The price has already moved. The headline is still being written.

Every move has something underneath it.

A drug that works. A plant that stops taking orders. The market hears these early and starts paying days before anyone explains why. Each morning the desk takes one of those moves and finds the event under it.

In 2025, 15.2 billion options contracts traded on U.S. exchanges, up from 12.2 billion in 2024. Source: OCC.

Each issue says how much of the reason is on the record.

• Some mornings the reason sits in a filing, and the issue tells you when it went public.
• Most mornings part of it is proven. The issue names that part and calls the rest a guess.
• And when nothing real sits under the move, you still get a full issue: what pushed the price, and who got paid for it.

Each story stops on a date.

The last paragraph is the day that settles the story and what to look for on it. Under it come the companies standing in that story, by ticker, with one line on why each is there.