The Disappearing Defense

The Message Disappeared

A teenager opens Snapchat, taps a contact, and buys what looks like a Percocet. The pill arrives. The conversation vanishes within 24 hours, deleted from Snapchat’s servers by default. The fentanyl doesn’t vanish.

More than 60 families have filed lawsuits alleging their children died from drugs purchased through Snapchat. According to the plaintiffs’ 205-page complaint, filed in Los Angeles state court in April 2023, Snapchat was a conduit for over 75% of fentanyl poisoning deaths among 13-to-18-year-olds who connected with dealers through social media between 2020 and 2022 (complaint obtained by ABC News, February 2023). That’s an allegation from plaintiffs’ filings, not an independently verified statistic. But it’s an allegation that judges are letting proceed to discovery, and the court dockets keep growing.

The Fortress

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been the foundation of social media investing since 1996. The principle is simple: platforms are not publishers. If a user posts something illegal, harmful, or actionable, the platform that hosted the post is shielded from liability. For 30 years, this shield has turned back every significant legal challenge the social media industry has faced. Meta, Alphabet, and Snap have all relied on it. Courts have upheld it consistently across jurisdictions.

In the analyst coverage I’ve read, the fentanyl lawsuits don’t even get their own section. They’re a footnote, if they appear at all. Snap Inc. (NYSE: SNAP) carries roughly an $8.6 billion market cap with more than 20 active federal product liability lawsuits on the docket. The liability discount the market assigns to the fentanyl cases is, for practical purposes, zero.

The market may be right. Section 230 has survived challenges from every direction for nearly three decades. But the families’ lawyers built their case around a distinction that most 230 analyses don’t address.

The Crack

The standard Section 230 defense works like this: drug-related messages on Snapchat are user-generated content. Snap didn’t write them, didn’t endorse them, didn’t direct them. Under 230, the platform is not the publisher. Case dismissed.

The families’ lawyers aren’t making that argument. They’re not suing over the drug messages at all.

They’re suing over the disappearing messages feature itself.

The legal theory reframes Snapchat’s core design as a defective product. The auto-delete function doesn’t just make conversations ephemeral for privacy. It foreseeably destroys evidence of drug transactions, making the platform structurally useful for dealing. The families argue this is a product liability claim, not a content moderation claim, and Section 230 doesn’t cover product design.

Think of it like an automobile. A car manufacturer isn’t liable for where you drive. But if the brakes fail because of a design flaw, that’s a product defect regardless of what the driver was doing. The families argue disappearing messages are the defective brakes: a design choice that foreseeably enables harm.

The theory has a precedent most analysts haven’t connected to the fentanyl cases.

In 2021, the Ninth Circuit ruled in Lemmon v. Snap Inc. (995 F.3d 1085) that Section 230 did not shield Snap from a lawsuit over its Speed Filter, a built-in speedometer overlay that three teenagers were using when they crashed at over 100 mph. All three died. The court held that the claim targeted Snap’s own product design, not third-party content, and that the duty Snap allegedly violated “sprang from its distinct capacity as a product designer” (Lemmon v. Snap, 9th Cir. 2021). The Ninth Circuit covers California, where Snap is headquartered and where most of the fentanyl cases are being litigated.

Lemmon was about a content creation tool (the speedometer overlay). The fentanyl families are extending that reasoning to an architectural choice (ephemeral messaging). The doctrinal move is the same: first-party product design, not third-party content. But the factual step from “Snap designed a speedometer” to “Snap designed messages to disappear” is meaningful, and no court has ruled on that extension at the appellate level yet.

At the trial court level, the extension is winning. In January 2024, California Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff ruled in Neville v. Snap (Case No. 22STCV33500, L.A. County Superior Court) that Snap must face claims from the 60-plus fentanyl families. Section 230, he wrote, does not shield design defects. He identified “numerous design decisions” that could have contributed to overdose deaths, including ineffective age verification, lack of parental controls, and the Quick Add feature, a “people you may know” suggestion engine that plaintiffs allege helped connect dealers with teenage buyers (Bloomberg, 2024).

Snap appealed. In December 2024, a California state appeals court denied the appeal, letting the case proceed to discovery. That’s two levels of the California state judiciary reaching the same conclusion: design-defect claims targeting ephemeral messaging can move forward.

