A few days ago, I got it in my head to talk about unusual options activity.

I just wanted to give you a list of what I was seeing in the derivatives market, potential plays, and whatnot.

But the trend I found is much more important.

Now, digging through unusual options activity is tough work.

It’s not as simple as “Someone just bought a ton of AAPL calls expiring after earnings. They must know something!”

No.

It’s more like “Hmmm. Some money moved into AAPL calls after earnings. Okay, was it a sweep that tore through multiple exchanges, or one negotiated block? Did it fill at the ask, at the bid, or somewhere in the middle?

Is it opening or closing? I won’t know for sure until open interest updates tomorrow morning. Was there a matching leg at the same timestamp? A higher strike sold against it? A put sold to finance it? Stock bought or shorted at the same time to hedge the delta? Because if so, this isn’t a bet at all. It’s a spread, a collar, or a hedge wearing a costume.

What did implied volatility do? If IV jumped, the buyer paid up and didn’t care. If it didn’t budge, maybe a market maker was already sitting on the other side. And how much of that premium is about to get crushed the morning after earnings?

Where are dealers positioned? Long gamma or short gamma near this strike? Any dark pool prints in the stock right before or after? Did the same strikes light up yesterday? Last week? Is anyone doing the same thing in MSFT or the QQQs? Was there a headline two minutes earlier that I missed?”

… And on and on and on and on.

You know what? After all that investigative work, the answer is usually... nothing. There was news. Or other traders were already piling on. Nothing unusual about it at all.

Now imagine doing that with hundreds of stocks a day, across hundreds of expirations and strike prices. (Yes, I have filters. I’m not a psychopath.)

But it’s still a lot of data crunching, math, and theory.

That’s why, when I was compiling today’s list, one trend stopped me. It was hard to see at first.

A lot of this is happening in airlines right now.

I mean, hey. It’s airlines. It’s like trading bank stocks. (Are you still awake? This is serious!)

• Delta: 119,000 calls traded Monday. About five times normal.
• United: 73,000 calls traded Tuesday. About 11 times normal.
• JetBlue: More than 23,000 calls, nearly all bought at the ask (just means more likely buyers of the options than pure volume), late Tuesday.

Meanwhile, American, Southwest, and Alaska Air? Business as usual. Someone is oddly picking their spots.

And I think this could be the setup for a great contrarian play.

WTI crude is jumping up around $103 a barrel. Brent is around $107. Jet fuel eats up roughly a quarter of an airline’s operating costs, so the market did the obvious thing: it sold airlines. Hard. Delta is 17% below its 52-week high. United is 23% below its June peak. JetBlue has lost more than a third of its value.

But, you know, the thing here is that airlines pass that fuel bill on to you and me. Fares were up 25.5% year over year in July. United says it will recover 80% to 90% of its higher fuel costs this quarter, and all of it by the fourth. The stocks are priced for fuel pain. The companies say they’re outrunning it.

It could be true.

Implied volatility — how expensive or cheap the options are — has ticked up this month, but all three names sit in the bottom 40% of their 52-week range. IV rank is 37 for Delta, 33 for United, and 29 for JetBlue. Pair that with beaten-down share prices, and the dollar cost of a bet here is small.

The icing on the cake is earnings. Delta is expected to kick off the season on Oct. 8, with United around Oct. 14. JetBlue comes later, around October 27.

All the unusual options contracts we’ll talk about today expire Oct. 16.

Let’s use our magnifying glasses…

Delta

I am not Delta neutral. Delta is easily my favorite airline to fly, even if I live right outside the Southwest hub that is the Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

Delta is the best-run shop in the group. It remains investment grade at all three major rating agencies. And it owns something unusual for an airline: its own oil refinery, in Trainer, Pennsylvania. Refinery revenue jumped 83% last quarter to $2.09 billion. When jet fuel runs hotter than crude, Delta collects on the other side of the trade.

Now look at what hit the tape late Monday.

See that big green bar?

