Queued up to add an additional 1,000 shares at market open at any asking price. I would hate to get in a situation (like the shorts will be in) where I want shares but no one is selling them. Cheers!
Dealer Positioning:
NOPE (Net Options Pricing Effect) on Friday was 22x the 30-day median and accelerated through the day instead of fading.
Cumulative net delta: +15.37M shares-equivalent means dealers must hold ~$147M of long stock to be neutral. Firday directionalized. Gamma Exposure of: -$3.99M and today's flow created NEW short-gamma exposure for dealers
Monday 5/4 Gamma Cliff - 5/1 held 53% of gamma exposure. Monday morning starts with chain gamma at ~$2.9M vs Friday's ~$6.2M which dealer hedging requirements halved overnight, allowing the same news to move price more dramatically.
Smart money rolling from 5/15 to 6/18 straddle (likely for potential IV post earnings)
Max-Pain Asymmetry: 6/18 at $10 - institutional positioning
Volatility:
On 5/15 expiry at the 0.15 delta point, put IV minus call IV reads -0.27, meaning far-OTM calls are priced at 27 vol points over equivalent distance puts. SOUN's tail call-skew reversal is the structural footprint of persistent retail call demand.
Volatility of Vol (VOV) - 97th percentile of its 1-year range
Front-month IV (5/8, 7 DTE): ~170%. 240-day IV (~01/2027): ~90%. The ~80 vol-point spread is the steepest backwardation observable in the visible window.
SOUN exhibits IV smile, both tails are bid up to roughly equal IVs (~2.0 at 4P, ~1.8 at 16C, ATM ~1.25). Confirms retail call demand has been so persistent that OTM call IV has matched the natural put-protection bid.
Position:
5/15 Call Options going into earnings (Watching to sell before earnings based on price movement)
6/18 Call Options (Watching to buy after earnings from IV crush based on price movement)
I am watching $SOUN going into earnings next week and wanted to put my notes out there through some analysis I am working on. Seperately, I will have an options analysis but not focused on this one. The stock closed around $9.56, market cap $3.7B, sitting in the middle of its 52 week range.
The business: SOUN is one of the few independent voice AI platforms that actually owns its stack. They run speech recognition, natural language understanding, and their own generative AI integration layer. They are not a wrapper paying "enter any AI wrapper lol"
I am calling this company and saying it is Basically positioning to be the Siri of 2026 but actually licensed and owned by the businesses deploying it.
Customer mix: Automotive OEMs, Financial services and healthcare, Enterprise contact center automation
The numbers : Q4 2025 came in $55 million in revenue, up 59 percent year over year. Management guided 2026 to about $260 million. Adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to around -$7 million. Forward growth sitting near 50%.
At roughly 3.7 billion market cap on 260 million forward revenue, that works out to about 14 times forward sales. Not cheap on absolute terms but reasonable compared to other voice and AI infrastructure names which trade anywhere from 10 to 25x depending on growth profile. Analyst targets range from $9 to 20 , mostly Buy ratings. DA Davidson at 14, HC Wainwright at $20,
What makes the setup interesting
Earnings on 5/7 with an expected move around 16 %. IV rank is sitting near 79, so options are pricing real uncertainty in either direction.
There is also a positioning dynamic worth mentioning. Borrow rates have moved up significantly recently, available short shares have tightened, and failure to deliver data has been elevated through April. Short volume ratio has actually been declining lately, which historically suggests covering rather than fresh shorting.
Valuation is also not obviously cheap. If growth slips even modestly, 14 x sales gets repriced quickly. I am buying the trajectory, not the current multiple.
Risks I am weighing
What I am watching at the print