Brandon Chapman, Author at TheoTrade

Why Volatility Fell As Stocks Fell

September 5, 2026

Hey trader, I was set up for a bad jobs number this Friday. I thought there was a real chance the print came in negative. Instead we got a three sigma beat. Strong economic news, and the market spent the session selling into it. I can explain that part, and I will. The piece I want your attention on is the VIX. Stocks were lower yesterday, and volatility was lower right along with them, sitting down at 14. Now set that next to the SKEW index, which closed at 150 yesterday after sitting at 126 a few weeks ago. Anything above 130 is high. At 150, institutions are hedging aggressively, and they have not pulled those hedges off. So the desks are buying protection with both hands. The fear gauge is falling while they do it. One of those is causing the other. What are they doing that drives volatility

How I Trade An Untradeable Name

September 3, 2026

Hey trader, Five thousand contracts crossed in Lennar today in a single block trade. Sixty percent of that went off at the ask. The name printed eleven and a half times its average volume. My first instinct was to skip it. Home builders are not easy to trade. I generally won’t send out an alert on something with no open interest sitting behind it. Then I looked at where the stock was actually trading. Lennar gapped above its put wall at 85. It could not hold the level. Price is back underneath it now, which puts the stock in a negative gamma region. Essentially, dealers are positioned in a way that adds fuel to a move lower instead of absorbing it. That flip is why I’m still on this one. It also handed me an eight-day vertical I can put on for 65 cents. Below, I’m going to walk you

Why Gold’s Biggest Print Just Got Stronger

September 2, 2026

Hey trader, Gold is building a squeeze into Friday. Here’s why I’m using that word. I went through the GLD put chain for this week, next week, September 18, and October, hunting for anything that could accelerate a move lower. There’s almost nothing down there. Price is at 401, sitting on a put wall at 400. Overhead, someone just bought 110,000 call contracts and dragged them closer to the money. That’s the setup that pays. A two-strike spread costs 71 cents right now, and it’s worth $2 if GLD closes at 405 on Friday. The first thing I did was check whether that print was a roll. It was. Rolls are where I see people get this wrong, because half of them make a position stronger and half of them put it to sleep. Get that call right and you’ll know which big prints are worth trading before you ever

What Options Say Energy’s Next Move

September 1, 2026

Hey trader, Supertankers took hits in the Persian Gulf. Oil is climbing. XLE gapped up at the open exactly the way you’d expect. Then it faded off the high and parked at 64.50. The story writes itself from there. Oil goes up. Energy follows. I went to the block prints instead of stopping there. Institutions bought calls on the XLE energy ETF at 66 today, at 63.50, and at 63, which is not a group of people agreeing on direction (the XLE currently trades at $64.50). Where they do agree is the boundary. There are 12,000 contracts sitting at 63 for Friday’s expiration, with another wall waiting at 65 overhead. XLE is fenced in on both sides. That fence is worth real money before the week is out. What do these institutions see that has them buying both edges of the same box? Let me walk you through where that

Someone Just Hedged $113 Million Midday

August 31, 2026

Hey trader, Something came through on the Qs at 11:36 today that I couldn’t walk past. Someone bought 38,000 put contracts near the ask. Run the notional on that and you get $113 million on a single print. A print that size usually gets read as somebody calling the top. My first job was checking whether it was just a roll. It wasn’t. Then I found a second trade sitting at the exact same timestamp. Put the two side by side and the whole thing reads differently. This is what an institution does when it already owns a pile of technology and fully intends to keep owning it. That second leg is why I’m writing this up. It leaves the Qs easier to push down than up, and it stays that way out to 31 December. So what does this player see between now and December that has them paying

Why The Last Dime Costs the Most

August 29, 2026

Hey trader, A vertical spread carries a hard ceiling. Buy the 40 call, sell the 42, and $2 is everything it can ever be worth. So you hold for $2. It’s printed right there on the risk graph. Yet, maybe that’s not such a good idea. You see, that $2 doesn’t show up when you want it to. It exists on exactly one day of the spread’s life, and only if price is parked above your short strike when the bell rings. I paid 58 cents for a $2-wide IBIT spread. The next morning it was worth 97 cents. Climbing from there to $1.50 would take a significant move or a long wait. I’d be carrying full risk the entire time. So what does that final stretch actually cost to collect? Let me run the numbers on both sides of it. The Two Dollars Only Exists on One Day The

Nvidia’s 10% Drop Wasn’t About Earnings

August 27, 2026

Hey trader, Nvidia fell almost 10% into last night’s earnings. I measured it high to low with the drawing tool this morning, and that’s the number it gave me. A whisper had been circulating that earnings would suck. That whisper bought a lot of puts across Nvidia and semiconductors the entire way down. Then the number landed. Nvidia is up $15.76 as I write this. The expected move priced into the options yesterday was $13, so we’ve already blown past what the market paid for. Here’s what I keep circling back to. A good chunk of the buying that lifted the stock today had nothing to do with anyone liking the earnings. So where did it come from? Allow me to show you… The whisper sold the stock before the number existed A whisper is just an unofficial expectation making the rounds ahead of a release. Whatever this one said,

Someone Wants CRML at $10 Friday

August 26, 2026

Hey trader, CRML faded most of the day… Yet, the calls kept getting bought anyway. My Console alert on the name fires when a single strike trades 2,000 contracts or more. It tripped at 9:52, roughly 22 minutes after the open. Of today’s call volume in CRML, 44% filled at the ask against 20% at the bid. The easy read is somebody buying the dip. I think this flow is more specific than that. They bought short dated calls above the money on a stock carrying 15% short interest and a 63 million share float. That combination decides what the dealer has to do next. CRML sits at $8. The trade on the tape points at $10 by Friday. That leaves two and a half days for a two dollar move. What does this buyer see that makes those odds worth paying for? I’m going to walk you through the

CNBC Got This Gold Options Print Dead Wrong

August 25, 2026

Hey trader, Gold has been on an absolute tear the last week or so. Just before it broke lower from $4,000, it reversed hard, soaring back towards the highs of the year, leaving gold bears scratching their heads. Yet, with today’s modest pullback at the open, CNBC decided to blame it on a 100,000 short vertical call spread trade they said was “bearish”…except that’s dead wrong. For all the analysts and money they pour into their programming, CNBC misread the print. It wasn’t a bearish trade at all. All it took was one look at the Block Hunter Console to realize it was a roll, not a new position. But I understand why they made that mistake. So, let me help them, and you, understand how to correctly read large option prints using the Block Hunter Console. That way, you know EXACTLY what happened and why. The One Number That

Your Flat Day Was Actually a Loss

August 24, 2026

Hey trader, I kept circling back to one number today, so I want to show it to you. The session went nowhere. SPY finished up 0.1%, and pretty much everyone logged off feeling like they’d watched paint dry. Gold ran 0.9% in that same stretch. That’s nine times the move on a day nothing was supposed to happen. You could call that a safe haven bid and move on. I’d rather look at what it actually measures. Priced in gold, the S&P 500 lost ground today. Your position sat still. The dollar you’re pricing it in got a little smaller underneath you. There’s a reason for that, and it starts with the Treasury’s general account sitting near $1 trillion when it usually carries $500 to $600 billion. So where did all that money go? Let me take you through the plumbing. The Treasury is running a catch and release program

	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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