Wheaton Precious Metals puts outnumber calls 6 to 1 as gold drops nearly 4% and the stock falls 5%

The most unusual options activity in Monday's session came from Wheaton Precious Metals (WPM), the gold and silver streaming company. Traders exchanged 30,237 Wheaton option contracts, 6.9 times the stock's 10-day average, and 26,118 of them were puts against 4,119 calls: about 6.3 puts for every call. The shares closed down 5.11% at $135.62.

What was behind the move

We found no company-specific news. Wheaton had no new press release or filing on SEC EDGAR that explains the day, and the headlines we found on the stock described a sector-wide slide rather than anything about Wheaton itself. The obvious driver was the metals it is paid in. December gold futures closed near $4,159 an ounce on Yahoo Finance data, down about 3.8% from Friday's $4,321, and silver fell about 4.8% to near $61.17.

Kitco News tied the drop to a rebound in oil after President Donald Trump rejected Iran's proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which pushed up Treasury yields and the dollar and raised the odds of another Fed rate increase in October. The Treasury's own daily curve shows the 10-year yield at 5.24% on Monday, up from 5.17% on Friday, and the 2-year at 4.92%, up from 4.81%. Higher yields raise the cost of holding a metal that pays nothing, and a streamer like Wheaton, which pays a fixed low price for metal and receives the market price, feels a drop in the metal price directly in its margin.

The numbers behind the headline

The put volume is large against the stock itself. The 26,118 puts cover about 2.6 million shares, compared with roughly 3.1 million Wheaton shares that traded on Monday, so the put positions opened or closed touched a share count equal to about 85% of the day's stock volume. Total option premium came to about $57.8 million, an average of roughly $1,913 a contract. The feed does not split that premium between puts and calls.

Monday's drop also extends a slide that started last week. Wheaton closed at $153.81 on September 22, so the stock is down about 11.8% in four sessions and about 18% below its 52-week high of $165.76. Its next earnings report is listed for November 5, a date the company has not yet confirmed. Over its last four reports the stock moved an average of 4.9% the next day.

One detail cuts against the idea that options traders were scrambling for protection at any price: Wheaton's 30-day implied volatility, about 45%, sits at the very bottom of its one-year range on the feed's ranking. Heavy put volume with cheap volatility is consistent with holders using puts as insurance, with traders positioning for further weakness, or with existing positions being rolled.

Same slide, opposite skew

Alamos Gold (AGI) fell almost exactly as far, down 5.16%, but its options tilted the other way: 41,474 calls against 737 puts, about 56 calls for every put, on volume 4.7 times normal. Two gold miners hit by the same drop in bullion drew opposite positioning. A put or call count on its own is not a verdict on the stock.

Company	Options volume	Times 10-day avg	Puts per call	Stock move
Wheaton Precious Metals (WPM)	30,237	6.9x	6.34	-5.11%
MongoDB (MDB)	173,838	6.6x	0.66	-18.14%
Alamos Gold (AGI)	42,211	4.7x	0.02	-5.16%
Whirlpool (WHR)	38,345	3.7x	5.24	-0.85%
First Horizon (FHN)	20,292	16.1x	0.003	-1.15%
Boeing (BA)	210,654	3.5x	0.75	-6.53%
Micron Technology (MU)	999,394	3.3x	0.65	-2.77%
NVIDIA (NVDA)	4,200,428	4.8x	0.43	+1.65%

Elsewhere on the list, MongoDB's volume followed the departure of its chief executive for Meta, and Boeing's followed its 737 MAX software setback. Whirlpool drew 5.2 puts per call on a stock that barely moved, and First Horizon traded 16 times its normal options volume almost entirely in calls. Micron reports after the close on Wednesday, September 30.

Congressional trades

Three members of Congress have disclosed Wheaton trades this year, according to TipRanks: Rep. Gilbert Ray Cisneros Jr. reported a purchase of $1,001 to $15,000 on August 26, Rep. Thomas H. Kean Jr. a purchase in the same range on June 3, and Rep. Brian Babin a sale of $15,001 to $50,000 on May 4. These disclosures can arrive up to 45 days after the trade and say nothing about Monday's options. See all filings on our congressional trades tracker.

Sources: options volume, implied volatility and market data via Robinhood; congressional trades via TipRanks (STOCK Act disclosures); filings via SEC EDGAR; Kitco News; U.S. Treasury daily par yield curve; futures closes via Yahoo Finance. Some data may be delayed. This is market information, not investment advice.