Don Kaufman, Author at TheoTrade

$1,000 Cash For One Person At 1 PM ET

October 22, 2026

In 30 minutes a man who ran his own hedge fund puts a ticker on screen that no TV desk is talking about today. Then he draws a name from everyone watching live, and that person gets $1,000 cash. I’d clear my 1 o’clock for that alone, and I don’t say that about many of these. But the real prize is the candle he spotted before all 3 of these trades. He saw it on Gap and rode +142% on the options trade in 23 days. Etsy gave him +105% in 3 days off the same candle, and General Mills, the cereal company, gave him +120% in 15. Every one of those stocks was sitting there while the crowd chased Nvidia. If you’re tired of buying the famous names after the move makes the news, this is the hour to see how he does it instead. Walk straight into the

His Stocks Don’t Care What Tesla Said

October 22, 2026

There’s a chart on Jeff Bierman’s page I keep going back to. It’s a $2,000 account taking every one of his trades since April, one contract each, winners and losers. It climbs to $4,907 by the middle of this month. Now think about what you’ve sat through in that stretch. Records, then a chip selloff overnight, then oil at a 5-month high, and this morning every screen fighting over Tesla and Meta. If you trade the famous names, every one of those headlines took a swing at you. A good week, then a bad one, and you can’t tell why. I watched that pattern for 15 years at TD Ameritrade, across 7 million traders. Most of them never broke out of it, because they never left the crowd. Jeff left it. His trades came from Gap, Starbucks, Abbott and Medtronic, stocks that don’t move on a Tesla or AI headlines

Markets at a Crossroads

October 21, 2026

https://youtu.be/uA70O95t_88?si=IzVtqbAxPNoykmJd The market bounced this week. The semiconductors never delivered the rip your face off rally a real bottom needs. That leaves us at a crossroads heading into the back half of the week. On the surface, the SPDRs look fine. A couple days of selling barely dented SPY, and it sits right back near its all time high. The Nasdaq tells a different story. The QQQ dropped hard over the last two weeks, with strong selling last Friday. Today the Nasdaq climbed 300 and some odd points. That bounce landed right on the upper edge of the expected move. Underneath, the tape looks broken. The advance decline line keeps swinging between 60/40 and 50/50. We’re still in a negative beta regime. When the S&P 500 rises, a pile of stocks trade the opposite direction. JPMorgan, Netflix, Walmart, and Target all sat lower today. The Nasdaq is dragging the rest

Implied Volatility: What It Is and How to Trade It

October 21, 2026

Most traders look at an option and see a bet on direction. I look at it and see a price for volatility. That price is implied volatility, and it’s the single biggest reason a trader can be right on direction and still lose money. I’m Don Kaufman. I started out pricing options as a market maker on the CBOE, and the first thing I learned on the dealer side is that the market makers aren’t paid for predicting direction. They’re paid for pricing volatility. Here’s how you can start thinking the same way. What is implied volatility? Implied volatility, or IV, is the volatility level built into an option’s price. It’s the market’s estimate of how much a stock will move over the next year, stated as a percentage. It’s called “implied” because nobody publishes it. You back it out of the option’s price. Take the stock price, strike, time

Expected Move: How to Calculate It and Trade It

October 21, 2026

Every options chain is telling you something before you place a single trade: how far the market thinks the stock is going to move. That number is the expected move, and it’s the first thing I look at on every trade I put on. I’m Don Kaufman. I spent years pricing options as a market maker and teaching them at thinkorswim, and if I could get every retail trader to learn one concept, this would be it. Once you know the expected move, you stop guessing and start pricing. What is the expected move? The expected move is the price range the options market is pricing for a stock, ETF or index over a set period of time: through Friday, through earnings, or through a specific expiration. It comes straight out of option prices. When traders pay up for options, the implied volatility rises and the expected move gets wider.

3 Bearish Trades I Put Up On The Big 3 Today

October 21, 2026

Everybody’s calling this a rotation back into tech, and I’m not buying it. I sat down with Schwab Network’s Big 3 this morning and put up 3 live trades right there on air. But the trades only make sense once you see what’s going on underneath this tape. When I look at the semiconductors, the bid back, the buy-side activity, is meager at best. What we need is that quintessential rip-your-face-off rally, and we’re not getting it. So either this rally gets it on, or we fall flat on our face and dive right back into more sell-side activity in the coming days. So I built 3 trades around exactly that, and all three lean the same way. One goes after a sector that looks a lot healthier than it is. The chart shows a nice rally, but the big names you’d expect to be carrying it haven’t rallied, and

Your Fear Gauge Is Walking Around Blind

October 21, 2026

The VIX Is Walking Around Blind Broadcom is nowhere near earnings. Look at its options, though, and you’d swear it reports tomorrow. That jumped out at me yesterday afternoon, and I passed on a trade because of it. If you check the VIX to see whether it’s safe out there, it’s telling you one thing. The options market is telling you something else entirely, and by the end of this, you’ll know how to read it yourself. Options Are Insurance An option works a lot like an insurance policy on a stock. Like any insurance, the price goes up when people expect trouble. Part of that price is what traders call implied volatility. It’s how big a move the market expects, built right into what you pay. Every stock has options that run out on different dates, like this Friday, next Friday or next month. The pattern of prices across

The Bottom Signal Hiding in Utilities

October 20, 2026

https://youtu.be/frQoc2PtCag Consumer staples led the market last week. Utilities led the week before. Gianni Di Poce sees that defensive rotation as a sign the bottom may already be in. You see, defensive flows tend to show up at or near the market’s cyclical bottom. In tonight’s video, he names the growth sectors and stocks he wants leading the next leg higher. His case starts with a washout on Sunday night. Nasdaq futures took out last Friday’s low the moment trading opened, and they’ve rallied ever since. Gianni reads that move as another flush of overleveraged hands. The VIX spiked last week. Now it’s getting crushed again. The pullback also reset the board. The Nasdaq, S&P 500, and Dow all dropped back to where they traded in mid September. The Dow then broke out of a descending price channel. Gianni treats that pattern as a continuation signal inside an uptrend of

They Bet My Marriage Would Last 5 Years

October 20, 2026

On the trading floor, we’d bet on anything. We literally had a board where we traded options on life events. We even traded options on people’s lifespans. I lost big on Tom Sosnoff, because I thought that guy would never make it past 65. When I got married, most of the guys I worked with bet on 5 years. This Saturday, it’s 17. I saw Tom about three weeks ago, and he said, “You stayed married just to screw me on that bet.” I absolutely did. Traders will price anything. And every single week, the options market puts a price on how far the S&P 500 is going to move. Take Its Temperature At 3:17 That price is the expected move, the range the options market is pricing for the S&P 500 (SPX) over a set period. This week, it’s about $165. For today alone, it was about $43. I

You Can Cut Your Risk In Two Tenths Of A Second

October 20, 2026

Somebody told me they were down 10 grand right at the opening bell. What the hell do you mean you’re down 10 grand? The market wasn’t even moving that much. We had like a percent and a half move in the Nasdaq. I’ll say this as eloquently as I possibly can. Not everybody fits into this, but the generation of traders we have now has absolutely no clue what to do when markets start to sell off, and we’re not even two weeks into this selling. Eventually, maybe they’ll figure out how to buy puts. I’m being a little sarcastic. What I mean is, you can cut your exposure in literally two tenths of a second. 26 Deltas Is A Nothing Burger Delta is how much a position gains or loses when the market moves a dollar. Beta weighting turns every position you own into one number, measured in shares

	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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