Nike on deck to report earnings

Nike has been heading higher in the last two months, but still hasn't recouped losses since its last earnings report in June. But option traders are betting next week's results can finally get the sportswear giant's recovery efforts over the finish line. Mike, what's the action on this? Yeah, so quite a lot of options activity. Right now, the options market's implying a one-day move of about 6% and about 6.7%, give or take. By the end of next week, we did see calls significantly outpacing puts. And an important point is we saw that CEO announcement. You know, one of the things we saw was that the upside calls started getting a better bid. And we started just recently seeing an uptick in the open interest that had been dwindling up until we got that little bit of a pop. We saw some profit taking on that, but now some more recently, some call buying. And that definitely was the case today. The weekly 100 strike calls that expire next week were the most active contract, about 7,000 of those trading overall. And that included an institutional purchase of 3,000 of those, buyer paid about $0.42 a contract. So they're betting on a pretty big pop for those to be profitable. I get what you're seeing, Mike, but just thinking about, you know, you've got an outgoing CEO, a new CEO, you've got to think a kitchen sink is in order, and that will be downside for the stock. So it just sort of doesn't intellectually make sense to me. Well, I mean, certainly people are not going to be looking back on the results right now. They're going to be looking to hear what they have to say, I think, about the future. And I think that's actually one of the upsides. It's one of the reasons, I think, why we've actually seen less concern baked into these results. And we're actually seeing more volatility baked into the ones that are coming up, probably because they want to see whether the promises that get made on this call are delivered on the next one. The inflection for Nike doesn't really happen until mid-25, if not a little bit later now. So Elliott Hill, he's a long, you know, he's a longtime member of this team, and he certainly is going to express a lot of vision. There's a lot of things that will be great and exciting and back to the future, as we've said. But yeah, there's no reason why he has to be over-Ebullient here. And despite the better discretionary environment out there and maybe better China, it's not like they're seeing it. I think it's just too much competition. And there's too much competition from smaller companies that can actually really combat Nike where they couldn't 20 years ago. It's so easy. We talked about this with Instagram, with social media, to have a smaller shoe company actually gain some momentum. So if you look at if you look at Decker's, if you look at even Under Armour, which is grossly underperformed, it's outperforming Nike. Everyone is outperforming Nike. I get the whole thing with a new CEO, but this is sort of the same culture that we've been there. Don't we want to break the mold, have something that started from the ground up, have a real new Nike? It doesn't feel like we have a new Nike at this point. And I think these smaller brands are taking share and they'll continue to do so. Yeah. Julie, your quick take on Nike's earnings. I kind of agree with Steve. Like I think that the what's the biggest challenge is just how much easier it is to market to customers and the brand doesn't have quite the same meaning. I do think that they can figure it out. They are so large. It's hard to forget that.