Everybody wants to tell you where this market is going. I think we’re going up. I think we’re going down. The Fed’s doing this, earnings are doing that. Every one of them is certain. So let me ask you a question. Why in your right mind would you go out and start to allocate heavy amounts of capital on any of that? Look at what this tape is actually doing. Rotations every few days. The index green while most of what’s inside it is red. Bounces that feel like the bottom and then aren’t. You’ve got a market that can’t agree with itself. In a tape like this one, the strong opinion is the expensive part. You’re not getting paid for being right about direction. You’re paying to find out. So here’s what I’d rather do. Stop thinking and start trading. Instead of putting real money behind one view, go

You hit send on an order and you assume it goes to an exchange. It doesn’t. Here’s what actually happens, and I’ve drawn this out on the whiteboard enough times that I can do it in my sleep.  Your order leaves your screen and goes to your broker first. Schwab, ThinkOrSwim, Fidelity, doesn’t matter who.  They all route the same way and they’re all full of it when they tell you otherwise. At the broker, your order gets authenticated. Is that really you? Do you have enough money to do whatever the hell you’re trying to do? If it’s an options trade it runs against something called a margin library, which is a database somebody had to teach every single trade to, one at a time.  I spent years on that work. Nobody calls it artificial intelligence, but that’s exactly what it is. If you pass, the order moves on. 

Intel is a half-trillion-dollar company. That number is a lie, and I’ll show you why in about ten seconds. Look at the volatility. Intel is running 107% implied vol out at 31 days. It reports this week, and the market is pricing Friday at 180.8%. Nearly double the back week against the month, because that’s where the whole move is stacked.  Apple, for comparison, sits around 30%. So market-cap adjust the two of them. Volatility adjust them. Intel is trading like something far bigger and far angrier than its market cap says. Pissed off and volatile. You have to look at these things that way now. You cannot look at Intel as a half-trillion-dollar company. You look at it as a half-trillion-dollar company with a pissed-off amount of volatility. Different animal. And it’s the whole group. AMD is running about 90% at 31 days, roughly double Google’s 40%, and it’s

Micron ripped $50 higher this morning before the opening bell. An $850 stock that all of a sudden was a $900 stock, up 40, 50 bucks in the pre-market. Your eyes go straight to the price. Big green number, big move, something must be happening. So ask the question almost nobody asks. How much size is really behind it? At the open, the answer was about two million shares. On a stock at that price, two million shares is nominal.  Not because the move is fake, but because two million shares does not tell you whether it’s real yet. The price looked enormous and the confirmation wasn’t there. That’s the whole point, and it holds no matter which way the stock goes.  This morning Micron stuck. Real volume came in behind it as the session got going and it held its gains. But that volume showed up during the session,