Don Kaufman, Author at TheoTrade

1 Person Watching Today’s Livestream Walks Away With $2,000

September 17, 2026

At 2 PM ET today I’m handing 1 person watching the livestream $2,000 in cash. You have to be watching live when the name gets pulled, and that’s the only rule. We’ve done this before and we’ve paid every time. The reason I’m paying somebody to be in the room is what goes on the screen. THE SWITCHBOARD has never been shown in public. It’s 1 screen that shows the price that’s going to decide the day before the market opens, and the trader who built it spends 6 minutes on it each morning, leaves 1 order sitting at that price, and doesn’t look at a chart again all day. Over the last 4 months that added up to 71 documented trades and 90.3% on a $1,000 base. Every trade goes up today, and so does the arithmetic behind 50% in 90 days, taken straight out of the record. I’ll

How Market Risk Just Got Bigger

September 16, 2026

The Fed raised 25 basis points and gave no forward guidance at all. Risk in this market went up after that announcement. One number proves it. The SPX priced a $128 expected move for the entire week. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are already in the books. Friday’s expiration still implies plus or minus $91. Most of the week’s risk now sits inside two sessions. I started tonight’s session in the September S&P 500 futures contract. We dropped right back into the volatility box and tagged 7511 almost spot on. I call 7511 the warm fuzzy spot. Risk goes there to die. The box runs 7350 on the bottom and roughly 7700 on top. The SPX dragged us back to it. Nearly five million contracts traded there today. Tesla traded two and a half million. Nvidia traded three million. Nothing else on the board moves that kind of notional value. Plenty

(NEW Video): 3 Trade Ideas Before The Fed

September 16, 2026

It’s still a little difficult to believe. 90% probability of a hike today, and everything going on in Main Street is so far removed from what we’re seeing on Wall Street. Look at oil prices, look at diesel. That’s a shock to the system we probably haven’t even felt yet. I was on with Schwab’s Big 3 this morning with three ideas, so let me walk you through them. There’s a sector that has hit or exceeded the lower edge of its expected move for five consecutive weeks. Count them, five. The option market says it should travel three bucks and it’s gone further than that every single week. That’s some fierce sell side activity, and it’s left statistically wild oversold conditions behind it. I’m a contrarian in there. I’m looking for a brief but violent move back to the upside, and I used a $5 wide call spread to

How Software Stocks Just Made History

September 15, 2026

https://youtu.be/R8TrsMTMi3g Gianni Di Poce caught something yesterday that barely registered anywhere else. Software outperformed semiconductors by the greatest margin in history. That happened in a single session. Gianni has been building an overweight allocation into software for months. Yesterday paid him off. He’s already looking at the next rotation, and he’s walking through the whole framework live tomorrow. Wednesday at 2 PM Eastern, Gianni opens the room for free. He shows the four conditions he checks in the Nasdaq every week, the full track record since launch with the losing trades included, and a brand new second way every Tech Timer pays. One attendee leaves with $1,000 cash, drawn live. There’s no replay. 👉 Save my seat for Wednesday at 2 PM Eastern👈 Now here’s what has him watching the Nasdaq this closely. The index has done nothing since mid May. Four months of range, and the Bollinger Bands now

They Buy Calls And Cause The Squeeze They Predicted

September 15, 2026

Persistence beats resistance. I hate that line. I hate it more than almost anything. That’s a market technician saying. Because crap goes up, it keeps going up. Because crap goes down, it keeps going down. Until of course it doesn’t. So Why Am I Nervous At This Level Anyway Because I am. I’ve got a position on in Meta against a level it has hit four separate times now, and I don’t mind telling you it makes me nervous. Just not for the reason you think. What I don’t like about trading against a level has nothing to do with what’s on the chart. It has everything to do with who else is looking at the same chart. Say you’ve got a big round number sitting up there, and for Meta that’s 680. A bunch of retail traders and a bunch of proprietary traders pull it up and go, that

