To The Moon

Oracle Beat Earnings. My Calls Went Down Anyway.

Mathematical Money | September 13, 2026

Oracle reported on Thursday after the close and it was a good quarter by any reading.

Earnings per share came in at $1.92 against the $1.74 the street wanted. Revenue was $19.35 billion against $19.14 billion expected, up almost 30% year on year. Net income nearly doubled, $4.68 billion against $2.93 billion a year ago. The stock jumped 7% in extended trading.

Then on Friday it opened below where it closed on Thursday and finished the day at $152.94.

That's below where it was trading before the results came out.

If you were long Oracle into that print and you're wondering what you did wrong — nothing. You were right. That's sort of the point of this post.

What I did

I'd been building an Oracle position in long-dated calls. Three October 2027 $120 calls in the first week of September, at $48.70, $48.80 and $51.30.

Then on Thursday, a few hours before the announcement, I bought a fourth. Paid $58.55.

Twenty percent more than the first one. Oracle had run from about $153.75 up to $161.63 in the week before the print, and the options had got dearer along with the stock.

Where that fourth contract sits now: about $55.70. So I'm down roughly $285 on it, on a day when the company beat on both lines and grew revenue 30%.

The whole four-contract position is still slightly green — about $1,542 up on $20,735 paid. But that's the first three doing the work. The one I bought on Thursday is a loser.

Why good news made the option cheaper

This is the bit that catches people, and it caught me knowing full well it existed.

When a stock runs into an earnings date, the options market prices in a big move. Implied volatility goes up, and every option gets more expensive — not because the stock has moved yet, but because the market expects it to.

You're not just paying for the stock's direction at that point. You're paying for the uncertainty. And uncertainty has an expiry date: the moment the numbers are public, it's gone.

So for the trade to work, the beat has to be big enough to move the stock past the premium you paid for the privilege of being early. Oracle's beat was good. It was not good enough to cover a stock that had already run 5% plus the inflated premium sitting in the option.

Good news. Lower option. Both true at the same time.

The part that's actually on me

Last weekend I wrote here that buying long-dated calls ahead of an earnings print was impatience with a rationalisation stapled to it, and that I'd probably wait until after.

Then I bought one on the day.

I'd like to say I reassessed and found a reason. I didn't. I'd decided I wanted the position and I don't enjoy waiting, and $285 is a cheap price for a reminder that the analysis and the process are two separate things. You can get the company completely right and still hand money away on the entry.

The three I bought the week before, when nobody was paying attention to Oracle and implied volatility was normal — those are fine. Same thesis, same strike, same expiry. Just bought at a sensible time.

That's the whole lesson and it's not a complicated one.

The rest of it

I've published the full week on my newsletter — including a rotation where I sold three long-dated positions for $117,050 and bought six others for $93,901, and a correction where my own risk software got a number wrong for the third week running.

Free and weekly, at mathematicalmoney.substack.com.

Back here as usual. Anyone else get caught by this one — right on the quarter, wrong on the option? It's a specific kind of annoying. Drop it in the comments.

Stop guessing. Start calculating.

Live to fight another day. 🤙