What move are TSLA and META options pricing for earnings on Oct 21?

On the morning of 2026-10-20, a day before both companies report, options in the Oct 23 expiry were pricing a move of about 6.6% for TSLA and about 7.3% for META, measured by the at-the-money straddle. The TSLA $365 call and put cost $24.28 together against a $366.94 stock price, and the META $685 call and put cost $50.22 against $687.64. This post shows where those numbers come from, how they compare with the implied volatility formula, and what they do and do not tell you.

What the expected move is

The expected move turns option prices into a dollar range. It does not come from an analyst or from either company. It comes from what buyers and sellers paid for options at a given moment.

There are two common ways to compute it. The first adds the at-the-money call and put at the same strike and expiry, which together are called a straddle. The second uses implied volatility, which the Options Industry Council describes as "a measure of how much the marketplace expects the asset price to move based on the price of the option".¹ Both methods read the same prices and answer slightly different questions, so they give different numbers.

When Tesla and Meta report

Both dates come from the companies' own announcements.

Tesla's filing says it "will post its financial results for the third quarter of 2026 after market close on Wednesday, October 21, 2026". Because both reports land after the close, an option must expire after 2026-10-21 to carry the report inside its life. The Oct 23 expiration is the first weekly expiry that does for both stocks.

The worked example: four real prints

As of 2026-10-20, CaymanBot's public trades feed shows a call and a put at the same strike in the Oct 23 expiry for each stock, all four within the first half hour of the session and each inside its bid/ask.⁴

The IV row is CaymanBot's own per-print estimate, computed from each trade, and it is not a figure published by an exchange. The legs of each pair are under two minutes apart. That is a simplification: a live straddle quote would use both legs at the same moment.

Step 1: the stock price

Each pair saw slightly different stock prices, so the example uses their average:

Step 2: the straddle

The straddle is the call plus the put:

Those are per-share prices. Each contract covers 100 shares, so one call plus one put cost $2,428 for TSLA and $5,022 for META.

Step 3: the straddle as a percent of the stock

Adding and subtracting the straddle from the stock price gives a straddle-implied range by the Oct 23 expiry. For TSLA:

For META:

These ranges are arithmetic on prices from the morning of 2026-10-20. They describe what the options were pricing then, and they say nothing about what either stock will do.

The implied volatility method

Our expected move calculator runs a different formula for any ticker: price times annualized implied volatility times the square root of days to expiry over 365, with calendar days. Here are the same inputs.

The average IV estimate for each pair, in percent:

From 10-20 to 10-23 is 3 calendar days, so the time factor is the square root of 3 ÷ 365, about 0.0907. The results below use the unrounded factor, so multiplying by the rounded 0.0907 by hand lands a cent or two higher. With IV written as a decimal:

As a percent of each stock:

So the IV method gives one standard deviation of about 8.2% for TSLA and 8.8% for META, against straddles of 6.6% and 7.3%.

Why the two numbers differ

Brenner and Subrahmanyam (1988) showed that an at-the-money option's Black-Scholes value is approximately 0.4 times the stock price times volatility times the square root of time. A call plus a put at the money is then about 0.8 times that product, which is the one-standard-deviation move.⁵

Both examples land near that ratio:

Some caveats apply. The two IV estimates for each stock differ, with the META put carrying a higher estimate than the call, so averaging them is a simplification. The Oct 23 expiry also prices the ordinary trading days around the report, so the straddle covers more than the earnings reaction alone. And a straddle is a market price, not a forecast: the stock can move more or less than it.

How options traders read it

In general terms, the expected move gives a scale for a report. A few habits help when reading one:

• Check the report date and time first, then use the first expiry after it.
• Say which method a number comes from, since the straddle and the IV formula give different figures from the same prices.
• Keep in mind that implied volatility often falls once a report is out, which our glossary entry on IV crush explains.

Our earlier post on why NFLX options expiring after earnings cost more shows how a report date raises implied volatility in the expiry that contains it.

How to practice this

Open a free CaymanBot account, find the at-the-money call and put in the first expiry after a company's report, and do the three steps above by hand. In the first two Learning Mode stages, each trade on the feed comes with a plain-English sentence you can check against the strike, expiry and premium. You can then follow both legs in the $100K paper account across the report, with no real money at stake. A free account shows options data delayed 16 minutes (60 minutes without an account).

Educational only, not investment advice.