Separately, in August 2024, the Third Circuit allowed a design-defect claim to proceed against TikTok in Anderson v. TikTok, applying similar reasoning about product design and Section 230 (Anderson v. TikTok, 3d Cir. 2024). That case involves recommendation algorithms, not ephemeral messaging, so the doctrinal move (first-party design, not content) is the same even though the specific feature differs.

The risk to the thesis is real: no court has specifically ruled at the appellate level that ephemeral messaging qualifies as a design defect under this framework. But the Ninth Circuit already established in Lemmon that Snap’s own design choices are fair game. Trial courts are extending that principle to disappearing messages, and appeals courts in two circuits are receptive to the broader theory.

If the design-defect theory holds, it has implications beyond Snap. Any platform with features that foreseeably enable harm could face similar claims. But broadening the frame too far is a mistake for investment purposes. The fentanyl cases target one feature on one platform, brought by families with names and children who died. The broader constitutional question is interesting. The trade is about SNAP.

What Snap Knew

Product liability claims require more than a design flaw. They require foreseeability: did the manufacturer know, or should it have known, that the design was dangerous?

In 2019, a security company advising Snap delivered a presentation that included a specific finding: “It takes under a minute to use Snapchat to be in a position to purchase illegal and harmful substances” (Bloomberg, 2024). That sentence is now in the court record. Snap says it cannot comment on internal records because of the pending litigation, but the document’s existence is not disputed.

The New Mexico Attorney General’s complaint, filed with unusually aggressive redactions stripped, went further. It cited internal documents showing that Snapchat’s Discover feed, the content stream the app actively curates and promotes, was surfacing posts by drug dealers who used Snapchat Stories to advertise product. The complaint also alleged that Snap’s own internal platform review found millions of drug and gun dealer accounts operating on the platform undetected (New Mexico DOJ, press release; TechPolicy.Press analysis). That’s millions of accounts, found by Snap’s own internal review, before any of the lawsuits were filed.

Snap has responded by adding safety features: reporting tools, educational materials, proactive scanning for drug-related content. The plaintiffs argue these additions actually reinforce the foreseeability case. If Snap added drug-detection tools, it means Snap recognized the drug problem. The question isn’t whether Snap tried to fix it. The question is whether the underlying design, messages that are deleted from Snapchat’s servers by default (Snaps vanish after viewing, Chats after 24 hours) rather than retained unless a user opts out, remains a defective product even with patches applied.

The distinction matters in court. Snap introduced an opt-in “infinite retention” mode in March 2024 that lets users keep messages permanently, but the default remains ephemeral. If the default were reversed, with messages retained unless users chose to delete, the product liability argument gets considerably harder to make. The alleged defect isn’t a bug. It’s the product working exactly as designed, with deletion as the default state.

The Coordinated Front

The fentanyl lawsuits are not a single case with a single judge. They span state courts and state attorney general offices, each operating on its own procedural timeline and applying its own pressure on Snap. A parallel federal MDL adds a second front with a different but related legal theory.

The fentanyl cases are primarily in California state court. Neville v. Snap Inc. (Case No. 22STCV33500, L.A. County Superior Court, filed October 2022) is the lead case, with 63 families of victims ages 14 to 22. Judge Riff’s January 2024 ruling letting 12 of 16 counts proceed was a turning point. Bellwether case selection hearings were set for August 2025, and the litigation is now in active discovery.

Five state attorneys general have filed separate actions targeting Snap. Texas, Florida, Kansas (Case No. 5:25-cv-04109, D. Kansas, filed November 12, 2025), Utah, and New Mexico have all brought claims. The New Mexico complaint is particularly aggressive, with unredacted internal documents that other states can now cite. Several of these actions focus specifically on ephemeral messaging as a design choice that endangers minors.

On a related but distinct legal track, federal MDL No. 3047, “In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation” (N.D. California, Case No. 4:22-md-03047, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers), consolidates hundreds of cases alleging that social media platforms, including Snap, caused adolescent mental health harm through addictive design features. The MDL is about addiction, not fentanyl. But it matters to the fentanyl thesis because Judge Gonzalez Rogers has ruled in the MDL that Section 230 does not provide blanket immunity for platform design choices, and because Snap settled the first bellwether case in the related California state coordination proceeding (JCCP 5255) in January 2026, just days before trial was scheduled to begin. The design-defect theory is being tested across both fentanyl and addiction claims, and it’s gaining traction in both.

