Dell's pricing power and server ownership allow it to offset costs; data center revenue guidance is expected to increase significantly beyond $60 billion.

it's a down day for a lot of the AI trade, Dell included. But we do have Dell reporting later today. So, let's go inside out and preview that report.

What are we expecting from Dell tonight? I mean, what have they got to say? Are we going to keep seeing AI demand offsetting the memory pressures? I do think Dell is in a very good position to figure out a way to offset that.

You know, they're the largest of those uh kind of OEM system integrators uh in this space and they have a lot more pricing power than some of the smaller some of the smaller options.

Um, I I do think them owning the server business outright is is a big advantage.

it gives an advantage to to somebody like Dell right there's big big improvements that we're seeing even in the testing we're doing with our pinnacle benchmark about like you know how much benefit you can get uh performance and and act real action per per dollar you spend when doing on prim versus like the cloud hyperscalers and I Dell is going to be able to lean into that much more heavily in the next quarter.

listening to some of the the the language that Jeff Clark has used from Dell, he's talking about demand is accelerating meaningfully, right, and outpacing supply. So, I still continue that to believe that that backlog will probably grow over the next quarter when they talk to us tonight.

this the $60 billion forecast that they have for their data center revenue seems low and uh I think you're already seeing some of the some of the analysts in the market kind of creep that up a little bit.

I think we've seen 65 billion as kind of uh one of the consensus numbers. I I think based on what we've seen out of Nvidia uh just from last week that that number should go up uh pretty significantly.

any improvement over what they had last quarter would be good. I know they they were they've been compressed a little bit. I think they're in the 17% range, which again, as a as a system builder and OEM that is pressured by memory costs.

Uh, that that's pretty tough to do. But I think Dell has the advantage of of selling a lot of attach to these server infrastructure deployments, a lot of networking, a lot of storage, a lot of services that can help improve those margins quite a bit.

So at least a few points I think would be on the table.

And I mean this is up what 250% year to date. Um I mean how much of this has been priced in the good news. Um because obviously we've set a pretty high bar this time around.

I think it's all about you know we we expect a beat in a raise. It's the dramatic nature of whatever the raise happens to be. I still think there's room for this to increase just like I think we saw a really good day for Nvidia after its earnings announcements.

You know, today is a little bit of an exception. Obviously, everything kind of in the red, but I I would expect Dell to to still have quite a bit of room to grow.

just walk us through an example trade on Dell ahead of this print. Yeah, that's part of the scary thing with uh you know a stock that's up 250% so far in 2026, up over 550% from 3 years ago.

Um so that's a concern when you look at it. Yeah, they're growing into maybe their new multiple. But at the same time, when you have a stock that's gone parabolic like this, you got to take that into uh consideration where hey, even if they hit on every metric and raise guidance that the stock might not go higher, but you can still use the option market to create some leverage.

This is a high price stock, right? $440 or so. Um so using the option market to take a directional bias might make sense as opposed to trading the stock at this point.

option market pricing in about a plus or minus 8 and a half nine% move in either direction on a one day uh basis. So uh I looked at something shortterm out in the September 4th weekly options that expire in just three days.

Uh and you can take a directional bias where you don't have to be aggressive. You can be passive and this is a short put vertical that's neutral to bullish selling the out of the money 405 strike put and then buying the 395 strike put.

So a short $10 wide neutral to bullish put vertical. you're collecting roughly about a 250 credit. Uh so that's what you can make, $250 per spread with about $750 in risk. So you've got a lot more risk than a reward, but you've got a probability that that short 405 strike will be out of the money at expiration of about 73%.

So the stock goes higher, stock consolidates, stock goes lower, but remains above the break even of 40250 to the downside, you're going to be profitable uh on this type of trade.

So, while you know we've seen 250% gains for the stock, if you're still bullish on the name, but you don't want to be aggressive by buying a call or buying a call vertical, you can sell a short put vertical that is about one standard deviation uh move to the downside uh before you get hurt on this.

Now, I mentioned the fact that you've got $750 in risk to make only $250. I mentioned those higher probabilities of success. implied volatility levels really elevated going into this report.

We'll see that V crush post earnings also um where even if the stock goes down, we're going to see a V crush because the event risk is passed on that. And the idea here is to let this go out worthless and the stock remains above 405.

But even if it does fall, the stock or the uh vertical price will contract. You can buy it back cheaper if as long as it remains above that 40250 break even.

Ahead of Dell's print later tonight, watching AI demand, we're watching the server demand. We're watching those margins as well, the backlog. They're all the metrics to keep an eye on. As Ryan pointed out there,