Don Kaufman, Author at TheoTrade

The AI Bubble Already Popped On The Other Side Of The World

October 27, 2026

Everybody keeps arguing about whether AI is a bubble. I’m going to throw this out there. If you believe AI is a bubble, and I’d suggest most of you probably do, it has already burst in most other parts of the world. How many people have taken the time to look at China? I mean, take a good long look at it. The Bubble Popped In China Alibaba is right in the epicenter of AI in China, and it can’t catch a bid. It’s down 36% year to date and 44% over the last year. Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, is down 50% year to date. Together, they’re putting a huge crack in FXI, the fund that tracks China’s biggest companies. Never in the history of Chinese markets have there been this many back-to-back losing weeks. Then there’s NIO, the electric car maker. A year ago, it was one of

Why $100 Oil Decides This Week

October 26, 2026

https://youtu.be/IO0Ofw94j1M Corey Rosenbloom’s game plan from last Monday called for the S&P 500 to rally to a midpoint target. The market hit it by Wednesday. The same setup is back this week. Crude oil at $100 a barrel decides whether it pays again. Corey sees a bullish reversal forming off the 7660 area in the S&P 500. His upside target sits at 7776. Crude oil is pressing right against $100 in the futures market. If crude breaks through, Corey sees a clear path lower for stocks. A stall or double top in crude flips the script. Corey sees that reversal as the catalyst for another rally. Bonds are sending their own warning. TLT rallied last week while the S&P 500 finished roughly where it started. Corey reads a big bond rally as a possible safety trade. He’s watching TLT near 82, where a push higher could signal weakness for stocks.

The 20% Shot That Knocked 25% Off An Entire Country

October 26, 2026

Brazil’s biggest stock fund fell about 24% on Monday. Going into Sunday’s runoff, the market put an 80% probability on the far-right candidate winning the presidency. He lost. By Monday morning, people all over X, and even major financial media, were talking about how wild and unprecedented it was. No, it was a one in five chance. A 20% chance of winning isn’t crazy. The Crazy Part The crazy part is the 25% drop. A lot got baked into Brazilian stocks on the idea that the far right was going to boost the economy. The markets didn’t like it. People get too caught up in the politics, and it doesn’t matter what I think. How often do you see an entire country’s market down 24% to 25%? You hardly ever see it. I had sold an out-of-the-money spread in the iShares MSCI Brazil ETF, or EWZ, a trade that pays

My Coffee Machine Exposed The $95 Billion Problem With AI

October 26, 2026

My $1,200 coffee machine is in the closet on timeout. It started fighting me on Sunday. It wanted to be descaled, and it demanded its own special descaling tablets. You can’t use vinegar, and it’s smart enough to know when you use the generic ones. Yes, the coffee machine knows. So I asked my AI agent if it could go in there and talk to Mr. Machine for me. I was thinking Star Wars. Apparently, we’re not at that point yet, so I drank crappy iced coffee out of the fridge. A Mad Dash For Cash AI can’t negotiate with my coffee maker yet, and Meta still needs a fortune to build it. On Monday, Meta told investors it’s selling $22.5 billion of new stock and $12.5 billion of mandatory convertible preferred stock, a type of share that turns into regular stock down the road. It also plans a $60

Christmas Tree Spread: How a Ratio Put Tree Works

October 25, 2026

Every time the market gets nervous, traders pile into downside puts and pay far more for protection than it’s statistically worth. The Christmas tree spread is how I get paid for that fear. I’m Don Kaufman, and this structure is the core of my Xmas Tree Alerts service. It’s one of the most powerful trades I know, and one of the most misunderstood, so I’m going to show you exactly where it makes money and exactly where it doesn’t. What is a Christmas tree spread? The way I trade it, a Christmas tree spread is a put structure that: Buys one put below the market, and Sells an increasing number of puts at progressively lower strikes, for example 3, then 4, then 5. The position is usually entered for a net credit, meaning you’re paid to put it on. The stacked quantities, with the most contracts at the bottom, are

