theta). This forces me to see the stock price rise within an extremely short time window (i.e., the last few days before earnings).

Out-of-the-Money (OTM): The $182.5 strike price (assuming the current stock price is between $175-$180) makes the premium cost relatively low. If NVIDIA’s stock price surges due to market enthusiasm before earnings, the Delta of this OTM option will increase rapidly, and its price appreciation will far exceed that of the underlying stock, generating significant leverage.

Risk Avoidance: The core of this strategy is to avoid the almost inevitable "IV Crush" (implied volatility collapse) after the earnings release. Regardless of how good the earnings are, if the stock price increase does not meet the expectations embedded in the IV, the option price may decline. My strategy is to proactively sidestep this "black hole." (Note: This is purely my strategic thinking and sharing, focusing on explaining the trading logic, and is by no means direct buy/sell advice.)

Task 3 - Show My Proof
Below are the positions I hold for this 'Pre-Earnings Surge' strategy. This is my $NVDA 251024 $182.5 Call, currently in a race against time.