On a separate legal front, a securities fraud class action, Black v. Snap Inc. (2:21-cv-08892, C.D. California), alleged that Snap made false statements about the impact of Apple’s iOS privacy changes on advertising revenue. Snap agreed to a $65 million settlement in September 2025, with preliminary approval granted December 2025 and a final approval hearing scheduled for April 23, 2026 (settlement site). The settlement is large enough to draw media attention but small enough that Snap can absorb it. The fentanyl cases have no settlement on the table.

The litigation costs are adding up. In Snap’s Q4 2025 earnings call, management specifically cited “higher legal costs, including litigation and regulatory compliance-related costs” as a driver of operating expense growth, and projected “continued elevated legal and regulatory-related costs throughout 2026” (Snap Q4 2025 earnings call transcript, February 4, 2026).

Following the Money Out

While the legal pressure builds, Snap’s executive team has been reducing their exposure.

The numbers below come from verified Form 4 filings on SEC EDGAR, covering roughly the last 120 days. Every named C-suite executive at Snap sold stock during the period.

CEO Evan Spiegel sold 1,258,850 shares on December 30, 2025, at $8.00 per share, followed by 1,220,165 shares on January 5, 2026, at $8.25 per share. Total proceeds: approximately $20.1 million (SEC filing).

CTO Robert Murphy sold 1,000,000 shares on February 6 at $5.27 per share and another 1,000,000 shares on February 10 at $5.36 per share. Total proceeds: approximately $10.6 million (SEC filing).

CFO Derek Andersen sold 121,291 shares across December 2025 through February 2026 at prices ranging from $4.70 to $7.83, totaling roughly $731,000. Chief Business Officer Ajit Mohan sold 168,324 shares in the same window at $4.70 to $7.62 per share, roughly $923,000. General Counsel Zachary Briers sold 203,325 shares on February 17 and 18 at $4.70 to $4.73, roughly $958,000. Chief Accounting Officer Rebecca Morrow made smaller sales across the period totaling approximately $194,000.

Combined: more than $33.5 million in insider selling over 120 days. Twenty-one sell transactions versus three buys, and every buy was an RSU vesting at $0.00 per share, the kind of automatic grant that happens on a schedule regardless of anyone’s outlook on the stock. There is not a single discretionary purchase in the group.

The fairness patch: these sales were executed through pre-existing 10b5-1 trading plans. That’s important context. 10b5-1 plans are specifically designed to let executives sell shares on a predetermined schedule without triggering insider trading liability. They’re a legitimate tool, and their existence is not itself evidence of wrongdoing. Executives at large-cap tech companies routinely sell for liquidity, tax planning, and diversification. Any individual sale in this list could be completely routine.

The observation is the pattern, not any individual sale. CEO, CTO, CFO, Chief Business Officer, General Counsel, and Chief Accounting Officer all sold during the same window that SNAP dropped from $8.25 to $5.07, a 39% decline. 10b5-1 plans explain the mechanism. They don’t explain the unanimity.

The Business Underneath

The insider selling would draw less attention if the operating metrics were holding up. They’re not.

Snap reported Q4 2025 results on February 4, 2026. Total revenue came in at $1.716 billion, up 10% year-over-year. Advertising revenue, which makes up the bulk, was $1.48 billion, up only 5%. Net income was $45 million. On paper, a profitable quarter (Snap Q4 2025 press release, February 4, 2026).

The engagement metrics told a different story. Global daily active users came in at 474 million, still up about 5% year-over-year but down 3 million sequentially from Q3, the first quarter-over-quarter decline. The global number masks a sharper deterioration in the market that matters most. North America DAU dropped to 94 million, missing Wall Street’s estimate of 97 million and declining 5% year-over-year. Time spent per user in the United States fell in the high single digits year-over-year. North America is where the advertising dollars are. Fewer users spending less time per session means the highest-value audience is shrinking on two axes simultaneously (CNBC, February 4, 2026).

Management attributed part of the DAU decline to reduced “community growth marketing investments” and platform-level age verification measures in Australia. Snapchat+ subscribers reached 24 million, with 71% year-over-year growth. Q1 2026 revenue guidance came in at $1.5 to $1.53 billion.

