Don Kaufman is options trader and educator. Former CBOE market maker, former Chief Derivatives Instructor at thinkorswim, and former Director of the Trader Group at TD Ameritrade. In 2015 he co-founded TheoTrade to teach traders how volatility, probability, and risk really work.

Why The Countdown Just Started

https://youtu.be/K6Li2RSaeZo Last week’s rate hike started the countdown on this bull market. Gianni Di Poce sees it as the signal that we’ve entered the final phase. He isn’t turning bearish. He thinks this final phase could carry the Mag 7 and Mag 10 another 50% to 80% higher. Gianni rejects the lazy take that rate hikes are bearish. He expects another hike or two before year end to pull global capital into US stocks. The bears keep complaining about weak breadth. Gianni says breadth mattered more before just over 10 stocks made up over 40% of the index. In past manias, the average stock faded well before the indices did. These mega caps have become the indices, so the market won’t go lower while they keep climbing. Tonight’s video maps out how far Gianni thinks this final phase can run: The Silicon Surge daily precision arrow indicator fired on Fed

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The COVID Lesson Memory Stocks Are About To Repeat

There’s a big market in Micron calls way out at $2,000. I pulled them up this morning, 87 days out. Micron, MU if you trade it, is already a $1.2 trillion company. Can MU get to 2,000? There’s not only a market for it, there’s a big market for it. Chaos. Intel’s the same story. Intel at 170, doesn’t that sound stupid? Maybe it isn’t, because I think Intel can get to a trillion dollars, and that’s 40% more upside. But the 195 calls, 87 days out, are still trading for 3 bucks, and that’s Intel adding another 80 bucks. The whole market is 5 stocks right now.  Micron is up 240% on the year, Intel is up 208%, and AMD cracked a trillion dollars again. Financials are flat on the year, and most everything else is going to hell in a handbasket. I think this ends the way COVID

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Why Monday’s 100-Point Rally Has My Spidey Senses Up

The S&Ps ripped more than 100 points on Monday. Everybody’s cheering. So let me ask you something. If you own individual stocks, how’d your stocks do? Walmart didn’t do much. Boeing looked like every other day, and Goldman Sachs almost went up a little bit. Financials are flat on the year, and what carried the whole market Monday was Meta, which was a pile of crap until Monday, and AMD. So this morning felt like “a hangover after a really good party.” Monday was also a vol up, market up day, and that part bothers me more. The VXN, which is the VIX for the NASDAQ, went up right along with the market. The only way volatility goes up with the market going up is egregious amounts of call buying, and we got plenty of it. Go look at the skew. AMD’s at-the-money calls 24 days out were pricing a

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Why Meta Ran 11% Today

https://youtu.be/luy94dF2tug Brandon Chapman watched Meta scream 11% on a day with no earnings. That move had nothing to do with an AI headline. Desks were running a dispersion trade. They sold premium in the SPX and bought calls on the Mag Seven names. Brandon showed the proof on the screen. The VIXEQ climbed from 38.3 to 38.8 while the VIX bled lower. Component volatility rose because traders were buying calls on individual names. Index volatility fell because those same traders were selling SPX premium around 30 days out. Those calls force dealers into negative gamma. Dealers hedge by buying stock, and the tape grinds higher on its own mechanics. The structure was already loaded before the first tick. The market opened at 766 with the negative gamma flip sitting all the way down at 762. That cushion let price run without friction. SPY blew through 770, took out 772, and

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The Apple Trade I Wouldn’t Fade No Matter What I Thought

Apple was butting right up against its all-time highs this morning. It hit the upper edge, pulled back, and none of it looked wildly overbought. I would absolutely not fade that move. Even if I thought Apple was going down, I wouldn’t take a bearish trade there, because it has a high probability of getting squeezed into new highs, easily $349 or $350. Meta shattered the upper edge of its expected move this morning, and I’m short Meta, so trust me, I noticed.  I’m getting Meta’d, and I think the same kind of squeeze is likely coming to Apple. You can’t just buy any spread, though.  With Apple sitting dead center between 2 $2.50-wide spreads, one bullish and one bearish, the put spread was trading for substantially less than the call spread, and the reason is skew. Buying the at-the-money spread was out of the question. If you pay $1.40

