https://youtu.be/BCC2mLhzw0U Brandon Chapman pulled up the volatility curve after today’s close. Three month VIX futures sit 22% above spot VIX. Spot VIX closed near 15 and a half. That premium prices a 5% to 10% correction in the S&P 500. The VIX finished below 15 on Friday. The futures market spent today saying the opposite. Contango in the /VX curve is steep across September and October. Brandon reads that structure as bearish. Skew supports it. The reading dipped below 130 last Tuesday. It popped right back above and sat near 132 and a half on Friday. The tape itself barely moved. The S&P 500 closed at 773, which landed exactly on max pain. 775 stood as the call wall all session. Dealers sold into strength and bought into weakness around it. Brandon traded that framework in the morning. He closed his spread for a 100% gain on the break under

https://youtu.be/GKeuDUuaBP4 The S&P moved 260 points this week against an expected move of 111. That is about 2.4 standard deviations outside what the options market priced, so I recorded my weekend update on what it means for next week. Trade is about to get erratic, and the reason has nothing to do with the jobs number. We breached the volatility box to the upside. All the open interest that normally holds a market together is sitting way back down at 7511. Up here in never never land, there is almost nothing. So a couple thousand SPX contracts can move the whole market, because there is no structure to absorb it. Here is what I cover: → Microsoft added $700 billion of market cap this week. Half of it came in one session. → The sector suddenly outperforming, and why it does not leave me warm and fuzzy. → Where I

https://youtu.be/GFtlVcRoFcU Two central banks are selling US Treasuries at the same time. Blake Young recorded this afternoon’s video on how to tell which one is doing it on any given day, and it takes two charts. Put bond prices next to the yen. Falling bonds alongside a strengthening yen means the Bank of Japan is selling Treasuries to raise dollars and defend its currency. When bonds fall while the dollar strengthens instead, the selling is coming from inside the US. Heavy volume on top of that points at the Federal Reserve. He walked back through the last two weeks and showed both patterns. A two-day spike in the yen against falling bonds was Japan. Four days of heavy volume with a strengthening dollar was something else entirely. Today it was the second one. None of that stays in the bond market. More selling pushes prices down, which pushes borrowing costs

https://youtu.be/fWQj8Jwohmk Nobody cared about AMD earnings. Nobody cared about SpaceX either. Both were non-events. The only thing that moved this market was the S&P crossing 7,700, and I want to explain why that single level mattered more than every headline this week combined. We had been trading inside a very finite range with 7511 sitting at the center of it. When price stays in one neighborhood that long, an enormous ball of risk builds up in the options, rolled forward day after day, and a lot of it in zero DTE contracts. The second we crossed out of that range into uncharted turf, the entire professional world had to buy S&P futures. Servers turned on and we went parabolic. I recorded tonight’s video on what that did underneath the surface, because the structure is the story now, not the level. Here’s what I cover: → The skew reading that just