On Monday, Enrique laid out the thesis that Micron Technology (MU) could lose half its value sometime in the next 6 to 24 months.

He might be right. His case rests on supply, margins, and what happens to a stock when an 87% gross margin just… stops being 87%.

We’re going to look at it from a bit of a different angle today. And I’m not even going to touch the fundamentals at all.

Whether Micron moves up, down, or sideways from here, there’s one thing I’m pretty certain about: its days as a rocket ship are over.

Personally, I think this stock goes sideways for a year. Maybe several. I have more to say about why precisely that is, but it’s a long story. We’ll get into it soon.

For now, I’ll stop meandering.

Micron could fall the way Enrique expects, and I won't argue with him if it does.

But what I'm sure of is that it won't give you another 450% run like the one that put it on every trader's screen.

My reason is a rule change that hit Micron's options market on July 1.

Riddle Me This!

You already know Micron’s earnings were absurd. Enrique walked you through them.

Now look at what the stock did since.

MU closed at $1,097.39 the day after the report. Yesterday, it closed at $1,045.56, down 4.7% in three sessions.

The lazy explanation is that the gamblers got bored and went home.

But they didn't!

• Call volume: On July 1, Micron averaged 444,430 calls a day over the prior 30 days. Today that number is 581,825. That's 31% higher.
• Call open interest (contracts people are still holding): 1.52 million then, 1.64 million now. Up 7%.
• Total options volume (calls and puts together): about 845,000 a day then, 948,000 now. Up 12%.

So more people are betting on Micron today than on July 1.

And here's what the stock does with all those bets.

• 30-day volatility:8% on July 1. On Tuesday, 44.7%. That's the lowest reading of the past year.
• Realized volatility (how much the stock actually moves, as opposed to how much options traders expect it to): 131% on July 1. Now 46%.

The betting went up by a third, and the movement fell by almost two-thirds?

How does a stock take in more speculation and move less than half as much?

What Happened on July 1

Micron's weekly options used to expire on Friday every week. Everybody who wanted a short-term lottery ticket on MU bought the same Friday.

Now, I’ve written about extended gamma squeezes before, on MU until this past summer and SLV last year into January.

Then the exchanges got an idea.

In late January, they started listing Monday and Wednesday expirations on a short list of nine giant, heavily traded names, the Nvidias and Teslas of the world.

To make the list, a stock needs a market cap above $700 billion and more than 10 million options trading in a month.

Micron wasn't on the January list. It wasn't on the April list either.

Then the stock cleared the bar, and on July 1 the exchanges added it. It's still on the list this quarter.

Now, Micron's June earnings report sent the stock up 15.7% in one session, and September's blowout got… 3%.

It gets worse when you see what the options market expected.

In June, options were pricing a 9.4% move, and Micron blew through it. In September, they were pricing 6.2%, and the stock managed half of that.

I read this as a before and after.

The June report landed one week before Micron made the list. The September report landed three months after.

Same Fuel, Bigger Tank

Let me explain why three expirations a week could do this, and I'll skip the Greek alphabet as much as I can.

When you buy a call, somebody sells it to you. Usually that's a dealer, and the dealer doesn't want your bet. So he buys some stock to hedge. If the stock rises toward your strike, he has to buy more.

The closer the option is to expiring, the faster he has to buy.

Now picture a few hundred thousand people buying calls on the same stock, at the same handful of strikes, all expiring the same Friday. The stock ticks up, dealers buy, the stock ticks up again, the calls print money, and more people pile into next Friday's calls.

That's a gamma squeeze.

My theory is that a slow version of it drove Micron for most of the past year.

What I love about it is that nobody in that loop is coordinating. These are strangers! The calendar coordinated them.

When there's one table open in the casino, every gambler in the building ends up at it.

Add Monday and Wednesday, and the casino just opened two more tables. It's the same crowd with the same chips, and now they're spread around the room.

I pulled Micron's gamma by expiration to see if the tape agrees.

On June 30, the day before MU made the list, the nearest expiration held 29% of all the call gamma in the stock.

On Tuesday, the nearest expiration was a Wednesday contract holding about 10%.

Friday's held another 17%.

Add them, and you get about the same slice of short-dated firepower as June, except it's cut into two piles that come due on different days.

More than a third of the call gamma expiring this week sat in a product that didn't exist for Micron in June.

Where the Money Goes Next

Speculators go where things move.

Once Micron stops paying out, they don't sit around waiting. Look at just yesterday!

• Micron: down 1.7%
• AMD: up 2.8%
• Broadcom: up 3.7%
• CoreWeave: up 5.0%
• Marvell: up 5.8%
• Ciena: up 13.8%

Net options premium came in at about 36 million for AVGO that day and 17 million each for Marvell and CoreWeave. Micron's was -$58 million.

AMD and Broadcom are on the Monday-Wednesday list with Micron. Marvell, CoreWeave, and Ciena aren't. They still expire on Fridays only, and they were the three biggest movers on that board.

One day is one day, and I'm not going to dress it up as a study.

Where Does That Leave Us?

So here's where I sit on this.

I think what took MU to a four-digit share price was a crowd of strangers forced onto the same Friday, week after week, as much as it was earnings.

To be clear, it’s not what moved Micron at first. That’s more fundamental, of course. But these consistent traders putting money into the same bucket is what propelled it.

No r/wallstreetbets forum needed!

But now that crowd has been split up, and I don't see what puts it back together.