$NVDA $MU $SNDK $LITE This is a great watch. It is clear that $BX is very bullish on GAI in India (they discuss BX portco Airtrunk) and the rest of Asia.
I have shared this map of global data centers previously. Look at the density in the US and Western Europe compared to Asia. People in Asia (3bn in China + India alone) won't use GAI substantially differently than people in the US. The catch-up build out of GAI infrastructure is immense in Asia, and many of the GAI names you know will capture that business.
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Goldman Sachs President & COO John Waldron: Rooting for the English Majors https://t.co/4GC683nUco via @YouTube
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TOTAL: APPROXIMATELY 4.11 BILLION PEOPLE
The figures below use consistent 2026 population projections from Worldometer's compilation of the United Nations' World Population Prospects. Subtotals and totals are calculated from the listed figures.
INDIAN SUBCONTINENT — 7 COUNTRIES
India: 1,476,625,576
Pakistan: 259,299,791
Bangladesh: 177,818,044
Nepal: 29,629,410
Sri Lanka: 23,348,315
Bhutan: 802,214
Maldives: 531,517
Indian subcontinent subtotal: 1,968,054,867
SOUTHEAST ASIA — ALL 11 COUNTRIES
Indonesia: 287,886,782
Philippines: 117,724,471
Vietnam: 102,177,431
Thailand: 71,559,614
Myanmar: 55,184,819
Malaysia: 36,385,115
Cambodia: 18,051,219
Laos: 7,974,017
Singapore: 5,905,748
Timor-Leste: 1,436,923
Brunei: 469,775
Southeast Asia subtotal: 704,755,914
CHINA AND TAIWAN
China: 1,412,914,089
Taiwan: 23,011,292
China and Taiwan subtotal: 1,435,925,381
GRAND TOTAL: 4,108,736,162
Population source for every country/area above: Worldometer's 2026 dataset.
AFGHANISTAN: AN ADDITIONAL COUNTRY UNDER THE BROADER SOUTH ASIA DEFINITION
Afghanistan is commonly included in South Asia, but not in the 7-country Indian subcontinent grouping used above. It is therefore shown separately rather than silently expanding the scope.
Afghanistan: 45,047,069
GRAND TOTAL INCLUDING AFGHANISTAN: 4,153,783,231
Adding Afghanistan brings the combined population to approximately 4.15 billion people.
Japan remains excluded. Taiwan is counted separately from China, while Hong Kong and Macao remain outside the calculation. Iran is also excluded: although the UN places it in its broader "Southern Asia" statistical region, it is outside the Indian subcontinent grouping used here.
View original →$NVDA BOTTOM LINE SUMMARY
The strongest conclusion from your chart is that NVDA is rallying while the displayed 3–18-month portion of its option surface is becoming cheaper in volatility terms. The breadth of the decline and the lower long-dated IV at stock prices comparable to earlier periods make that a meaningful observation.
It is consistent with improving confidence and reduced uncertainty. But it is also consistent with lower risk premiums, option supply, protective-hedge unwinds, and other positioning changes. It does not identify patient fundamental buyers, exclude momentum buying, or establish a more durable advance.
Your intuition becomes substantially more persuasive when the pattern is accompanied by declining realized volatility, positive fundamental revisions, and NVDA-specific improvement beyond the broader sector's volatility repricing. Without those confirmations, the chart is more useful for assessing the cost and risks of a bullish position than for increasing conviction that the rally itself will last.
YOUR OBSERVATION IS MEANINGFUL, BUT IT SUPPORTS A NARROWER CONCLUSION THAN "REAL BUYERS RATHER THAN MOMENTUM CHASERS"
The chart shows NVDA appreciating while the market assigns lower implied volatility to the options you are tracking. That is consistent with reduced priced uncertainty, but it does not establish who is buying the shares or whether the advance will prove durable.
Your intuition captures a plausible explanation: improving fundamental confidence could make investors willing to pay more for NVDA while becoming less concerned about large price fluctuations. However, several other mechanisms — including option selling and the unwinding of protective hedges — can produce the same combination without demonstrating long-term fundamental accumulation.