Volatility Strikes Back

October 23, 2026

https://youtu.be/YgColzhTQYY Something broke in the market today. Volatility futures flipped into backwardation for the second Friday in a row. The S&P 500 slipped about 35 handles in one of the calmest sessions of the week. The volatility curve says real risk is sitting right on top of us. November volatility futures sit at 19.75. December sits at 19.55. More time normally means more risk. This curve prices more danger in the next 26 days than in the next 54. The VVIX sees it too. It cracked to 120 last Friday during heavy selling, then started flying again today on a slow drift lower. Then the advance decline line snapped. At the open, only 12 stocks in the S&P 100 traded higher against roughly 88 lower. Traders had spent the week dumping semiconductors for bonds, consumer staples, and healthcare. Today those hiding spots sold off too. The S&P 500 is up

The Bond Fund That Does Nothing Until It Does Everything

October 23, 2026

Most mornings, I come into the trading session with a page full of notes. Friday, I looked at the screen before the bell and wrote nothing down. I do that on days when I know it’s going to get pretty wild, because you have to walk into a session like that with your arms wide open. The first thing I saw was the volatility futures. Forget the VIX for a second. Over the weekend, you’re going to see articles about the VIX crossing 20, and I don’t care. The volatility futures are the ones worth watching, and they clearly see trouble coming. The Vol Futures Flipped Volatility futures are contracts that let traders bet on where the VIX will be on a future date. Normally, the next month costs less than the month after it, because more can go wrong over a longer stretch of time. When the front month

Why Your “Safe” 401(k) Fund Is Doing Worse Than The S&P

October 23, 2026

My inbox is full of 401(k) complaints this week. The S&P 500 is a couple of percent from its all-time high. But the emails all say some version of the same thing: the market’s a couple of points from a record, so why does my 401(k) look like crap? One guy put it perfectly. He’s getting killed by bonds, and he’s getting killed by tech. I believe it. The only way your portfolio looks good right now is if you own a handful of tech stocks, because everything else looks like crap. People are now calling it the stealth bear market. I don’t care what you want to call it. So let me put it to you straight. If you’re flat on a year-to-date basis, you’re doing pretty good. There are a lot of 401(k)s out there that are off 10% to 20%. The Safe Stuff Got Hit Hardest And

Butterfly Spread: How It Works and When to Use It

October 22, 2026

If I could only use one options structure for the rest of my career, it would be the butterfly spread. You risk a small, fixed amount, and if you’re right about where a stock will land, the payoff can be many times what you put up. I’m Don Kaufman, and butterflies are at the center of how I trade earnings, the expected move, and any setup where I have a view on where a stock will settle, not just which way it’s going. Here’s how they work. What is a butterfly spread? A butterfly spread is a three-strike options position that profits most if the underlying finishes at the middle strike at expiration. It’s built from four contracts with the same expiration: Buy 1 option at a lower strike Sell 2 options at a middle strike Buy 1 option at a higher strike The strikes are evenly spaced, so the

What Copper Is Telling Us

October 22, 2026

Copper, gold, Bitcoin, and stocks all cracked on the same day. Blake Young says demand is vanishing. The S&P 500 is sitting right on support. Blake sees a head and shoulders pattern forming with 80 points of downside. Copper is the tell. It’s testing its 200 day moving average, and Blake reads that as manufacturing and growth stalling out. The money is already hiding. Consumer staples led every sector with a 2.76% gain on a day Bitcoin dropped 4%. Blake is trading both sides of that split. Tonight’s video shows exactly how: General Mills jumped 6.75% and trades near 10x trailing earnings with a 7% yield. Blake sees it running to 42. NextEra broke out of its channel. Blake wants a pullback to 80 to sell puts for 2.33%, with a target of 90. Freeport fell from 80 to 64 and broke its 200 day moving average ahead of earnings.

	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
10.00
11.00
12.00
13.00
14.00	Corey Rosenbloom \| Options tactics 14.00 15.00
15.00	Blake Young \| Market wrap 15.00 16.00

Blake Young

Corey Rosenbloom

Our Classes

Options Strategies

Day Trading

Swing Trading

Futures & Bonds

Current Masterminds

Don 0DTE Mastermind

Corey's 12-week Mastermind

Retirement Roadmap Mastermind

Matrix Key Mastermind

Today

Most Recent

Get educational market insights sent right to your inbox.