The subscriber growth is the counterargument: paying users are increasing even as free users leave. But Snapchat+ revenue is a fraction of total revenue, and growing paid subscribers on a shrinking daily active base means you’re extracting more from fewer people. Ad revenue is still growing because ad pricing can compensate for declining reach, but only as long as the remaining users are engaged enough to justify the CPMs. A high-single-digit decline in time spent means each remaining user is less valuable to advertisers, not more. That compression narrows the gap between engagement reality and revenue performance every quarter.

The stock dropped 13% the day after earnings, from $5.91 to $5.12, on the North America DAU miss.

The Trade

One option contract frames the risk/reward math:

The SNAP $3 put expiring January 15, 2027, was last offered at $0.28 per share ($28 per contract) as of February 25, 2026. The strike is 40.8% below the current stock price of $5.07. Breakeven is $2.72. Open interest sits at 7,906 contracts, with implied volatility at 70.3% and a delta of -0.12. The contract has 10.7 months to expiration.

Why this strike? The thesis requires either a legal outcome that reprices Snap’s liability profile (a material settlement, an appellate ruling confirming the product-design theory, or forced platform changes) or a business deterioration severe enough to compress the equity value on its own. A minor earnings miss doesn’t get you to $3. A structural break in the business model does.

At $28 per contract, the risk is capped. If nothing happens and the stock stays above $3 through January 2027, the option expires worthless and you lose $28. If SNAP drops to $2, each contract is worth $100, roughly a 3.6x return. If $1, each contract pays $200, roughly 7.1x. The asymmetry is the point: small, defined risk against a large potential payoff if the scenario materializes.

Fair warning: option chains move. By the time you read this, the ask price, open interest, and implied volatility will be different. I’m not arguing this specific contract is mispriced right now. I’m showing how deeply out-of-the-money puts let you take a defined-risk position on a scenario the market isn’t pricing.

The Chain

Every link is conditional. I’m not predicting this will happen. I’m saying if it does, the options market isn’t pricing for it.

Step one: Discovery in the Neville fentanyl litigation continues through 2026. More internal documents emerge showing Snap had foreknowledge of drug accessibility and chose to keep disappearing messages as the default. The New Mexico AG complaint has already produced unredacted internal communications. Other state AG offices can cite those filings.

Step two: The fentanyl cases survive further procedural challenges and move toward bellwether trials. Judge Riff has already let 12 of 16 counts through, the state appeals court upheld him, and the Lemmon precedent makes a federal 230 defense harder to win. The litigation enters the phase where settlement economics start to shift.

Step three: Settlement pressure mounts. Discovery costs escalate into the tens of millions. Internal documents surface in court filings, generating media coverage. Each new filing puts more internal communications on the public record.

Step four: Snap faces a choice. Settling establishes a precedent that design-defect claims can bypass Section 230 immunity, a precedent that would expose every social media company to similar suits. Going to trial means putting the 2019 “under a minute” presentation in front of a jury seated in a courtroom full of parents whose children died.

Step five: State attorneys general, running parallel actions, demand platform changes as a condition of settlement or through legislation. The most likely demand: kill ephemeral messaging for users under 18, or face state-level restrictions on minors’ access to the platform.

Step six: Platform changes crater teenage engagement. Snapchat’s core value proposition for younger users is the disappearing feature. It’s the reason they aren’t on Instagram or TikTok. Remove it, and you remove the product differentiation.

Step seven: DAU decline, already visible at 3 million per quarter, accelerates. Advertising revenue follows. The gap between engagement metrics and revenue that the Q4 2025 report revealed becomes a collapse.

Two frictions worth naming. First, legal timelines are slow. Complex product liability litigation routinely takes three to five years from filing to resolution. The Neville case was filed in October 2022, and the MDL in August 2022. We’re in year four on both tracks. Settlement pressure accelerates when discovery produces damaging documents, and the 2019 presentation is already in the record, but not every step in this chain fires within the 10.7-month option window. Second, Snap has waiver and cure options at various stages. A negotiated consent decree with state AGs could impose platform changes gradually rather than overnight, softening the engagement impact.

