The headline for this episode is Moderna’s astonishing one-day move — up 177% on news of strong melanoma trial results for an mRNA-based treatment developed with Merck, a stock that closed the prior session at $63 and finished this one above $174. Lex and Mark’s first instinct, trained from years as market makers, is to go check the tape for anything unusual in the days before the move: a suspicious buildup in call buying, aggressive put selling, anything that might suggest someone traded ahead of the news. What they find is mostly unremarkable — a few sizable trades near the money, a small long-dated leap position that’s hard to characterize either way — which leads them to conclude there’s no obvious sign this was telegraphed in the options market beforehand.

From there, the conversation turns into a genuinely useful teaching moment on skew. Mark pulls up a chart comparing the volatility skew from the day of the move, the day after, and a snapshot from two months earlier, and walks through how to read the shape of that curve — volatility plotted against delta, from the ten-delta put on one end to the ten-delta call on the other. The post-move skew, he explains, looks a lot like a stock heading into an earnings report: a broad, roughly 30-point spread between calls and puts baked in, reflecting genuine uncertainty about what happens next rather than a clean, already-resolved outcome. His practical read: trade it like an earnings event, leaning toward defined-risk structures like a broken-wing butterfly rather than assuming the story is already over.

The episode also introduces a new recurring segment, Schoolhouse Rock, built around real questions that come up from viewers and customers. This week’s topic is the box spread, sparked by a genuinely organic conversation Mark had with a friend about using one to borrow against a portfolio instead of taking out an expensive mortgage. Mark and Lex walk through both directions of the trade — a long box functioning like a zero-coupon bond, a short box functioning as a way to borrow at close to the risk-free rate — and spend real time on how heavily interest rates get baked into box pricing the further out you go. Lex shares an anecdote about a deep in-the-money call spread order that never got filled at the price the trader expected, purely because they hadn’t accounted for the interest-rate component of the box, a mistake he says is common and expensive.

The episode wraps with a viewer question about the poor-man’s covered call — buying a deep in-the-money call instead of stock to get leveraged exposure — which Lex and Mark generally endorse for longer-horizon, thesis-driven positions, while cautioning that shorter-term catalyst trades call for a different toolkit of spreads entirely. Between the Moderna post-mortem, the skew lesson, and the box spread deep dive, this is one of the more technically dense episodes of the series, useful well beyond the specific stock that triggered it.

The opening bell this week is a deep dive on collars, a trade Mark calls unfashionable until suddenly it isn’t. The mechanics are simple — buy a downside put, sell an upside call against long stock — but Mark and Lex spend real time on why the trade is having a moment right now: with implied volatility elevated on richly valued names and interest rates where they are, the risk-reward on collaring a high-beta stock has gotten unusually favorable. They cite a Micron example from an earlier workshop session where a 25-delta put paired with something like a 40-to-45-delta call produced nearly four times as much upside room as downside protection, a function of how skewed volatility gets priced on high-beta names. Lex also tells the story of Mark Cuban’s famous Yahoo collar with Goldman Sachs — locking in a chunk of his Broadcast.com windfall before the stock fell from the $150s to under $25 — as a real-world reminder that collars aren’t just a textbook concept.

The guest segment features Chris Roland, a former life actuary turned full-time options trader, whose path into the markets started from an unusual angle: pricing index annuities and watching how the banks hedging those products were distorting pricing in things like European dividend futures. That observation — that structural, price-insensitive flow moves markets in predictable ways — became the foundation of his trading approach. Chris describes splitting options traders into two camps: the purely statistical, edge-driven type, and the retail trader using options mainly as a directional tool. He places himself closer to the first camp, generally buying premium and building conviction from a combination of a market thesis and a read on whether the options chain looks mispriced relative to it.

The conversation gets specific on portfolio construction: Chris typically runs thirty to seventy positions at once, deliberately sized so no single idea can do outsized damage — out-of-the-money option positions capped around two percent of the book, in-the-money positions up to five or ten percent — leaning on the law of large numbers rather than any one high-conviction bet. He’s candid that he tried selling premium and found it too stressful to sustain, preferring to sit in cash waiting for a genuinely underpriced setup rather than collecting steady theta. On exits, his answer is refreshingly honest: there’s no clean formula, just portfolio-level volatility monitoring, a bias toward trimming winners before round-tripping them, and a rule about not letting a losing stretch snowball, since he sees his own returns as serially correlated in both directions.

Mark and Lex close out with their usual speed round — Chris naming Vega as his favorite Greek and George Soros as his hypothetical dinner guest — and a Beyond the Bell segment that wanders into golf-course phone etiquette and a very expensive bottle of Sine Qua Non from Lex’s cellar. It’s a lighter episode on structure than some, but the collar discussion alone is worth the watch for anyone sitting on appreciated stock and wondering how to protect it without selling outright.