Blake Young, Author at TheoTrade

What Bailing Early Cost My Trading Room

October 31, 2026

Hey trader, On Monday, my gut told me to get out of an ES long. ES is the S&P 500 futures contract, and my trading plan said to stay in. I listened to my gut and closed the trade near breakeven. It’s hard to follow your trading plan when your gut disagrees. Price ran to my full target anyway. On my two micro contracts, that was $265 I didn’t collect. I apologized to the room for pulling members out with me. I’ve traded these signals for almost 20 years, and that feeling still gets me. A chart can look wrong without a single rule telling you so. My rules come with a record I can check. Across more than 1,300 trades called live, we’re right about 45% of the time. Our winners average twice the size of our losers. That edge only holds when I take the exits my rules

Get Paid Where You’d Stop Out

October 29, 2026

Hey trader, On Thursday, I priced a General Motors trade built around selling a put, and it could pay me even if GM went nowhere. It could also pay a lot more if GM ran to my target. The put that made both possible sat right at my stop. Your stop is the price where you admit a trade is wrong. Usually, it only protects you. A more advanced options approach puts that price to work. You sell a put there. Selling a put pays you premium up front, and in exchange you agree to buy the stock at that strike if price falls there. If the strike matches your stop, you’re getting paid at a level you’d already accepted. That premium can cover the cost of your upside bet. On GM, the put paid for my entire call spread, which buys one call and sells a higher one to

Trade The Fed Without Picking A Side

October 27, 2026

Hey trader, The Fed announces its rate decision tomorrow. If you plan to trade the Fed, the market already dropped a clue on Tuesday. The Euro sat stuck for 4 hours. I told the room I was surprised to see it coil up ahead of the Fed already. Volume faded candle after candle once the morning’s economic reports passed. The calendar stays crowded after Wednesday. GDP and PCE, an inflation report I watch more closely than CPI, both land Thursday. Guessing the Fed’s answer turns a trade into a bet on one headline. Before I pick a side, I check what options cost. Implied volatility drives that cost, since it measures how much movement the options market is pricing in. On Tuesday, a member asked how to trade the Fed outcome. I told the room implied volatility might still be low enough to make it a straddle or strangle day.

Trading Is a Haunted House: Don’t Run Into the Wall

October 24, 2026

Hello trader, I was probably 5 years old when a gorilla first scared me, running loose inside my grandparents’ home. Yes, I said a gorilla. Later, the grim reaper threatened my preadolescent life. Another time, a scary old man came running and banging on the back sliding glass door while I played in the living room. By the time I was 11, I had been startled by a menagerie of creatures, monsters, and demons. I had seen my brother’s torso lying on a mad scientist’s table with his legs on the floor. I had been shown bullet holes in that same brother’s arm and told, “Quick, get in, he’s been shot!” I’m fairly certain that for over a decade, every visit to my grandparents’ house included at least one prank or jump scare. My uncle was (and is) the king of Halloween. He has owned dozens of masks, costumes, and

Watch Copper Before You Buy Homebuilders

October 22, 2026

Hey trader, Alcoa, the aluminum maker, gapped down 5% on Thursday. Copper got pummeled right along with it, sending a copper demand signal I can’t ignore. Metals like these are raw materials. Factories and builders buy them to make things, so their prices follow demand. When copper falls this hard, I read it as buyers backing away. Housing stocks moved the other way. Bond prices rallied, which pushes interest rates lower. Homebuilders like Toll Brothers bounced on hopes of cheaper mortgages. I don’t trust that bounce. Yields sit only about 0.2 off their highs, too little to change how people borrow. The copper demand signal settles it, because its price shows whether demand is real. Right now, copper says demand is shrinking while borrowing stays expensive. I call that mix stagflation. It’s why I’ve spent three months telling the room to own staples and utilities, my safety plan. It’s also

