Get Paid To Wait For ISRG Stock To Go On Sale

Trefis Team

Mon, September 14, 2026 at 5:34 PM GMT+3 4 min read

Photo by Rigby40 on Pixabay

Intuitive Surgical (ISRG) trades near $370, about 38% below its 52-week high, after growth in its US robotic-surgery procedures slowed. Selling a put pays you now for agreeing to buy the shares much lower, and you keep the payment either way. The catch is it only works if you would want this business at that price.

Capture 8.3% Yield at a 30% Margin of Safety

Sell a put option on ISRG expiring 9/17/2027, with a strike price of $260.
Collect roughly $1,140 in premium per contract (each contract covers 100 shares).
That works out to about 4.3% annualized on the $26,000 of cash you set aside to secure the trade.
Park that cash in Treasury bills or a Treasury money-market fund yielding roughly 4.0%, and your total yield climbs to about 8.3%.
And if ISRG finishes below $260 at expiration, you buy it at $260, an effective entry near $248.60 a share after the premium, about a 33% discount to today's $369.15.

Assessing the Two Expiration Outcomes

If ISRG finishes at or above $260 on 9/17/2027, the put expires worthless and you simply keep the full $1,140 premium.That is about 4.3% annualized on the $26,000 you set aside over 371 days, while that same collateral keeps earning the ~4.0% T-bill yield on top, for the ~8.3% total above. You never buy the stock and you keep the income, free to do it again.

If ISRG finishes below $260 on 9/17/2027, you are assigned and buy 100 shares at $260. The $1,140 premium you already pocketed lowers your effective cost to about $248.60 a share, roughly a 33% discount to today's price, though if the stock drops significantly below that breakeven point, your net unrealized losses increase dollar-for-dollar with any further decline.

That second outcome only arrives if the shares keep falling, so start with the business you would be buying.

Would You Want ISRG Stock If It Fell That Far?

Over the past year the stock lost about 18% while the S&P 500 gained close to 19%. Worldwide revenue over the past twelve months was $11.03 billion, up almost 21%, at an operating margin of 31.3%, the best in three years.

Hospitals also keep buying the hardware. Intuitive placed 468 da Vinci systems in the June 2026 quarter, 18% more than a year earlier, and by its own account almost all of the increase in US placements came from hospitals trading up to da Vinci 5.

The reason the shares are down is the same reason you might end up owning them. US da Vinci procedure growth slowed to 12% in Q2 2026 from 14% in Q1 2026, and management points to procedures patients can put off, plus changes in patient coverage and premium dynamics that may be affecting when patients seek care. The CEO also pointed to the law of large numbers. US bariatric cases fell by a high single-digit percentage as GLP-1 use keeps rising. You are being paid to take on a company whose machines keep selling while its US operating rooms run slower than planned.

Can ISRG Get That Growth Back?

Most of the money arrives after a robot is installed. Recurring revenue, mostly instruments and service, was 85% of revenue in Q2 2026, and each da Vinci procedure carried about $1,830 of instruments and accessories, against roughly $1,800 a year earlier. That per-procedure take slipped from Q1 2026, which management attributed to customer ordering patterns.

Management's answer is to make each case cheaper for the customer. In the first half of 2027 the company plans to raise the number of uses allowed on a subset of its instruments under its extended use program, targeted at high-volume benign procedures and at the countries where cost is the bigger constraint. Give up price per case, win more cases.

How much revenue that gives up, nobody can say yet. Management is still finalizing pricing and will not size it until the next earnings call, and analysts pressing for a rough framework have not been given one.

So the number to watch is US da Vinci procedure growth. If it climbs back toward the 14% of Q1 2026 while revenue per procedure holds, the price cut is buying volume. If it sits near 12% while each case pays less, you would be buying a slower compounder.

So Should You Sell The Put On ISRG?

The income is the easy part. The real question is whether you would be happy to own this business after another leg down. Many investors overlook this trade-off, focused primarily on upfront income rather than the long-term obligation to purchase the stock. If yes, the put pays you to wait for a better entry. If not, no premium is large enough to make it a good trade. The cash-secured put yield screen shows what the same trade pays across the market. A sold put also leaves you leaning on one company. If you would rather spread that bet, the Trefis High Quality Portfolio holds quality businesses chosen on their fundamentals. That portfolio has a track record of outpacing the three major indices.