You’re Looking At The Wrong Number On Your Option Chain

September 15, 2026

Most traders are staring at the right screen and reading the wrong column. They pull up probabilities and read the one for the expiration they’re in. What are the odds this thing finishes in the money on the 18th. Fine. Except that’s not the trade you’re making. You’re not holding to expiration. You’re getting out when price touches your number, and those are two completely different questions with two completely different answers. The Two Numbers I’ve got a position on in Meta right now, and it’s sitting around $670 at the open. If I read the expiration column, it tells me one thing. But what I care about is whether price touches $655 or $650 before I’m done, because that’s where I’m out profitable. Probability of touching that level out at expiration? 73%. Probability of getting there this week? About 44%. That second number is the one that matters to

Why The Fed Raises Rates Wednesday

September 14, 2026

https://youtu.be/Bq4K0CrBVnU The 10-year Treasury note touched 5% today. Fed funds futures now put a quarter point hike Wednesday at 90%. Brandon Chapman spent today’s session explaining why that hike has close to nothing to do with inflation. Raising rates won’t rebuild the refining capacity we never built. It won’t bring down oil after we bombed a batch of Russian refiners. Brandon tracks the real pressure to a different place. The Fed needs the yield spread between us and Japan to stay wide. The Bank of Japan is raising rates to fight its own inflation. Their Friday policy statement lands right on top of that spread. Every tick of tightening in Tokyo narrows the gap. Investors who borrowed cheap yen to buy our Treasuries lose their reason to hold them. Brandon walked through the collateral math, and it’s the part I keep coming back to. A Treasury posted as collateral at

Most Of What’s Green Today Is Garbage

September 14, 2026

70 products opened green today with the market down almost 1%. Somebody’s going to look at that advance-decline line and call it a good sign. It isn’t. Go look at what’s green. A few of those names matter. Most of them are crap. What you’re watching is a marketplace buying garbage to prop itself up, and that is nothing like a market anybody wants to own. Meanwhile the semiconductors got taken apart at the open, with memory down 6 or 7% and Intel getting hit. And Google opened up $5, Meta had a $10 bid under it, and that rotation is the only reason the Nasdaq wasn’t down 1,000 points. Which is money hiding, and it is a different animal from strength. Jeff Bierman has a phrase for it that I’m going to steal, which is that this reeks of desperation. Money management and desperation, and the underpinnings of this

Stories Are For Children Not For Traders

September 14, 2026

I made 56% on a one-day trade and I had no idea it was coming. Put a bearish position on in the semiconductors Friday at $1.15. Closed it this morning at $1.80. One of the bigger one-day gains I’ve seen. And I’m going to get emails today telling me I was spot on, so let me stop that right now. I did not put that trade on because I thought the world was going to fall apart over the weekend in AI. I didn’t know that was coming. Nobody did. So let me tell you why I took it. The volatility in the semis has been great lately, and this is not my normal setup. I like three standard deviations, yada yada yada. This thing was a chopped out wonder fest, and that’s why I did the trade. I took the bearish side because the skew was a little friendlier

7660 Or Hell In A Handbasket?

September 11, 2026

https://youtu.be/RgtNLDsYx80 The S&P futures closed at 7660. That’s the exact upper edge of the volatility box I’ve been marking since May. Every time we’ve tagged 7660, this tape has turned into a crap fest. We closed spot on it Friday. Friday looked like a snapback rally. I care far more about the other thing that snapped back. Correlation came back. We opened with 93 products trading on one side of the market, and I haven’t seen an open like that since April. That isn’t a bullish read or a bearish read. It tells me the index is getting ready to move after four and a half months stuck in the same range. The VIX argued the opposite. It measures 30-day implied volatility, so it can’t see short duration options at all. Short duration vol went up on Friday. The VIX feels like the last instrument to know. Look at the

	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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