Somebody asked me why the market was rallying. There is no reason, at least not the kind people are hunting for. I can tell you exactly what happened, and it has nothing to do with anybody deciding a company was worth owning. Traders were buying calls in Meta. By midday, Meta had traded 368,000 calls against 118,000 puts. A hundred thousand of those calls went off at the ask or above, which means the buyer paid up to get filled and did not care about the price. Nvidia traded 840,000 calls over the same stretch. What that does When you buy a call, somebody has to sell it to you, and that somebody is a market maker. Now the market maker is short a call, which means they are short upside. If the stock rips, they lose. So they buy stock to cover themselves. The market maker does not want

Meta is up 90% over three years and 10% over two. Read those two numbers again, because almost everybody quotes the first one and almost nobody checks the second. Both numbers are real, and what separates them is that every dollar of that gain arrived in a single stretch before the stock sat down and did nothing for twenty-four months. Dead money wearing a good costume, and once you know to look for it, it is everywhere in big tech right now. Set any chart to three years and then to two. The gap between those two numbers tells you when the stock did its work. Meta is the cleanest example. 90% over three years, 10% over two, and the last time it made a genuine strategic move was 2023. Tesla runs about 46% over three years, and all of the positive price action came at the front of that

The Treasury has signalled it will defend the 30-year bond. So every trader in the country is now watching the 30-year, which means almost nobody is watching the one that decides what you pay for a house. Let me explain why that gap exists and what it is worth to you. Two different bonds, two different jobs When people say bonds, they usually mean the 30-year Treasury. That is the one traders quote, the one futures desks live in, and the one the Treasury has signalled it cares about. The 10-year is the one that matters to your life. Mortgage rates are priced off the 10-year, not the 30-year. Car loans, corporate borrowing costs, and most of what a bank charges you all track it. The five-year sits underneath adjustable rate mortgages doing the same job on a shorter clock. So the government is defending the bond that traders care

Salesforce ran 76% with two down days in it. Two!!!  That took the stock from down 42% on the year to up 2%. SAP did close to the same thing. It was down almost 40% four weeks ago and it is down 6% now, which works out to a 53% run in a month. I am not here to argue valuation or price on either of them.  I do not care what they are worth. What I care about is what a move like that tells you, because it tells you plenty. What you are looking at is a one-sided trade. How those get built A one-sided trade is what happens after a market completely destroys something. Software got decimated earlier this year. Not sold, decimated. Everybody who was going to sell it had sold it, and the people left holding it had stopped caring. So when the tape turned,