The piece the market may be underweighting is the reinforcement loop. The legal pressure and the business deterioration aren’t independent. Weaker business metrics reduce Snap’s leverage in settlement negotiations. Higher legal costs compress margins on a company already losing users in its most valuable geography. Management acknowledged on the Q4 call that legal costs will remain “elevated throughout 2026.” Each side of this loop makes the other worse.

What Could Go Wrong

Three reasons the thesis could be wrong.

The extension gap. Lemmon v. Snap established that Snap’s own product design choices can bypass Section 230, but Lemmon involved a content creation tool (the Speed Filter). The fentanyl cases extend that reasoning to an architectural choice: ephemeral messaging. No appellate court has ruled on whether disappearing messages specifically qualify as a design defect under this framework. If the Ninth Circuit draws a line between “Snap designed a speedometer overlay” and “Snap designed messages to auto-delete,” the fentanyl theory narrows significantly. The doctrinal move is the same, but a court could decide the factual application doesn’t follow.

A manageable settlement. Snap could settle the fentanyl cases for a dollar amount the business can absorb without establishing broader liability precedent or forcing product changes. The securities fraud case settled for $65 million. A fentanyl settlement in the $200 to $500 million range, structured over several years with confidentiality provisions, would be painful but wouldn’t threaten the balance sheet of a company that generated $270 million in quarterly operating cash flow and $206 million in free cash flow in Q4 alone. The families might accept a meaningful payout over an uncertain trial. Snap might prefer writing checks to changing the product.

The business stabilizes. Total revenue is still growing 10% year-over-year. Snapchat+ reached 24 million subscribers with 71% growth. Snap posted $45 million in net income and $206 million in free cash flow in Q4. If North America DAU bottoms out and ad monetization continues improving, the business could outgrow the legal costs. A profitable company with growing revenue has options that a struggling one doesn’t.

Five reasons it may be closer than people think.

The Ninth Circuit already ruled against Snap on the core legal principle. Lemmon v. Snap (2021) held that Snap’s own product design choices are not protected by Section 230. Judge Riff extended that reasoning to ephemeral messaging in Neville, and the state appeals court upheld him. Judge Gonzalez Rogers applied comparable logic in the addiction MDL. The Third Circuit reached a similar conclusion in Anderson v. TikTok. The specific application to disappearing messages is untested at the appellate level, but the underlying doctrine has survived every challenge so far, including one in Snap’s own circuit.

Five state attorneys general are running parallel actions. Federal courts move slowly, but state AGs can force platform changes through legislative action, consent decrees, or settlement conditions that bypass the appellate process entirely. AG actions have different procedural dynamics than private litigation. They don’t need to prove individual causation the same way a family does.

Every named C-suite executive sold stock in the last 120 days. Six out of six. Twenty-one sell transactions against zero discretionary buys. The 10b5-1 framework provides legal cover for each individual sale, but it doesn’t explain why all six executives had plans executing in the same window that the stock dropped 39%.

The discovery evidence gets worse for Snap over time, not better. The 2019 “under a minute” presentation, the internal review that found millions of undetected drug dealer accounts, the Discover feed surfacing drug dealers’ posts to users: all of this is already in the court record, and the litigation is entering its fourth year with discovery still ongoing.

Snap’s engagement trends in its most valuable market are moving in the wrong direction. Global DAU growth is decelerating (first sequential decline in Q4) and North America DAU missed estimates by 3 million users, declining 5% year-over-year. Revenue is growing because ad pricing compensates for fewer eyeballs. Snapchat+ subscribers are growing because Snap is monetizing its remaining users harder. Both of those compensating mechanisms have limits. When the highest-ARPU audience shrinks enough, ad pricing and subscription upsells can’t fill the gap.

The Rubber Swan Scorecard

I rate every thesis across seven dimensions.

Thesis Quality: 7 out of 10. A legal mechanism (product-design bypass of Section 230) with Ninth Circuit appellate precedent (Lemmon v. Snap) and trial court rulings extending the theory to ephemeral messaging. Coherent and specific, though the extension from Speed Filter to disappearing messages is untested at the appellate level.

Evidence Strength: 7 out of 10. Court rulings, SEC Form 4 filings, internal documents surfaced through discovery, and verified financial data from earnings releases. The 75% fentanyl statistic is from plaintiffs’ filings (not independently verified), which caps the evidence score.

