The stock $VKTX soared 40% – but the truly interesting story actually began yesterday in the options market.
Viking Therapeutics stock is surging by about 40% in pre-market trading after the company published exceptionally strong data on VK2735, its drug for obesity treatment.
The data point that ignited the market is not just the weight loss – but the ability to maintain it even when significantly reducing treatment frequency.
Patients who received an injection once a week and switched to an injection once every two weeks maintained about 97% of the weight loss recorded at the start of treatment for 12 weeks.
When switching to an injection once a month, about 90% of the weight loss was maintained.
Before the maintenance phase, patients lost about 16% to 19% of their body weight over 21 weeks.
And in a small group that continued to receive 17.5 mg once a week, the weight loss reached about 22% by week 33 – with no clear sign of plateauing.
The safety profile also appeared positive: the company reported gastrointestinal side effects at a level similar to placebo and a low treatment discontinuation rate.
What's next? Viking also plans to test an oral maintenance treatment, while VK2735 is advancing in Phase 3 trials.
So far – excellent news.
But there's a much more interesting question.
Did someone see this coming?
Yesterday, even before the data release, unusual activity appeared in $VKTX options.
According to trading data, on September 21, unusual activity was recorded in call options with a strike price of $30 expiring on October 16.
5,305 contracts were traded against only 650 contracts of open interest, with a volume-to-open-interest ratio of 8.16 and classified as a bullish trade.
A mysterious whale paid a premium of $1.6 million for these options.
And that's already interesting.
This involves an expiration in about 3.5 weeks – precisely around the timeframe where an investor expecting a significant catalyst would want to be positioned.
Then morning arrives:
VK2735 provides strong maintenance data.
The stock surges by about 40%.
And the bullish options purchased the day before suddenly become a story in themselves.
People see a headline about a stock soaring 40%, but they don't understand that the most interesting part is not that the stock soared today.
The interesting part is that someone was willing to pay hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, for bullish exposure just before the story broke.
If it was simply speculation – it was speculation with almost cinematic timing.
If the trades were based on information not accessible to the public – that's an entirely different question.
Meanwhile, one thing is clear: the whale entered the water just before the sea began to boil.