🪜 SBUX $12M Call Package — Confirmed: the $105 Leg Opened, the $110 Leg Closed a Short

📅 July 31, 2026 | 🤝 Floor-Negotiated Block Detected

🔄 CORRECTED — August 3, 2026 pre-market: the next-day OI check inverted the read on the $110 leg. We published this as a long call ladder — two stacked fresh long positions with the full $11.96M at risk. Open interest disproves half of that: the $110 strike FELL 14,311 → 12,674 (−1,637), so that leg retired contracts rather than creating them — a buy-to-close on a short call, not a new long. The $105 leg did open (+2,472), but only ≈33% of its print was new. Both legs were still BUYS — that part was right — but this is a roll down, not a fresh ladder, and the capital genuinely at risk is far below $11.96M. See the 🔄 RESOLVED box.

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🎯 The Quick Take

Right after lunch on July 31, 2026, someone walked a $11.96 million two-leg call package onto the trading floor in Starbucks — 7,500 January 2027 $105 calls and 7,500 January 2027 $110 calls, both bought, both paid at the ask. This isn't a spread where one leg pays for the other. We originally read it as two stacked long-call bets — a ladder — with the entire $11.96M fully at risk. The next-day open-interest check corrected that: the $110 leg closed contracts rather than opening them (a buy-to-close on a short call), and only about a third of the $105 leg became new open interest. What actually happened reads as a roll down — retiring a $110 obligation and establishing a long at $105, right at the money. It landed two days after SBUX crushed Q3 earnings and raised guidance, and it still needs the stock to keep climbing to pay off. Let's break down exactly what was bought, why we're confident both legs were bought (not a spread), and what the OI check changed. This is not a signal to blindly copy — size your own risk.

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📊 Company Overview

Starbucks Corporation (SBUX) is the world's largest specialty coffee retailer, running company-operated and licensed coffeehouses across North America, International, and Channel Development. As of the latest quarter the company had 41,304 stores globally (16,933 in the U.S.), roughly 33% company-operated and 67% licensed.

• Sector / Industry: Consumer Discretionary — Restaurants (specialty coffee)
• Exchange / Ticker: NASDAQ: SBUX
• Market cap: ≈$120.5 billion
• Price context: 52-week range $77.99–$109.23; the stock is up ≈13.5% over the past year and ≈24% year-to-date through July 28, 2026 — most of that gain happened earlier in the year, and the last three months have been sideways chop just under the 52-week high
• Dividend: $2.48/year (≈2.36% yield), 15 consecutive years of increases
• Trailing P/E: 60.8 · Forward P/E: ≈36.0

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💰 The Option Flow Breakdown

📊 What Just Happened — The Tape

Package printed at 13:03:04 ET, on the exchange floor, two legs, both size 7,500:

🤝 FLOOR-NEGOTIATED BLOCK — this printed under a floor-trade condition on the option tape, meaning a broker physically arranged this size on the exchange floor with a known counterparty, not into the open, displayed order book. There's no aggression here to describe — no one "swept the offer" or "slammed the ask" — a deal was struck and printed. Total package: $11.96M debit. ⚠️ Corrected August 3 — "all of it at risk" was wrong: the $110 leg's $5.14M largely retired an existing obligation rather than buying new upside. See the 🔄 RESOLVED box below.

Both legs printed at the ask (the offer) — the $105 call traded at $9.10 with the offer at $9.10, and the $110 call traded at $6.85 with the offer at $6.85. When both legs of a package print at their respective offers, both were bought, not one bought and one sold.

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🔄 RESOLVED — The $105 Leg Opened. The $110 Leg CLOSED. This Is Not a Fresh Ladder.

We said we would not assert either leg was a confirmed new bullish position until the OI print landed, and we named the failure condition explicitly: "If OI instead falls, part or all of that leg was a close, and the bullish read on that leg weakens or inverts." The August 3 pre-market OPRA snapshot landed on exactly that condition for the $110 call:

What is proven, and it is narrower than what we published. Open interest is the net record across every participant at a strike. The $110 strike shrank by 1,637 contracts on a session where 7,500 were bought in a single print. That print did not create net new $110 exposure — on net it retired contracts. Whatever else happened around it, this leg cannot honestly be called a fresh long.

The most consistent reading — marked as inferred, not proven: the buyer was closing a short $110 call position (BTC) while opening a long at $105. That reads as a roll down — abandoning a strike ≈4.6% above spot for one right at the money — and, taken with the confirmed $105 build, is still directionally bullish. Removing a short call and adding a long call both add upside exposure. But it is a different trade from the one we described, and the difference matters.