Catalyst Specificity: 6 out of 10. The MDL timeline is uncertain, but the April 23, 2026 securities settlement hearing and ongoing discovery are concrete near-term events. State AG actions add additional catalyst vectors.

Timeline Plausibility: 6 out of 10. Legal timelines are inherently slow. 10.7 months is tight for a full chain reaction through settlement or platform changes. The option could expire before the thesis fully plays out.

Market Blindness: 8 out of 10 (double-weighted). The market is pricing zero liability from fentanyl lawsuits. No analyst note I’ve read models product liability exposure. Insider selling across the entire C-suite suggests an informational asymmetry.

Catalyst-Timeline Alignment: 5 out of 10. The lowest score. Legal cases could easily drag past the January 2027 expiration. The chain reaction depends on settlement pressure building faster than typical MDL timelines.

Asymmetric Payoff Potential: 8 out of 10. $28 per contract, 40.8% out of the money, defined risk, extreme payoff if the scenario materializes. The option structure matches the thesis: low-probability, high-asymmetry.

Overall: 6.9 out of 10.

Sources

Legal and Litigation

1. Lemmon v. Snap Inc., 995 F.3d 1085 (9th Cir. 2021), product design claim survives Section 230
2. Bloomberg, “Families Are Going After Snapchat for the Teen Fentanyl Crisis,” 2024 (Judge Riff ruling in Neville v. Snap, 2019 presentation details)
3. ABC News, “Families of overdose victims file lawsuit against Snapchat,” February 2023 (75% fentanyl statistic from complaint)
4. NBC News, “Relatives of more than 60 young people who died of fentanyl overdoses file expanded lawsuit against Snapchat,” April 2023
5. Anderson v. TikTok Inc., No. 22-3061 (3d Cir. 2024), design-defect claim survives Section 230
6. In Re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3047 (N.D. Cal., 4:22-md-03047, Judge Gonzalez Rogers)
7. New Mexico Attorney General, unredacted complaint against Snap Inc. (internal documents re: drug dealers on Discover feed)
8. TechPolicy.Press, “Snap Inc. Under Fire in New Mexico’s Unredacted Lawsuit” (analysis of internal review findings)
9. Social Media Victims Law Center, “Snapchat Fentanyl Lawsuit: December 2025 Update” (case status and discovery details)
10. Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, “Online Drug Markets and Lawsuits Against Snapchat,” July 2025
11. Kansas v. Snap Inc., Case No. 5:25-cv-04109 (D. Kansas, filed November 12, 2025)
12. Black v. Snap Inc., Case No. 2:21-cv-08892 (C.D. California, $65M securities fraud settlement)

Insider Trading (SEC EDGAR Form 4 Filings)

13. CEO Evan Spiegel Form 4: Dec 30, 2025 and Jan 5, 2026 sales
14. CTO Robert Murphy Form 4: Feb 6 and Feb 10, 2026 sales
15. CFO Derek Andersen Form 4: Dec 2025 and Feb 2026 sales
16. CBO Ajit Mohan Form 4: Dec 2025 through Feb 2026 sales
17. GC Zachary Briers Form 4: Feb 17-18, 2026 sales
18. CAO Rebecca Morrow Form 4: Dec 2025 through Feb 2026 sales

All SEC filings accessed February 25, 2026.

Business and Financial

19. Snap Inc. Q4 and Full Year 2025 financial results press release, February 4, 2026
20. CNBC, “Snap Q4 2025 earnings” (North America DAU miss, 94M vs. 97M estimate)
21. Snap Q4 2025 earnings call transcript, February 4, 2026 (legal cost guidance, DAU attribution)
22. Globe and Mail, “Snap Reports Strong Q4 2025 Results, Authorizes Buyback” (net income, margin details)

Market Data

23. Option chain data and stock price sourced from Polygon.io, accessed February 25, 2026. Snap Inc. ticker details: market cap ~$8.6B, 1.69B weighted shares outstanding.

Disclosure

Disclosure: I hold a small position in the option contract described above. It’s a speculative position, not a portfolio allocation.

Not financial advice. This is a stress-test scenario published for educational and entertainment purposes. It describes a conditional sequence of events, not a prediction. Options involve risk of total loss. Do your own research. Consult a financial advisor. I’m a rubber swan, not a fiduciary.