$5,442 to $1.57 Million: Did Someone Know About $CRNX?

Hey all,

Hey all! Nicholas from the Unusual Whales team, here!

In this issue, we’re going to cover an unusually timed trade in Crinetics Pharmaceuticals, $CRNX, that took place just days before the company agreed to be acquired for roughly $10 billion.

To start us off, Crinetics Pharmaceuticals is a biotech company focused primarily on treatments for endocrine diseases. On Monday, July 6th, after the market closed, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, $VTRX, announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire the company for $85 per share in cash.

That put a total equity value of roughly $10 billion on Crinetics, or approximately $8.8 billion after accounting for the cash Vertex expects to acquire along with the company. The $85 offer represented a premium of roughly 102% over the stock’s closing price that afternoon.

And investors certainly got all giddied up by the price Vertex put on the company.

$CRNX closed at $42.03 on Monday, July 6th, just before the announcement. The next morning, the stock opened at $83.58 and reached an intraday high of $83.63. It eventually closed the session at $83.53, representing a one-day gain of nearly 99%, with more than 80 million shares changing hands.

The shady interesting part though, is that someone opened a lil chunky-poo of cheap calls just a few days earlier.

Back on July 2nd, a sneaky little bugger slipped in with some options transactions that largely went unnoticed. The contract had never traded before; there was 0 outstanding open interest, and scrolling through the contract history, there never had been. In fact, historical options activity in $CRNX was next to nonexistent altogether.

Still, one trader came in and transacted 550 of the $55C 07/17/2026 calls at the ask for a total cost of just $5,442.

Open interest updated after the trade and showed all 550 contracts carrying over, confirming that all transacted volume from the prior session remained open, and stayed open over the 3 day July 4th weekend into Monday.

Even though 550 contracts is a notable amount of volume for a contract that had never traded, the total premium spent was just over $5,000. With small size compared to larger, more actively traded companies, and such a low premium, this position likely slipped by many peoples’ screeners.

When the market reopened on Tuesday, July 7th, the $CRNX $55 calls opened deeeeep in the money. The $55 contracts that had cost on average $0.10 each reached an intraday high of $28.70.

The contracts remained open until Thursday, July 9th, when the same 550-contract position appeared to come back through the tape at an average exit price of $28.58.

Here’s the full breakdown of how ridiculously profitable this was:

Initial position cost: $5,442

Closing value: $1,571,835

Total profit: $1,566,393

Percentage gain: approximately 28,783%

A little over $5,000 became more than $1.57 million in one week.

Of course, there is no way for us to know who placed the trade or what information they may have had. But I’m gonna go out on a limb and say someone buying near-dated contracts that far out of the money likely wasn’t some random dude in his mom’s basement.

But hey, like I always say… Maybe bro was just reeeeeallllly lucky.

Thanks as always for reading; I’ll catch ya next week with another flow write-up (or random education, we’ll see).

NOTE: This post is not financial advice. The stock market is risky, and any trade or investment is expected to have some, or total, loss. Please do research before any trade. Do not use this information for investment decisions. Check terms on site for full terms. Agree to terms before considering this information.