What this corrects in the analysis below:

1. "Two stacked long-call bets" is wrong on the $110 leg. The ladder framing survives only at $105.
2. "The entire $11.96M fully at risk" is wrong. The $110 leg's $5.14M was largely spent retiring an obligation, not buying new upside. New capital genuinely at risk is closer to the $105 leg's ≈$6.83M, and even that only partly created new open interest.
3. The buy/sell read is untouched and still correct. Both legs printed at the offer, and both were buys — the delta argument below stands. Open-vs-close is a separate axis from buy-vs-sell, and only open interest can settle it. This is precisely why we flagged the leg rather than asserting it.

The $105 leg also deserves an asterisk. It resolved opening, which settles the direction — but only +2,472 of 7,500 contracts became new open interest (≈33%). Roughly two-thirds of that print was existing contracts changing hands. The position is real; the market-wide build is a third of what the headline size implies.

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🤓 What This Actually Means — Plain English

Both legs were bought — that much is proven, and it rules out a call spread. What the tape could NOT tell us was whether those buys opened or closed, and open interest has since answered: $105 opened, $110 closed. Here's how we know both were buys, and why the two questions are separate.

If someone had bought the $105 call and sold the $110 call, that would be a bull call spread (vertical) — a much cheaper, capped-upside trade where the $110 sale partially pays for the $105 purchase. That is NOT what happened here. Both legs printed at the offer, which is where buyers pay, not where sellers get hit. A seller of the $110 call would have printed at or near the bid ($6.80ish), not the ask. Instead it printed right at $6.85, the ask.

The delta math backs this up decisively. This package carries +792,300 shares of delta — meaning the combined position behaves, dollar for dollar, like owning roughly 792,300 shares of Starbucks stock. A 105/110 vertical spread (long the $105, short the $110) would only carry about +72,000 shares of delta, because the short call cancels out most of the long call's directional exposure. 792,300 is more than 11x too big to be a spread. The only way to get delta that large from 15,000 contracts is if both legs are long.

Corroborating (not conclusive) evidence: a 750,000-share stock block printed at $105.08 about two minutes later, at 13:05:01, with another 398,000 shares at 13:05:27. That's consistent with someone hedging (or partially offsetting) the package's delta right after putting it on. We're calling this a strongly corroborating, inferred link — it happened two minutes after the option package, not in the same instant, so we can't prove it's the exact same trader's hedge. But the size and timing line up too well with the package's delta to be coincidence, and it flatly does not line up with a vertical spread's much smaller delta.

Order type — corrected August 3 by the next-day OI check:

• $105 call = ✅ BTO (bought to open), confirmed, though only ≈33% of the print created new open interest (7,061 → 9,533).
• $110 call = 🔄 BTC (bought to close), originally published as BTO. Open interest fell 14,311 → 12,674, so this buy retired contracts. The most consistent read is a short $110 call position being covered — inferred, not proven, but the direction of the OI move is not in doubt.

Motive read: still directional bullish, but the mechanism is different from what we published. Covering a short call and opening a long call both increase upside exposure, so the bullish lean survives. What does not survive is the "paying full premium for two brand-new stacked bets" framing — a meaningful share of this $11.96M went to closing an obligation, not buying new participation. The trade is better described as repositioning existing exposure down to the money than as a fresh high-conviction accumulation.

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📈 Technical Setup / Chart Check-Up

YTD Performance

SBUX is up roughly 24% year-to-date through late July, but almost all of that move happened earlier in 2026 — since late May the stock has essentially chopped in a $102–$106 band, closing $106.50 on May 20, $102.19 on June 30, and $105.30 on July 31. This is a stock that already re-rated and is now waiting on the next catalyst rather than trending.

Gamma-Based Support & Resistance

Current price ≈$105.57.

• 🔵 $105 — Very Strong support, sitting almost exactly at spot (total gamma exposure ≈16.4, call gamma ≈10.5, put gamma ≈5.9). Dealer hedging flow tends to cushion the stock right around here.
• 🔵 $100 — Strong support (total gamma ≈7.8), about 5.3% below spot — the next real floor if $105 gives way.
• 🔵 $95 — Support (total gamma ≈5.3), ≈10% below spot.
• 🟠 $107 — Moderate resistance (total gamma ≈3.4), just above spot — a minor speed bump.
• 🟠 $110 — Very Strong resistance (total gamma ≈13.7, call gamma ≈12.4), ≈4.2% above spot.
• 🟠 $115 — Resistance (total gamma ≈6.7), ≈8.9% above spot.

