Options Alert: Hynix Contracts Just Launched

SK Hynix started as an underdog in Asia's 1980s tech boom, and yesterday it achieved a key milestone by launching options in the world's biggest market.

American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) on the memory-chip maker started trading on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange last Friday. Its calls and puts followed on Tuesday, with volume climbing past 218,000 contracts. That would rank SKHY among the top 20 members of both the Nasdaq-100 and the S&P 500. (It isn't in either index.)

The launch, supported from the first moment by TradeStation, caps a multidecade journey from the fringes of smokestack industries to the heart of AI data centers. Founded as a division of Hyundai, the business struggled to survive against then-dominant players like Japan's NEC and Toshiba. A big turning point came in 1999 when authorities restructured conglomerates (chaebols) and combined the firm with LG Semicon. It was controlled by creditors for years before getting acquired by former cloth maker SK in 2012.

SK Hynix grew steadily over the next decade, competing with Micron Technology (MU) and Samsung Electronics in the memory-chip market. That period was relatively quiet, with tech investors focused on other businesses like SaaS, cloud-computing and fintech. Things changed a year ago, when the AI boom triggered a wave of demand that pushed Hynix up by about 1,000 percent between July 2025 and last month. (Samsung rose about 450 percent in the same period, making South Korea the world's top-performing stock market.)

Calls and Puts

Calls fix the price where a security can be purchased. They can gain value when shares rally, often generating leverage relative to moves in the underlying stock.

Puts are just the opposite because they fix a selling price, and can generate leverage to the downside. Traders use them to position for directional moves, generate income and to hedge against volatility in the equity.

Yesterday's activity in SKHY was equally balanced between calls and puts. Two-thirds of the volume occurred in the July contracts expiring this Friday, July 17. Other options expire in August, September, December and March.

SKHY rose 27 percent to $193.91. Bloomberg reported its IPO (the biggest ever for a non-U.S. company) was 7 times oversubscribed. The ADRs went public for $149 each, jumped to $177 on their first day and dipped to $151 on Monday before surging to a new high on Tuesday.

The company hasn't yet confirmed the date of its next earnings release, but it's estimated for August 13.

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