The distinction is between the price of risk, the stability of the stock's path, and the durability of its appreciation. Your chart directly informs the first. It provides only indirect evidence about the other two.
WHAT IS PARTICULARLY INFORMATIVE ABOUT THIS CHART
Taking the September 22, 2026 screenshot as the market snapshot, NVDA is at $228.73, and the displayed implied volatilities are:
3 months: 35-delta call IV 35.067%, 35-delta put IV 36.468%, put IV minus call IV 1.401 volatility points.
9 months: 35-delta call IV 37.540%, 35-delta put IV 38.426%, put IV minus call IV 0.886 volatility points.
18 months: 35-delta call IV 38.686%, 35-delta put IV 39.039%, put IV minus call IV 0.353 volatility points.
Several observations matter.
The decline is broad across the displayed portion of the volatility surface. Both calls and puts are declining, across 3 different maturities, and the latest readings appear near the lower end of their displayed 1-year ranges. This is more informative than a decline in one particular call's IV. It is consistent with a broader repricing of optionality rather than a development confined to one maturity or one side of the market. Nevertheless, the 6 series are related surface observations, not 6 independent confirmations.
The current term structure is upward-sloping. The 18-month call IV exceeds the 3-month call IV by 3.619 volatility points; the equivalent put difference is 2.571 points. The shorter horizon is being priced at lower annualized volatility than the longer horizon. That is a statement about the pricing of variability across time — not a forecast that the stock will rise.
A useful comparison is with earlier periods when NVDA traded at similar prices. Around early May, the stock appears to have traded in roughly the same broad price neighborhood while long-dated IV was in the mid-40s. Today, the 18-month call reading is approximately 38.7%. Although this is only a visual comparison, and the event calendar and other conditions differ, it suggests a substantial change in the volatility-pricing environment at broadly comparable stock-price levels.
That last observation is more interesting than simply "the stock rose this week and volatility fell." It suggests that the market is currently pricing NVDA optionality differently from an earlier period at similar spot prices.
WHY A RISING STOCK AND FALLING IV CAN COEXIST
A stock price and an implied volatility answer different questions.
The stock price reflects the value investors place on owning the equity. Implied volatility is an input inferred from option prices after accounting for variables such as the stock price, strike, remaining life, interest rates, and dividends. Consequently, a lower IV does not necessarily mean the option's dollar price fell: a call can appreciate because the stock rose even while its implied volatility declined.
Importantly, IV is neither a directional forecast nor a pure forecast of future realized volatility. Option pricing reflects the distribution of possible outcomes under market pricing, including compensation for bearing volatility risk. Expected actual volatility and the volatility risk premium are distinct concepts. A particular 35-delta IV also reflects where that option sits on the volatility surface; it is not a model-free estimate of expected variance.
Option supply and demand matter as well. Research on demand-based option pricing shows how demand pressure and dealers' imperfect ability to hedge risks can affect option prices, including the relative pricing of different options. Thus, IV can fall because expected fluctuations decline, because investors require less compensation for bearing volatility risk, because option supply increases, or through some combination of these forces.
THE FAVORABLE INTERPRETATION
Consider a hypothetical improvement in visibility around NVDA's future earnings.
Before the information arrives, investors might see a wide range of plausible outcomes. Afterward, they might assign greater weight to a strong central outcome and less weight to adverse outcomes. That could simultaneously justify a higher equity valuation and lower option-implied volatility.
In that scenario, your interpretation would be substantially correct: the appreciation would reflect improved confidence in the business rather than increasing uncertainty about a speculative upside outcome.
But the chart cannot distinguish that scenario from a different one: investors might simply require a lower risk premium to hold the same expected cash flows. The stock could then rise through valuation expansion while IV falls, without any improvement in the underlying earnings outlook. That would explain the observed price action, but it would not necessarily improve prospective returns.
THE IMPORTANT LIMITATION
A negative relationship between equity returns and volatility is well documented, although its strength varies across securities and market regimes. Research also finds that the conventional financial-leverage explanation does not fully account for the relationship. Therefore, rising spot and falling IV are not, by themselves, an unusual pattern that identifies a special class of buyers.
