To The Moon

$Advanced Micro Devices(AMD)$  

$AMD Passed Every Chart Test I Have. I Still Can't Sell a Put on It.

I've run my sell-put checklist on a lot of names this year. Most fail on the chart. Boeing and SoFi were both trading under their 200-day moving average when I checked, and that's an automatic no for me.

AMD is the opposite. It's the cleanest chart I've scored all year, and it's still a NO TRADE. The reason has nothing to do with the company. It's arithmetic, and I think a lot of put sellers here are running into the same wall without noticing.

Where AMD stands (close Sept 30)

Price: $611.76, up 0.69% on the day

52-week high: $639, so about 4% below the top

Up roughly 280% in twelve months

200-day SMA around $515, which puts price about 19% above my hard floor

50-day SMA around $606, acting as near-term support

Trailing P/E around 156x

Consensus target about $618.51 from 55 analysts, only about 1% above the price

The business is genuinely strong

I'm not going to hedge this part. Q2 2026 revenue came in at $11.54B, up 50%. Data Center revenue hit $6.72B, up 107%, and is now 58% of the company. That segment went from a $155M operating loss a year ago to a $2.1B operating profit. Q3 is guided to about $13B. The balance sheet carries roughly $9.9B of net cash and almost no debt.

Add the OpenAI deal (up to 6 gigawatts of Instinct GPUs) and the Anthropic deal announced in July (up to 2 gigawatts of MI450s). On Sept 28 AMD also agreed to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2B in stock, with Li joining as Chief Scientist.

Two things I'd watch

First, margins. Q2 non-GAAP gross margin was 56%, and Q3 is guided to about 56% again. Revenue is growing fast, but each new dollar isn't earning more than the last one. NVIDIA runs in the low-to-mid 70s. For a stock priced like this, flat margins matter.

Second, the China headline. Last week Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis said an export-controlled AMD RFSoC chip was turning up in China far below its US list price, and he called for an investigation. AMD denied any direct sale or shipment and blamed third-party diversion. As far as I can find, no regulator has acted. I'm not treating it as a scandal, but I'm not ignoring it either.

Why it's NO TRADE for me

My chart gates pass: above the 200-day, above the 50-day, deep option liquidity. Then I get to sizing, and it falls apart.

A cash-secured put ties up strike x 100 in cash. At AMD's price:

10% OTM, $550 strike = $55,000 collateral

15% OTM, $515 strike = $51,500

20% OTM, $485 strike = $48,500

25% OTM, $455 strike = $45,500

Every one of those is well above what I let any single name tie up. To get under my limit I'd need a strike so far out of the money that delta is near zero and the premium is pocket change. That's not a trade. That's selling lottery tickets for pennies.

What surprised me is that AMD outgrew my sizing rules months ago, and my checklist never flagged it. Price gates come first in my sequence, and AMD kept failing those. Sizing only got tested once the chart finally passed. If you sell puts on high-priced names, check this before anything else.

The calendar doesn't help either

AMD reports Q3 in late October or early November, and the date isn't confirmed yet. I keep a 7-day earnings blackout. The Oct 16 monthly is only 15 days out, and the Nov 20 monthly runs straight through earnings. Nothing sits cleanly in my 30-45 day window.

What I could do, and why I'm not

Take AMD off my sell-put list. It's a great stock that my framework just can't hold right now. This is what I'm doing.

Raise my per-name limit. I won't. A concentration rule only means something if it holds on the days the setup looks good.

Sell a put spread instead. Sell the $550 put and buy the $500 put, and collateral drops to $5,000. But that's a different strategy, with lower premium and no assignment, and it breaks the Wheel I actually run.

As a stock, I'd rather buy weakness

I'd love to own AMD over five to ten years. Not at the 94th percentile of its 52-week range, with the sell side's own targets already reached. My plan is to wait for the Q3 print, read the gross margin line first, and look at the 100-day (around $560) and the 200-day (around $515) as zones to start building.

Bottom line

A great company and a great trade aren't the same thing. AMD might be the best business on my list right now. It just doesn't fit inside rules I set to protect myself, and I'd rather respect the rule than bend it for one ticker.

Anyone else hitting the same wall on $AMD, $META or other high-priced names? Do you switch to spreads, or just walk away?

$AMD $NVDA $SMH

Not financial advice. This is how I run my own book.