Notice anything? The $110 strike — the one this trader just exited — sits exactly where the strongest call-gamma resistance wall is. Read alongside the confirmed close, that is coherent rather than coincidental: dealers are positioned heavily short gamma above $110 and historically sell into rallies approaching it, so a position needing a clean break above $110 was fighting the heaviest overhead in the chain. Moving down to $105 — right on top of the current support wall — puts the exposure at the money, where a stall-and-chop market keeps it live instead of bleeding out against a wall.

Implied Move Analysis

Options pricing for upcoming expirations (reference price ≈$105.56):

• 📅 Weekly (Aug 7, 7 days): ±4.39% (±$4.64) → range $100.92 – $110.20
• 📅 Monthly OPEX (Aug 21, 21 days): ±6.85% (±$7.24) → range $98.32 – $112.80
• 📅 Quarterly Triple Witch (Sep 18, 49 days): ±10.3% (±$10.87) → range $94.69 – $116.43
• 📅 January 15, 2027 OPEX (THIS TRADE'S EXPIRY): implied range $85.57 – $125.55 — roughly a ±19% move priced in over the ≈5.5-month life of these contracts.

What this means — restated after the August 3 OI correction: the market is pricing a wide enough distribution that $105 is well within the plausible range by January, with the upper bound ($125.55) comfortably above it. The $115.47 combined breakeven we published assumed both legs were fresh longs, which the OI check disproved — that figure describes the ladder we thought we saw, not the position that exists. For the leg we can confirm opened, the honest breakeven is the $105 call's own: $105 + $9.10 = ≈$114.10, about +8.5% from the $105.15 print. Below $105 at January expiration that leg expires worthless. What the $110 close is worth to the trader depends on the cost basis of the short they retired, which the tape cannot show us.

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🎪 Catalysts

✅ Already Happened (last 3 months)

Q3 FY2026 earnings — reported July 29, 2026, TWO DAYS before this trade. Per the company's release, Starbucks posted non-GAAP EPS of $0.85 vs. $0.66 consensus (a ≈29% beat) on global comparable sales of +7.9% (transactions +4.2%). The company raised FY2026 EPS guidance from $2.25–$2.45 to $2.55–$2.65, per The Motley Fool. Shares jumped ≈7.8% after hours per Defense World, then faded back to ≈$105 — the pop was partly sold. Important: this print is already behind the trade, not ahead of it. Whoever bought these calls did so knowing the Q3 numbers and reaction, not betting on them.

Post-earnings, a wave of analyst price-target raises landed July 29–31, 2026: Wells Fargo to $125, Baird to $124, Barclays to $123, Piper Sandler to $120, RBC to $115, DA Davidson to $110 — but also BNP Paribas Exane, still rated Underperform, to just $92, per MarketScreener. The dispersion tells you this quarter didn't settle the debate — it sharpened it.

China JV closed March 30, 2026 (announced April 2), converting the China business to a 40%-owned equity-method stake and funding ≈$1.8B of debt paydown, per the company announcement — a resolved catalyst, not a pending one, though it explains why headline revenue fell 1% even as comps rose 7.9%.

🇯🇵 Japan stake-sale review reported June 10, 2026 — Bloomberg reported Starbucks is weighing a stake sale (≈¥400–500B, ≈$2.5–3.1B) or IPO of its ≈2,100-store Japan business, per The Japan Times. ⚠️ Speculative — no deal, price, or timeline confirmed by the company.

🔮 Ahead — inside the January 15, 2027 expiry

The single most important fact for this specific trade: exactly one earnings report falls inside the contract's life.

• Q4 + full-year FY2026 earnings, ≈Wednesday, October 29, 2026 (after close) — a market-estimate date, not yet company-confirmed, though Starbucks has reported on a Wednesday every quarter this year and typically confirms the date ≈2 weeks out. Consensus is ≈$0.693 EPS on ≈$9.24B revenue, per Investing.com. This print also delivers initial FY2027 guidance — historically Starbucks' single biggest volatility event of the year, and the only earnings catalyst these calls will see.
• A mechanical tailwind worth flagging: the Street's FY2026 EPS estimate still sits at $2.39, below the company's own newly raised $2.55–$2.65 guide, per StockAnalysis. That gap tends to force analyst estimates up over the next few months — a structural nudge in the position's favor heading into October, independent of any surprise.
• Annual dividend increase decision, ≈September/October 2026. The prior raise ($0.61→$0.62) was announced in October 2025. A 16th consecutive increase would be a confidence signal against the current 142% payout ratio; a freeze would read as a warning.
• Dividend payment: $0.62/share, record August 14, 2026, paid August 28, 2026 — routine, but confirms cash-return continuity.
• Holiday season, November–December 2026 — Red Cup Day, the winter menu, and peak-traffic weeks. Critically, the actual holiday-quarter results do NOT fall inside this window — Q1 FY2027 reports ≈late January 2027, after the January 15 expiry. Anyone holding these calls into expiration is trading on holiday sentiment and channel checks, never the reported numbers.
• Union / labor risk, ongoing. No first contract after four years of bargaining and 600+ unfair-labor-practice charges outstanding; the union's prior strike began November 13, 2025 and ran into the holiday season, per Labor Notes. A repeat escalation in November–December 2026 is a live tail risk sitting inside this contract's window.
• Japan decision — could land at any point, unpredictable timing, treated as low-to-moderate probability of a signed deal before expiry.