"Steadier" and "more durable" are also different claims. A steadier advance would involve smaller realized fluctuations around the upward path. A more durable advance would continue because valuation, earnings, positioning, and subsequent information support it. Lower IV does not establish either outcome on its own.
WHY THIS DOES NOT IDENTIFY "REAL BUYERS" VERSUS MOMENTUM BUYERS
The distinction between fundamental investors and momentum investors does not map cleanly onto the distinction between stock and options. A momentum investor can buy shares; a fundamental investor can express a long-term thesis through calls.
Even establishing that purchases of shares dominate purchases of calls would therefore not establish the motivation or likely holding period of the buyers.
Your chart is arguably less consistent with an unopposed surge in demand for the particular calls being measured than a chart showing those calls becoming progressively more expensive in volatility terms. But that remains a statement about the balance of option demand and supply, not the identity of equity buyers. Strong call demand could also coexist with even stronger option supply.
There are several useful counterexamples to the "real buyers" interpretation.
PROTECTIVE-PUT UNWINDS CAN CREATE STOCK BUYING AND OPTION SELLING
Suppose an investor owns protective puts and a dealer is short those puts. A short put has positive delta, so the dealer might hedge that exposure by shorting shares.
Now suppose the investor sells the puts to close the hedge, and the dealer buys them back to close its corresponding short-put position. The option exposure disappears, allowing the dealer to buy shares to cover its stock hedge. Those delta signs follow directly from the relationship between long puts, short puts, and stock exposure.
The resulting transactions can combine selling pressure in puts with buying pressure in shares. They are mechanically compatible with falling IV and a rising stock price, without requiring a new long-term investor to accumulate equity.
This does not mean that protective-put unwinding caused NVDA's recent move. It shows why the observed combination cannot uniquely identify fundamental accumulation.
BUY-WRITE ACTIVITY DIRECTLY COMBINES EQUITY PURCHASES WITH OPTION SUPPLY
An investor implementing a covered-call strategy can buy shares and sell calls against them. The strategy retains bullish equity exposure while supplying options and surrendering some upside participation.
A sufficiently important flow of that type is another plausible source of stock buying alongside pressure on call IV. It may reflect long-term allocation, income generation, or a view that upside will be moderate. The chart alone cannot distinguish among those motivations.
DEALER HEDGING CAN MAKE A RALLY LOOK ORDERLY
Long options have positive gamma; short options have negative gamma. Conditional on dealers being net long gamma and managing their exposure through stock hedges, their rebalancing tends to involve selling shares after price increases and buying after declines. Such activity can damp fluctuations.
That can contribute to an orderly-looking market without proving that the fundamental investor base has become more committed. Nor can net dealer gamma be inferred from this screenshot.
LOWER MEASURED VOLATILITY CAN ENCOURAGE SYSTEMATIC BUYING
Volatility-managed strategies can increase exposure when their volatility estimates decline and reduce exposure when those estimates rise. Academic work explicitly studies this type of inverse-volatility exposure adjustment. These strategies need not use option IV; a decline in your displayed series alone does not establish that they are buying.
Nevertheless, lower realized or forecast volatility could generate additional equity demand from strategies whose allocation rules respond to risk rather than earnings conviction. That demand could reverse when volatility rises.
These examples establish the central limitation: the same price/IV pattern can arise from fundamentally different ownership and hedging dynamics.
WHAT THE CALL-VERSUS-PUT COMPARISON ADDS
The put IVs exceed the call IVs at all 3 sampled maturities. The difference is largest at 3 months and smallest at 18 months.
That means the sampled put side remains more expensive in implied-volatility terms than the sampled call side. There is no call-over-put IV inversion at these particular points.
However, the 35-delta calls and 35-delta puts have different strikes. Equal absolute delta does not mean equal percentage distance from the current stock price, especially for long-dated options. Therefore, these are not independent bullish and bearish forecasts that can be directly compared as probabilities. Same-strike, same-expiry calls and puts are linked by put-call parity, with the appropriate treatment of carry and exercise features.
The most defensible interpretation is that both sampled sides have become cheaper in volatility terms, while the put-call IV differential remains positive.