Where To Exit A Trade You’re In

October 20, 2026

Hey trader, On Monday, a member named Walter landed in a long Euro futures trade, a bet that price would rise. He never meant to take it, and now he had to decide where to exit a trade he didn’t plan. I told the room to manage a trade like that with fresh eyes. Picture your cat walking across the keyboard and opening a position for you. You’d have no story about why you’re in it, only the chart in front of you. I want that mindset on every trade, including the ones you take on purpose. Once you’re in a trade, bias creeps in. You start setting your stop at a dollar amount you can stomach instead of where the chart says you’re wrong. I fix that with one question. It tells me where to exit a trade whether I’m long, short or in a position I never meant

What 45 Slices of Pizza Taught Me About Bull Traps

October 17, 2026

I lost a pizza eating contest on purpose. My best friend still brings it up 35 years later. I’ve been going down memory lane over the past few weeks, and this day keeps coming back. My best friend and I went to a local Pizza Hut with a lunch buffet. We were both athletes, he a baseball player and I a swimmer, and we both had a competitive streak. What started as “let’s go eat a bunch of pizza” quickly became a contest to see who could eat the most. We sat down to a mound of slices and the classic red plastic tumblers sweating on the table. The buffet tray clattered behind us as another batch of fresh pizza was loaded in. The contest began. I really did think I could win, and I had a strategy. First, I wouldn’t fill up on soda. Second, I’d hunt for the

The 35/50 Rule For Pricing Options

October 15, 2026

Hey trader, Tesla can swing wildly, while IBM hardly moves at all. That gap makes it tricky to know when to buy or sell options on either one. A volatility reading that looks expensive on IBM could be a bargain on Tesla. I solve that problem with IV rank. Implied volatility is the market’s price tag on an option. It measures how much movement traders expect, and you pay for that expectation in the premium. When that price tag runs high, I want to sell options. When it runs low, I want to buy them. Implied volatility tends to be mean-reverting, which means it drifts back toward its average over time. The further it stretches from that average, the harder it tends to snap back. To put that pull to work, you need to know where each stock’s own average sits. IV rank gives you that answer. It measures today’s

My 3 Steps To Locking In Profits

October 13, 2026

Hey trader, Locking in profits at the right time might be the toughest call in trading. Take them too early, and you leave money on the table. Wait too long, and a winner can turn against you before you act. I don’t try to guess the perfect exit. I let my stop do that work. As a trade moves my way, I move my stop up in planned steps. Each step shrinks what I can lose, until the trade can only pay me. That gives you a system for locking in profits instead of a gut call. The steps come from the chart. They work the same on one contract or 100. On Tuesday, I got long micro crude at 93.26 with a target of 94.95. Early on, I had about $72 at risk. Crude never reached my target. Before I left the futures room, my stop had locked in

How Often Your Spread Has To Win

October 10, 2026

Hey trader, Every option spread comes with a price. That price sets your required win rate, the share of trades you need to win. A spread is two options traded together, one bought and one sold. The distance between the strikes is the width, which caps the payout. Overpay for that width, and you need to win more often than the market expects. Good setups can still bleed money over time when the price is wrong. On Thursday, I ran this math in the end-of-day room on a Walmart call spread. It cost $3.40 for a spread $6 wide. That price set my required win rate at 56%. The platform put the odds at about 57%, so I knew I wasn’t overpaying. A Broadcom spread I priced that afternoon needed 67% against the platform’s 62%. Running this check takes one division and a number your platform already shows. You can

	Today
09.00	Don Kaufman \| Pre-Market Prep \| FREE SESSION 09.20 09.30 Don Kaufman \| Early volatility 09.20 10.30 Jeff Bierman \| Market structure 10.30 11.30 Brandon Chapman \| Ghost Hour 11.30 12.30 Gianni Di Poce \| Macro overview 12.30 13.15 Elizabeth \| Price Action 13.15 14.00
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14.00	Corey Rosenbloom \| Options tactics 14.00 15.00
15.00	Blake Young \| Market wrap 15.00 16.00

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