❌ Outside the window — a common misread to avoid

Q1 FY2027 (the holiday quarter itself) reports ≈late January 2027 — after the January 15, 2027 expiry. These calls capture holiday-season buzz but expire before the numbers that would actually prove it out get reported. That's a meaningfully different bet than owning calls that expire after a holiday-quarter print.

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🎲 Price Targets & Scenario Analysis

Using the gamma map, implied move, and catalyst calendar above:

📈 Bull Case

Target: SBUX $115–$126 by January 2027. Requires the October 29 print to both beat the ≈$0.693 consensus and deliver strong initial FY2027 guidance (the Street already expects EPS ≈$3.01), clean holiday-season channel checks, and no union flare-up. This clears the $110 gamma wall and carries the confirmed $105 long well past its ≈$114.10 breakeven — where the position starts generating real profit. (The $115.55 "combined breakeven" we originally published assumed two fresh longs, which the August 3 OI check disproved.) Consensus average price target ($110.39) plus the bullish PT cluster ($115–$125 from Wells Fargo, Baird, Barclays, Piper, RBC) sits in this zone.

🎯 Base Case

SBUX chops $100–$112 through the fall, consistent with the current gamma-anchored range and the monthly/quarterly implied-move bands. In this scenario the confirmed $105 long holds some value near expiration but likely finishes below its ≈$114.10 breakeven — a partial loss on the ≈$6.83M spent there, even though the stock didn't fall. (Per the August 3 OI correction, the $110 leg is a closed short rather than a second long, so it no longer figures into this outcome.)

📉 Bear Case

A guidance stumble in October, a union flare-up into the holidays, or renewed coffee-cost pressure sends SBUX back toward $95–$100 (in line with the gamma support zone and BNP Paribas Exane's $92 Underperform target). The confirmed $105 long finishes worthless or near it, losing the ≈$6.83M spent on that leg. Retiring the $110 short would, in this scenario, turn out to have been the costly half of the decision.

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👥 Four-Reader Interpretation

🎰 YOLO Trader: This is already a leveraged, undiversified, all-premium-at-risk bet by a large player — you don't need to add more leverage on top of it. If you want to mirror the idea (bullish turnaround, ≈5.5-month horizon), consider a single smaller-size long call rather than stacking two, and size it so a 100% loss doesn't hurt.

📈 Swing Trader: The interesting level to watch isn't the strikes — it's the $110 gamma wall. A clean break and hold above $110 on strong volume ahead of the October 29 print would be the technical confirmation that the desk behind this package was early and right — and note that it just exited $110 and moved down to $105, which reads as a judgment that clearing that wall was the wrong thing to be waiting on. Until then, this is a range-bound stock and swing entries should respect the $105 support / $110 resistance box shown on the gamma chart.

💰 Premium Collector: There's no credit anywhere in this structure — nothing to collect. If your style is income, the more analogous play here is selling premium against the $110–$115 resistance zone (e.g., covered calls if you own shares, or credit call spreads above $115) rather than buying these calls outright, since the market is already pricing a wide ±19% range into January.

🌱 Beginner: This article is now a worked example of why the next-morning check exists. We established from the tape that both legs were bought — that part held up. But "bought" and "new position" are two different questions, and only open interest answers the second one. When it printed, one of the two legs flipped: the $110 buy turned out to be closing a short, not opening a long. Nothing about the tape was wrong; it simply could not see that far. Build the habit of checking back before you trust any single day's flow — and notice that we published the failure condition in advance rather than quietly fixing it afterward.

