Don Kaufman, Author at TheoTrade

The Indicator You Trust The Most Is Lying To You

July 20, 2026

Market breadth sucks. That’s not me being dramatic. That’s the actual state of the tools most people use to read this market, and they don’t work the way they used to. You’ve been taught that a negative advance-decline line, meaning more stocks going down than up, tells you the market is weak. You’ve been taught that ticks and breadth tell you what’s really going on under the surface. For most of market history, that was true. Watch what happens now. This morning the market was moving up while the advance-decline line went negative. You can literally sit there with 10, maybe 15 stocks trading to the upside and still have a marketplace that is incredibly hot. That’s how screwed up we are. How is that possible? Because a handful of multi-trillion-dollar organizations, with the heavy order flow that follows them, are the whole market now. When memory and chip stocks

The Thin Red Line and the Volatility Beast

July 18, 2026

Something broke in the market today. Nearly every sector closed down for the first time in months. I recorded this in the final 15 minutes of Friday’s session. The selling started swallowing the entire marketplace right in front of me. The S&P 500 sits on a thin red line. It is stuck in the same range we entered on May 4th, still hovering near 7,500. The NASDAQ is the real story. I gave everyone the 29,000 level on Wednesday night. We crossed under it today. A bidless beast showed up and sellers kept hitting the bid over and over. The chips carried this entire rally. Now they are getting their heads handed to them. Here is the damage I walked through in this weekend’s video: The SMH semiconductor ETF is down about 18% from its high and touched bear market territory today. Micron sits down almost 35% from its record

If They sell Apple, It’s Over

July 17, 2026

Before the cash open the S&Ps were off by 1%, the NASDAQ off by 2%, the Dow and the Russell each down a percent. The hit was coming across the board. Then we did something unusual. We closed at 7533 on the SPX and opened smashing through the lower edge of the expected move, ripping through it like just a knife through butter. We already said screw the expected move. We shattered through it. The NASDAQ breached 29,000 too, and that level has been big reactionary lows inside a really tight channel. There’s not a lot of places to run to. There’s not a lot of places to hide. The financials got smoked into the cash open. Google’s getting absolutely smoked again. Turns out they suck. Like we didn’t know that. Microsoft, back under 400. They definitely suck. Big hit to Meta and Nvidia. The energy sector is up, but

19 for 19

July 17, 2026

Nineteen for nineteen. That’s where this trade sits right now at TheoTrade. Nineteen trades, nineteen winners, and we can show you every single one of them. Now here’s what I actually think about that number. Be the skeptic. I like the skeptic, in fact. When somebody tells me their strategy is running perfect, my first move is to squint at it. I’ve been doing this 25 years and I have never once come across a strategy that’s 100%. So let me save you the trouble of wondering about mine. This trade will have a loss. Eventually every trade takes one and this one is no different, and when it comes I’ll mitigate what I can, but I’m not going to stand here and pretend it isn’t coming. What I’d rather tell you is what a loss actually costs on a trade like this. Because it isn’t what you’re picturing. You

Everyone Beat Earnings. Money Ran.

July 16, 2026

https://youtu.be/egkGcrKLWJg This week delivered a near perfect earnings season. Only IBM missed. Yet money is fleeing the market. Blake Young caught the disconnect in tonight’s video. Earnings beat expectations everywhere. Buyers did not follow. Blake tracked the capital flows live during the session. The numbers changed how I read this rally. Roughly $2.7 billion left the market. Only $1.4 billion came in. Nearly twice as much capital walked out the door. That is a flight to safety. Blake showed exactly where the money went. Consumer staples led the day up 2.7%. Technology dropped 2.5%. Healthcare and transport held firm. Blake did more than name the rotation. He built specific dividend trades to profit from it. Here are the setups he walked through in tonight’s video: Kraft Heinz broke out at $26 to its highest level in nine months and pays a 6% dividend. Coca-Cola closed at its highest price all