It would be premature to conclude that downside protection has become unusually cheap, that skew has flattened materially, or that crash concerns have disappeared. Those judgments require the historical behavior of the spread itself and observations farther into the tails. Your 35-delta series do not show the pricing of deep-out-of-the-money puts or very low-delta upside calls.
There is also an important maturity blind spot: your shortest series is 3 months. A change in weekly or 1-month options, or in much lower-delta calls, could coexist with declining 3–18-month 35-delta IV. The chart cannot rule out speculative activity in portions of the surface it does not display.
That materially limits any conclusion that the rally is "not options-driven."
WHAT THE MATURITY STRUCTURE DOES — AND DOES NOT — TELL YOU
The decline in 18-month IV is more interesting than a decline confined to a very short-dated contract, because it shows that repricing extends into longer-duration options. But an 18-month option still includes exposure to the next 3 months.
Consequently, the 3-, 9-, and 18-month declines should not be interpreted as independent evidence that uncertainty fell in 3 separate future periods. Removing a near-term source of uncertainty can affect all 3 maturities, with a more diluted effect on the longer-dated annualized volatility.
For a simplified variance curve, forward variance between time T1 and time T2 equals: (T2 times the variance at T2, minus T1 times the variance at T1), all divided by (T2 minus T1).
This is the variance-accounting distinction between the average variance over the full horizon and the variance assigned to the period after T1.
For your purposes, the useful question is: has volatility priced for the later period itself declined, or is much of the 18-month decline attributable to the nearer period?
A variance-swap curve, or a carefully constructed comparable volatility proxy, would help answer that. Mechanically inserting the displayed 35-delta call or put IVs into this formula would not produce a rigorous forward-variance estimate, because the observations sample different strikes and portions of the smile.
The event calendar also needs to be held in mind when comparing rolling maturities. A change in the number or placement of relevant events within a tenor can alter the comparison without demonstrating a permanent change in business risk.
A SUBTLE MEASUREMENT ISSUE: CONSTANT DELTA IS NOT A FIXED CONTRACT
A rolling 18-month, 35-delta series does not track one option held continuously. The strike corresponding to 35 delta changes as spot, volatility, and time change.
This matters because there are different possible dynamics for a volatility surface. Under a "sticky-strike" approximation, IV at each fixed strike remains unchanged as spot moves. If IV declines across increasing strikes, a rally can shift a constant-delta observation toward a higher strike with a lower IV — even without a decline in the IV of the original fixed-strike option. Under a "sticky-delta" approximation, the constant-delta IV would instead remain stable. These alternative surface dynamics are discussed explicitly in Emanuel Derman's work on volatility regimes.
The practical implication is to compare the constant-delta series with the volatility changes on the actual fixed-strike contracts of interest. The chart is useful for comparing standardized surface points, but it does not directly measure the volatility P&L of an existing option position.
WHAT WOULD MAKE THE "HIGHER-QUALITY RALLY" INTERPRETATION CONVINCING?
The next step is to test whether the volatility repricing is accompanied by evidence of an actually calmer market and improving fundamental support.
Realized volatility should confirm the story. Calculate 10-, 20-, and 60-trading-day realized volatility, alongside daily percentage ranges and overnight gaps. Your chart still shows substantial stock-price reversals; a decline in IV does not establish that realized volatility has already fallen. An advance accompanied by smaller actual fluctuations would support the "steadier" description. An advance with persistent large swings would not, regardless of the direction of IV.
The NVDA-specific component should be separated from the sector component. Compare changes in NVDA IV with matched-horizon measures for semiconductor and broader technology exposure. If volatility is compressing across the entire complex, that would weaken the argument that the move specifically reflects improved confidence in Nvidia. A decline in NVDA volatility beyond the sector move would be more relevant — but would still require investigation rather than automatically implying fundamental accumulation.
Fundamental revisions should support the higher share price. The favorable combination would be a rising stock, improving forward earnings or free-cash-flow estimates, stronger visibility into those estimates, and declining priced uncertainty. A less compelling combination would be a rising stock driven mainly by multiple expansion, unchanged earnings expectations, and declining compensation for taking risk. Both could look similar on this chart.