Someone bought 52,339 of the October 16 $87.50 calls for $1.66 and sold 52,339 of the $97.50 calls for $0.23. That’s what’s called a bull call spread, just a complicated options tactic to cut risk while capping profits. They spent around $1.43 per spread, or about $7.5 million all in.

Remember all that digging I talked about?

This is where it pays off. Check the open interest column. Open interest is contracts owned at one time, while volume is the contracts trading. Before this trade, there were just 525 contracts open at the $87.50 strike and 83 at the $97.50. In other words, this was a brand-new bet.

Delta’s total call open interest jumped by nearly 108,000 contracts overnight, right in line with two legs of 52,339.

Is that a stretch? A bit.

The options market is pricing in about an 8.7% move over the next 30 days, which would put Delta around $86. So this trader needs a bigger rally than the market expects.

The good news for them is that the catalyst sits right inside the window. Delta reports about eight days before these contracts expire.

Back in July, Delta guided third-quarter earnings to $2 to $2.50 a share, while analysts were at $2.02. That guidance came before oil’s latest run, so the report will tell us fast whether the fare increases are keeping up.

And look at the chart.

Delta has spent two weeks chopping between roughly $78 and $80. That towering green bar on the right is this trade. It’s the biggest burst of options volume on the chart by a mile. Over the full seven days, Delta call buyers spent about $30 million in premium versus $10 million on puts.

United Airlines

If Delta is the blue chip, United is its high-beta cousin.

It leans harder on long-haul and international flying, and its options carry more volatility, with 30-day IV at 51%. On Tuesday, the stock fell 2.3% to $106.44. And right into that weakness, call volume exploded.

Look at the two lines on that chain.

The Oct. 16 $120 calls traded 33,873 contracts against open interest of just 5,279, and 94% of that volume went off at the ask. Those are buyers.

The Oct. 16 $135 calls traded 31,710 contracts against open interest of 2,474, and 99% went off at the bid. Those are sellers.

Nearly matching volume, same expiration, opposite sides of the market, and both hitting early Tuesday. That’s the fingerprint of another call spread: long the $120s, short the $135s.

Why would anyone want that trade? Because the bar United has to clear isn’t that high.

In July, United guided third-quarter earnings to $2.50 to $3.50 a share, below the $3.60 Wall Street expected, and the stock sold off.

But that same day, United raised its full-year range to $9 to $11 a share. It even said it would beat the top end if fuel fell back to early-July levels. At $106, with a $10 midpoint, UAL trades at about 10.6 times this year’s earnings guidance.

The risk is just as clear. That guidance assumed jet fuel at about $3.69 a gallon. Fuel is running closer to $4 now. If oil stays here, there’s a hole in those numbers.

And there’s a timing risk. If United reports on Oct. 14 as expected, this trade gets its answer two days before expiration. If that date slips a week, these calls expire before anyone hears a word from management.

Still, the seven-day picture is lopsided: about $25 million in United call premium versus $11 million in puts.

JetBlue

And then there’s JetBlue. This is the speculative one.

JetBlue is a $1.6 billion airline trading at $4.32 a share. It’s down about 35% from its 52-week high of $6.62, and Wall Street has been piling on. Last week, Goldman Sachs, TD Cowen, and UBS all cut their price targets to $4. Barclays cut its target from $7 to $5.

Keep that $5 number in mind.

Late in Tuesday’s session, 23,390 of the Oct. 16 $5 calls traded against open interest of 8,179, with 97% of it at the ask. At around $0.12 a contract, that’s roughly $280,000 in premium.

That’s pocket change next to Delta and United. But look at the chart. That green bar on the far right is the single biggest 30-minute burst of JetBlue options volume in two weeks.

Yes, this is the only one where the option expires before the earnings report.

But that doesn’t really matter.

If Delta crushes earnings, if any other airline crushes earnings and brings us good industry news wrapped in gold cloth, I can imagine a company like JBLU will also ride with the tide.

I’ll be watching the price action closely on these over the coming weeks.

Put these on your watchlist as well. We might see something no one (except these options traders) expects.