CAPR Whale Flashback: A $6.2M Sold Call That Lost $2.1M Before It Made $4.4M

For four months this looked like a bad trade.

That is the part that never survives a screenshot. On March 6, 2026, with Capricor (CAPR) at $27.90, our Unusual Options Activity scanner flagged a sale of January-2028 7-strike calls at $22.00 — roughly $6.2 million collected, about 2,818 contracts on a premium-derived basis.

Selling a call is a bearish position. The seller is paid now and takes on the obligation to deliver CAPR at $7 any time before January 2028. Every dollar the stock gains above the seller's breakeven is a dollar out of their pocket, and CAPR spent the following six weeks going up.

First published: Daily Institutional Flow Digest, March 6, 2026 · CAPR flow on 2026-03-06.

The print itself

Field	Value
Date	2026-03-06
Symbol	CAPR
Side	SELL
Type	CALL
Strike	7
Expiration	2028-01-21
Premium collected	$6.2M
Contracts (premium-derived)	~2,818
Entry option price	$22.00
Spot price at trade	$27.90
Intrinsic value at trade	$20.90
Time value at trade	$1.10
Breakeven at expiry	$29.00

Two things about the shape.

The strike was 74.9% below spot. At $7 against a $27.90 stock, this call was about as deep in the money as a listed contract gets — $20.90 of the $22.00 price was intrinsic, and only $1.10 was time value. A contract like that moves nearly dollar-for-dollar with the stock. The seller was not clipping a little premium at a strike nobody expected to be tested. They were taking on something close to a short stock position with a fixed maximum payoff.

The expiry was 22 months out. January 2028 gave the position a very long runway to be wrong in, which is exactly what happened. Selling a LEAPS contract this far in the money is an unusual way to express a view, and it is why the print cleared our filters in the first place: the line was not one where anyone was routinely doing size.

One caveat we cannot resolve from the tape: we do not know whether this was sold naked or written against stock. Naked, it is a bearish position with capped gains and open-ended risk. Written against shares, it is a covered call that monetizes almost the entire position and caps the upside at $7. Either way, the seller was paid to give up everything above $29.00 at expiry. Neither reading needs the stock to rise.

What happened next

CAPR went against the seller first, and hard.

Date	CAPR close	Jan-2028 7C close	Position mark
2026-03-06 (print)	$27.90	$22.00	collected $6.2M
2026-04-17 (option peak)	$34.70	$29.56	−$2.13M
2026-06-25	$30.40	$25.50	−$0.99M
2026-07-27	$7.00	$4.05	+$5.06M
2026-08-10 (option low)	$3.85	$1.20	+$5.86M
2026-08-27	$10.06	$6.30	+$4.42M

The stock rallied 24.4% off the print to $34.70 by April 17, and touched $35.34 on April 21 — its high in this window. The call went with it, to $29.56, marking the seller $2.13 million underwater. The last close above the $22.00 sale price came on June 25, nearly four months after the trade.

Then the stock broke. CAPR closed at $19.70 on July 24 and at $7.00 on July 27, a 64.5% decline. Our next quote on the contract, on that same July 27, was $4.05, down from $18.00 on July 6. By August 10 the stock was at $3.85 — below the $7 strike, leaving the call with no intrinsic value at all — and the contract was marked at $1.20. At that point the seller had captured $20.80 of the $22.00 sold, or 94.5% of the maximum possible profit: about $5.86 million.

The giveback

It has not stayed there, and this is the number a flashback that stops at the peak would leave out.

CAPR has rallied 161% off that August 10 low, from $3.85 to $10.06 on August 27. The stock is back above the $7 strike, and the call has gone from $1.20 to $6.30 — $3.06 of that is intrinsic again, $3.24 is time value on the 17 months still left to run.

So the honest scoreboard is two numbers, not one:

• Peak profit: ~$5.86M, or 94.5% of the premium, on 2026-08-10.
• Current profit: ~$4.42M, or 71.4% of the premium, on 2026-08-27.
• Given back: ~$1.44M, or $5.10 per contract, in thirteen sessions.

The position is still well in the black, and still open. Seventeen months is a long time for a stock that just moved 64% in one direction and 161% in the other to do something else entirely. A seller here has an unrealized gain, not a result.

Being straight about the denominator

Across the eligible prints we score — opening trades with a claimable direction, aged past our 60-day publishing embargo — roughly half work. CAPR sits in the good half, and it got there by a route that would have shaken most people out: a $2.13M drawdown before a single dollar of profit.

We did not predict any of this. We flagged a print. Somebody sold a very deep in-the-money LEAP against a $27.90 stock and took a view on where CAPR would be in January 2028; we published the fact of it on the morning it happened, and we are publishing the path it took now that there is enough of a path to judge.

What this one is actually good for

A sold call is not a slow bleed. The reflex reading of premium selling is "collect a little, risk a lot, watch it decay." A 7-strike call sold at $22.00 against a $27.90 stock does not decay — there was $1.10 of time value in it to begin with. Nearly all of this trade's outcome came from where the stock went, not from the calendar.

Drawdown is the whole story, and it never makes the write-up. Four months at a mark-to-market loss, peaking at $2.13M, is the actual experience of holding this position. The profit is the last chapter, not the trade.

Direction lives in the side, not the contract type. A bought call is bullish; a sold call is bearish. Volume on a line tells you neither. If you only see that "$6.2M traded in CAPR 7 calls," you have learned close to nothing — and if you assume it was a buy, you have learned something false.

See the flow as it prints

• Today's institutional flow digest
• How the Unusual Options Activity scanner works
• More whale flashbacks