The Rotation Holding Markets Together

July 15, 2026

https://youtu.be/J2wqvcGnfsE Hundreds of billions of dollars are quietly fleeing Micron right now. That money is landing straight in Apple and mega-cap tech. This single rotation is the only thing keeping the market alive. When it stops, the whole thing caves. The market is stuck in the middle We tried to test lower today. We bounced right back. The S&P 500 sits smack in the center of its range. Reading direction into that price gives you nothing. The real story is where the money is moving. That is the only edge available right now. Semiconductors are ground zero Semiconductors carried this entire rally. Micron and AMD are ground zero for the move. The year-to-date gains are staggering. In tonight’s video I break down exactly where they stand and why they matter. Micron is up 187% year to date with earnings already behind it. No catalyst is left to save it. Intel

The problem with my own trade

July 15, 2026

Here’s what my reputation actually costs me on my highest winning trade. Half the year, I’m sitting on my hands. You know me as the chaos guy. Vol spikes, everyone’s hiding under their desk, I’m collecting premium from panicked institutions. I earned that. But the Xmas Tree is built for loud markets, and when the market goes quiet, it waits. I wait. The trade sits in the drawer while I watch a market that isn’t paying me to do anything. 100% of my published Xmas Tree trades have closed profitable so far. Every one of them placed when the market was loud enough to let me. Look, I’ve been doing this since the late 90s. Dot-com, 2008, COVID, The Tariff Tantrum. I know what to do when it gets ugly. The quiet stretches are the ones that cost people money. Nobody talks about it because there’s no story in it.

The 3 Trades I Dropped On Schwab This Morning

July 15, 2026

I was on Schwab Network this morning and walked through three setups I’m watching right now. First one is a home improvement name that’s been channeling around the same price for months, but it looks ready to break. We’re talking a potential move down to levels we haven’t seen in three years. The interest rate environment is working against it, and the technical setup is screaming for a retest lower. I showed them the exact put spread I’d use to play it with defined risk. Second one is a consumer staples play that everyone rotated out of earlier this year. It’s been stuck in a tight range, but I think the market’s about to rotate back into it. This one’s bullish, and the way I’m structuring it, the downside is minimal. But if it snaps back into that channel like I think it will, the upside is sitting there clean.

Nvidia Just Got Historically Cheap

July 14, 2026

https://youtu.be/z3MwU3V9QWA Stocks just notched record levels across the board. Gianni Di Poce says Nvidia is now trading at its cheapest valuation since 2019. Records sit at the top of the tape. Yet, the biggest name in tech looks like a bargain. The morning opened with a negative inflation reading. Gianni called it the first negative print in years. That report sent stocks soaring. It also buys the Fed more time before the next move on rates. The S&P 500 closed last week at its highest weekly level in history. Gianni counts that as a clean breakout. Financials led the charge to record highs. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs both printed new highs and blew past earnings expectations. Here is the part that surprised me. Nvidia sits at its lowest valuation going back to 2019. Gianni pointed out the tech sector has not been this cheap since the Liberation Day lows

The 25% Crash That Landed Right Where It Was Supposed To

July 14, 2026

IBM opened down 25% this morning, and it stopped exactly where I would have guessed. That is not a brag. It is a lesson about how panic behaves. A stock gets a pre-earnings warning, it gaps into freefall, and most people think the bottom is random. It is not. Price falls to what I call the warm, fuzzy place. In times of heavy volatility, a stock doesn’t go find some precise, calculated level. It goes to whatever round number on the screen seems to work. IBM this morning? What’s the round number that seems to work? 220. Good, let’s go there. And that is exactly where it opened. Down 25%. Why 220? Because it was just there. IBM traded down to that same neighborhood back in May. The level was already in the market’s memory, so when the warning hit and the thing had to find a floor in a

	Today
08.00	OJ & Mac \| Overnight review \| FREE SESSION 08.30 09.20 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 Corey Rosenbloom \| Options tactics 13.15 14.00
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14.00	Tony Rago \| Futures Trading 14.00 15.00
15.00	Blake Young & Mac Holbrook \| Market wrap 15.00 16.00

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