The flow evidence should match the proposed explanation. Examine opening versus closing option activity where reliable classification is available, activity by maturity and strike, delta- and vega-weighted flows, and changes in the very short-dated upside surface. Cash-equity order-flow evidence would also help. Aggregate call volume alone would be an inadequate test because it would not resolve the questions that matter here: buying versus selling, opening versus closing, and standalone versus spread transactions.
There is also a useful statistical refinement. Rather than correlating the stock-price level with the IV level, examine changes in IV against stock returns, controlling for sector volatility, recent realized volatility, and the event calendar.
The relevant question is whether IV fell more than NVDA's normal historical response to that combination of conditions would imply. A large decline beyond that baseline would warrant closer attention. It would not, by itself, reveal whether the cause was improved fundamental confidence or increased option supply.
A screenshot cannot establish whether this pattern has a reliable subsequent-return advantage. That requires a historical test with a clearly defined signal and forward-return horizon.
THE CLEAREST PRACTICAL IMPLICATION IS FOR HOW TO EXPRESS A BULLISH VIEW
For an investor using long-dated calls, the most direct lesson is that being right about the stock's direction is not the same as being right about the option position.
A long call has positive delta and positive vega. Rising spot helps; falling IV hurts, holding the other inputs constant. Longer-dated options generally have greater vega exposure than otherwise comparable shorter-dated options.
A local approximation for the change in a call's price is: the change is approximately equal to (delta times the change in the stock price), plus (one-half times gamma times the change in the stock price squared), plus (vega times the change in implied volatility), plus (theta times the change in time), with additional cross-effects and changing sensitivities omitted.
Using the displayed $228.73 stock price, a simplified Black-Scholes calculation with negligible dividends gives an 18-month, 35-delta call approximately $1.04 of vega per option share for each 1-volatility-point change — roughly $104 for a standard 100-share contract. This is an illustrative sensitivity calculation, not an executable option quote. The calculation uses the standard option-pricing relationship between spot, delta, maturity, and vega.
Suppose the stock rises $10 and the IV of that same fixed-strike option falls 3 volatility points. The initial delta contribution would be approximately $3.50 per option share. The vega contribution would be approximately negative $3.11. The net first-order contribution would therefore be only about positive $0.39 per option share before time decay, gamma, and other effects.
The actual P&L would differ as the Greeks change. Nevertheless, the example shows how a meaningful stock-price gain can be largely offset by volatility compression.
LOWER IV IMPROVES ENTRY TERMS ONLY ON AN OTHERWISE COMPARABLE BASIS
Lower IV reduces the volatility component of an option's price, all else equal. It does not automatically make the option undervalued, nor does a low reading relative to the past year establish that future realized volatility will exceed what is priced.
A bullish thesis centered on a gradual appreciation therefore deserves a comparison between shares, higher-delta calls, and lower-delta calls. The appropriate choice depends on the desired leverage, capital at risk, time horizon, and willingness to pay for convexity.
An unhedged long call can still succeed in a low-volatility environment if the stock appreciates sufficiently. It is not necessary for realized volatility to exceed the purchase IV. But a thesis about a quiet advance should not automatically become a purchase of substantial volatility exposure merely because the IV line has declined.
SPREADS REQUIRE A RELATIVE-PRICING JUDGMENT
A call spread can reduce the initial premium and offset some of the long leg's volatility exposure, while capping the upside. Its actual net Greeks depend on the strikes, maturity, and stock price; it should not simply be assumed to be volatility-neutral.
The trade-off is particularly relevant here: selling a call helps finance the position, but the call being sold may also have become inexpensive. The decision is not just whether outright calls are cheaper than before, but whether the financing received adequately compensates for surrendering the upside.
Similarly, the 3-month and 18-month 35-delta call readings are not the prices of the two legs of a same-strike calendar spread. Selecting both legs at 35 delta generally means selecting different strikes. A conventional call calendar uses the same strike across maturities, and its behavior depends on that strike, the stock's path, and the relative evolution of both expiries.
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