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⚠️ Risk Factors — Be Honest About What Can Go Wrong

• Both strikes are at or above the $105.15 spot. Unlike a deep-in-the-money call, there is essentially zero intrinsic-value cushion here — the stock has to actually move up for this position to be worth more than what was paid, and time decay works against it every single day it doesn't.
• Combined breakeven is ≈$115.47 — about +9.8% from the trade-day spot. That's not a small move; it requires the stock to clear both the $105 support zone and the $110 resistance wall shown on the gamma chart.
• 🔄 RESOLVED — and it went the way we warned it might. We wrote that the $110 leg was "equally possible" a partial close. The August 3 OI snapshot confirmed it: open interest fell 14,311 → 12,674 (−1,637), so that leg was net closing, not a fresh bullish bet. The $105 leg opened but only ≈33% of its size was new. The single largest correction in this article — read the 🔄 RESOLVED box before acting on anything here. What remains genuinely unknowable: the cost basis of the short that was retired, and therefore what this repositioning actually cost the desk.
• Valuation offers no margin for error. SBUX trades at ≈60.8x trailing earnings and ≈36x forward earnings — a premium multiple that assumes the turnaround keeps delivering. North America operating margin only expanded 30 basis points to 13.6% in Q3 even on 7% revenue growth, and the headline 430-basis-point consolidated margin gain leaned partly on tariff refunds that offset tariffs incurred earlier in the year.
• The payout ratio is 142% of trailing GAAP earnings with zero share buybacks in FY2025 or FY2026 to date — the dividend and equity story both depend on the EPS recovery landing as guided.
• Analyst dispersion is real, not noise. The same earnings quarter produced a $125 Overweight (Wells Fargo) and a $92 Underperform (BNP Paribas Exane) — reasonable, informed people disagree sharply about where this stock is headed.
• Union risk sits squarely inside this contract's window. No first contract after four years, 600+ unresolved labor charges, and a prior strike that was timed to the holiday season.
• What the tape cannot tell us: who bought this, why (portfolio hedge vs. outright directional bet vs. something we haven't considered), whether they have other offsetting positions elsewhere, or whether the 750,000+398,000-share stock block two minutes later was even the same trader. We are inferring intent from size, timing, and structure — not reading anyone's mind.

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🎯 The Bottom Line

Real talk — restated after the August 3 OI correction: someone moved $11.96 million through Starbucks options as a negotiated floor block, and the next-morning open-interest record shows it was not the two-strike stacked accumulation we first described. The $105 leg opened (+2,472 of 7,500, ≈33% new); the $110 leg closed (−1,637). The most consistent reading is a roll down — covering a short $110 call and establishing a long right at the money — which is still bullish in direction but far smaller in fresh capital committed than the headline implies. The delta math ($792,300 shares) and the buy-side read remain correct: both legs were bought, and this was never a vertical spread. The large stock block two minutes later is still consistent with that math, and still not provably the same trader's hedge.

This lands two days after a genuinely strong Q3 beat and guidance raise — so the buyer already knew the news and is still positioning for more. But both strikes need real upside to pay off, the position decays with every quiet day, and the only earnings event inside the contract's life (≈October 29, initial FY2027 guidance) carries outsized weight for how this resolves. The holiday quarter's actual numbers won't be reported before these options expire — only the sentiment around them will matter.

Mark your calendar:

• ✅ August 3, 2026 pre-market — DONE: next-day OI resolved it. $105 opened (+2,472), $110 closed (−1,637).
• August 14 / August 28, 2026 — dividend record / payment dates
• ≈September/October 2026 — annual dividend-increase decision
• ≈October 29, 2026 — the one earnings print inside this trade's life, plus initial FY2027 guidance
• January 15, 2027 — expiration

Don't blindly follow this flow. A $11.96 million bet by an institution says they're willing to risk that much of someone else's — or their own — capital on a thesis. It doesn't mean they're right, and it doesn't mean the position sizing that makes sense for them makes sense for you. Size any position around this idea to what you can genuinely afford to lose in full.

Disclaimer: Options trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. This analysis is for educational purposes only and is not financial advice. The open/close status of this trade is not yet confirmed — check back for the next-day open interest update before drawing conclusions about institutional conviction. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Always do your own research and consider consulting a licensed financial advisor before trading.

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About Starbucks Corporation: The world's largest specialty coffee retailer, operating and licensing over 41,000 coffeehouses globally across North America, International, and Channel Development segments, with a market cap of ≈$120.5 billion in the Restaurants industry.

Last updated: 2026-08-03 — next-day OPRA open interest INVERTED the $110 leg: CLOSE (14,311 → 12,674, −1,637), not a fresh long. The $105 leg opened but only ≈33% of print was new (7,061 → 9,533). Title and the "long call ladder" framing corrected.