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The Cheapest Options I’ve Seen In A While

This morning was the unspoken holiday of the financial markets. It was Yom Kippur, and it landed the Monday after a major options expiration, so a huge amount of risk had either rolled forward or come off the board entirely. 10 minutes into the session, the S&Ps were barely printing 3,000 contracts a minute.  It was a light and fluffy trade. The S&Ps still blew through the $42 expected move for the day almost immediately.  By midmorning they were more than halfway to the $98 expected move for the entire week, and everybody wanted to call it a rally. We’ve been a stone’s throw off the all-time high for months, people. At-the-money options with the whole trading day ahead of them were going for 88 cents this morning, when on any other day at that point in the session they trade for $1.35 or $1.40. Implied volatility got the life

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What Happens When The Bonds Break

https://youtu.be/n8CDtxhNIXE Quadruple witching came and went today. The S&P 500 finished the week dead unchanged. The story sits in the bond market instead. The 10-year yield is parked at 5% and setting up to break higher. I’ll be watching that all weekend. When the bonds break, a long list of other asset classes gets dragged into it. Start with where we’ve been. We’ve traded inside the same volatility box since May 4th. Five months of pinging back and forth. The futures rolled from September to December this week. The new contract sits about 68 points higher, so the box moved up with it. Center of the range now sits near 7550. A selloff into that level next week means nothing to me. A push above 7750 gives a rally real legs. Today handed you another rotation session. Financials opened lower and rallied straight back, and over 80 stocks were trading

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Stand At Sea Level And You See 8 Miles

Stand at sea level and you can see about 8 miles. That’s the horizon. Past it the water curves away and you’ve got nothing, no matter how hard you squint. VIX measures 30 days out. So when somebody asks me where VIX is on a day the tape is getting kicked around, my answer is that VIX don’t work here no more. It’s over the horizon. It’s measuring something you can’t see from where you’re standing, and it’ll sit right there while the risk in front of your face does whatever it wants. What Moves It Correlation. VIX wakes up when the market stops rotating and starts going down together. The semis go, AMD goes, the whole complex goes at once. That is the only thing that gets it off the floor. Which makes rotation the thing holding everything up. Money comes out of big tech, lands in financials, the

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Why Today’s Rally Never Happened

https://youtu.be/N2XfS_D4xWM Blake Young stripped the overnight session out of today’s tape. The S&P 500 moved 0% from the cash open.Every bit of that recovery landed while American traders slept. This wasn’t an audience participation move.Technology ran 2% on the day. The index still finished flat once you measure from the 9:30 candle forward.Blake traced the buying to the dollar. Foreign capital converted euros, yen, and pounds into US equities overnight.The dollar broke out of a double bottom and now targets 100.61. It closed today with the exact same strength it carried yesterday.Equities fall when the dollar climbs. That overnight bid papered over a market still rolling over underneath.Look at the quarter instead of the session. Only communications, healthcare, and energy sit above the S&P 500 average over the last three months.Half the sectors sit below zero. Blake reads that as a temporary pullback, and he’s getting ready for the next

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$2,000 On The Line When We Go Live Now

THE SWITCHBOARD goes live at 2 PM ET, and 1 person watching leaves with $2,000 in cash.  You have to be on the livestream when the winner is announced. If that person isn’t there, we pull another name. I know the afternoon fills up.  This is the 1 hour today that’s worth clearing, because while you’re in the room you’ll see a 6-minute morning that turned into 90.3% over 4 months, all 71 trades on 1 screen. The link below puts you straight in. ===>Put me in the livestream To your success, Don Kaufman

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Don Kaufman Don Kaufman

TheoTrade co-founder, former CBOE market maker and thinkorswim Chief Derivatives Instructor.

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