Brandon Chapman, Author at TheoTrade

We Have A Refining Cartel In The United States

August 5, 2026

Hey trader, Gas is over $4 a gallon right now with oil at $75. Go back to 2007. Oil was in a similar neighborhood and gas was nowhere close to that… Same commodity, same country, wildly different price at the pump… So today I want to walk through what actually changed, because the answer explains the best trade in energy this year and the reason it’s about to get dangerous. Ask yourself what kind of system this is We can’t build refineries in this country. EPA policy has made it effectively impossible, and we’ve had major closures on top of that over the last four years. So whatever refining capacity we have today is all we’re going to have. Now think about what that describes. A handful of players control the supply of something everybody needs, and nobody new is allowed to enter. There’s a word for that. We

I Lost Money On This Exact Setup Two Weeks Ago

August 3, 2026

Hey trader, Two Mondays ago I shorted a setup that looked exactly like the ones I’ve been shorting profitably for years. And I lost money on it. The chart wasn’t the problem. What I missed was the cushion sitting underneath the market. Which meant nothing down there was going to force a dealer to sell into weakness… So the selling pressure I was counting on was never going to show up in the first place. Today handed me the same structure on the same day of the week. And this time I called it out loud before the open instead of working it out afterward. I want to show you what a cushion is… How to see one in about 90 seconds… And what it told me to do this morning. The thing that isn’t on your chart Start with the mechanics, because the mechanics come first and the opinion

Someone Gave Corporate Bonds A Deadline

August 1, 2026

Hey trader, Corporate bonds are sliding again. LQD, the junk bond ETF, sits at $106 with another 0.36% gone today. Rising yields explain most of that. Warsh spoke Wednesday. The bond market did not like what it heard. Yet, then the Block Hunter Console lit up with something bigger than a one day reaction. One institution bought 55,000 put spreads in LQD, the $104 strike against the $101, running out to September 18. That is size with a calendar attached. Nobody commits seven weeks of downside to investment-grade credit, the safest corporate debt on the board, over one press conference. So what does that institution already see in corporate credit? I’m going to put both strikes in front of you, because they mark the exact spot where this move gets faster. What LQD Is And Why It Bleeds When Yields Rise LQD holds investment-grade corporate debt. Basically, it is a

Can Options Predict Earnings Moves?

July 29, 2026

Hey trader, What if you could predict earnings moves before the announcement? Wouldn’t that be grand? It turns out, I might have a way to do that without magic. These days, options drive stocks, not the other way around. Yet, the average trader doesn’t bother moving beyond a price chart. They don’t realize how much information they are missing. Today, we’re going to take a stroll through SOFI’s latest earnings. Because it turns out the options market may have predicted the stock’s move BEFORE the first tick landed. Now, to give you a sneak preview, let’s dig into SOFI and see how options became our crystal ball. The print that landed a day before the report SOFI reported Wednesday morning before the open. But…the information I care about most showed up the day before that. On the August expiration, 100,000 contracts traded at the $18.50 strike. They were bought. I

How Someone Took a Bet Opposite of Everyone Else

July 28, 2026

Hey trader, Consumer staples had a day you notice without looking for it. XLP ran up over 4% earlier in the session. The easy read is money hiding in defense ahead of tomorrow’s Fed announcement. The size that printed today tells a different story. Puts were bought across the line in XLP, every one of them at or near the ask. One of those prints was a straight buy of 10,000 contracts. I can see the individual fills myself once I filter for blocks of 100 or more. I keep circling back to one thing. What does a buyer paying up for downside see in a sector that just ripped 4%? Let me walk you through the read I built off it. Buying Puts Builds Negative Gamma The Console flagged four prints in XLP today. Volume to open interest was significant on all of them, at 2,400, 4,000, 4,000 and

This 20,000-Contract QGEN Print Stopped Me

July 27, 2026

Hey trader, A 20,000-contract order hit QGEN this morning in one trade. It filled right up near the ask. A print that size in a name few people watch is easy to wave off as noise, a fund quietly shuffling a position it already had. That was my first instinct too. The first thing I do with a print like this is ask whether it’s a roll. So, I pulled it up on the Console and traced it back to the 40 and 45 strikes. The read got more interesting the longer I sat with it. The structure barely matters in the end. Whatever the exact shape of this trade, the dealer on the other side is now short a stack of calls. That puts the desk in a corner. What does that desk have to do now? Let me walk you through it and how you can turn it

How to Get Trades at a 40% Discount

July 25, 2026

Hey trader, If I offered you 40% off your next trade, would you take it? Funny enough, that’s what the market is offering you right now…if you know where to look. It shows up in how the options are priced. You see, a volatility gap between two strikes is quietly marking down the structure I trade most, the vertical spread. In fact, the same SPY vertical that quoted north of 60 cents yesterday quotes 36 cents today. Yet, almost none of that markdown traces to the chart. It comes from the skew between the strikes. At first, I didn’t believe it myself. I had to double-check the quote when it popped up. But it’s real. It’s an edge. And now, it’s time for you to learn how to find and exploit it too. The Coupon Hiding In The Chain Three things set an option’s price. How far price sits from

Why I Closed My Trade From a Pizzeria

July 23, 2026

Hey trader, Yesterday SPY kept reaching higher and kept getting slapped back. It stalled at 750, drifted lower, and settled almost exactly on 748 into the close. The easy read is that 750 was plain resistance and buyers ran out of gas… …but that is not what pinned it there. A stack of calls sold at 748, 750, 752, and 755 built a wall above the tape. That wall walked price straight down into the heavy open interest at 748 and 747, which is exactly where I had a put spread sitting. I closed it 40 minutes before the bell for 75 and a half cents against a 48-cent cost. That is a little over 50%, booked from a pizzeria in Idaho. So what did that wall actually do to the price? Let me show you. The wall institutions built at 748 Institutions hedge the same way over and over.

FCX Just Showed Me Its Target

July 22, 2026

Hey trader, Something lit up in FCX today. It happened the day before the company reports earnings. Institutions bought roughly 5,000 of the 67 calls in a straight purchase. They also rolled their 65 calls up to the 68 strike. The easy read is that somebody is betting the stock rips on the print. That read skips over the mechanic doing the real work. Those calls do more than express a direction. They mark a spot the dealers now have to defend, and that spot lines up almost exactly with the market maker move. FCX is trading around 65… …The buying clusters at 67 and 68… …The math keeps pointing to the same place. I keep asking myself what that desk sees in the 68 strike that the tape has not shown yet. Let me walk you through how I’d take a cheap shot at it. What those calls force

How to Build a Day Trading Plan from Options Flows

July 21, 2026

Hey trader, Yesterday the SPY 500 spent the whole morning stuck. Price kept circling one number and refused to leave – 745 – and it acted like a magnet. The easy move was to scalp the little wiggles around it. I passed on every one of them. Instead, I waited for a single clean setup. The plan I laid out returned 67% on a sub-60-cent trade. I want to show you how the map told me it was coming. You see, there was a reason 745 held price like glue. However, the clean trade lived somewhere else entirely. I’m going to walk you through building that plan from scratch, the same way I built today’s. The Map Comes Before the Trade Before I take a single trade, I map the gamma structure. Gamma exposure, or GEX, essentially tells me where dealers are forced to stabilize price and where they let

	Today
08.00	OJ & Mac \| Overnight review \| FREE SESSION 08.30 09.20 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 Corey Rosenbloom \| Options tactics 13.15 14.00
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14.00	Tony Rago \| Futures Trading 14.00 15.00
15.00	Blake Young & Mac Holbrook \| Market wrap 15.00 16.00

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