People keep telling me they’re getting killed. With all due respect, we haven’t even begun to sell off in the S&Ps. The S&P 500 was down about 1.3% this morning while the NASDAQ was down close to 3%. I heard this same talk early in my career, and the market looked exactly like it does right now. In 1999, Traders Bragged About Making Tens Of Thousands A Day In ‘98, ‘99 and 2000, I was working on a trading floor in Chicago and flying back to Scottsdale, Arizona, on the weekends. If you’ve ever spent November through May in Chicago, you understand why. I was 23, 24 years old, and almost everything we did on that floor was non-directional. Then I’d come out here, have some drinks at a bar and listen to people talk about the tens of thousands of dollars they made that day. By 2000 and 2001,

Only 56 million options contracts traded yesterday. That number comes from the OCC, the Options Clearing Corporation, which reports every listed option that trades in the U.S. For those of you that have never seen an OCC report, it’s your worst nightmare. No, it’s just option volume. Now, correct me if I’m wrong. There was a Fed announcement yesterday, positioning before the PCE data and positioning before some of the biggest earnings of the year, with everybody on the edge of their seat about AI. So why did only 56 million contracts trade? Where Did 15 Million Options Contracts Go On Fed Day? The year-to-date average is almost 71 million contracts a day, and October has been running about 73 million. If we’d done 63 million, I’d call that light. At 56 million, you’re 20% off the norm for this month, and that’s absolutely unheard of. No one participated in

https://youtu.be/_8B2uyRjrhY The semiconductors finally got their bounce. I’m treating it as a bounce and nothing more. SMH looks like a classic rip your face off rally after a stretch of heavy selling. I want to short into it, possibly as early as tomorrow. That short won’t come from hammering futures until my hands bleed. I’ll build it as a structured trade with a defined risk spread. Today gave the market every reason to pick a direction. We had an FOMC announcement and two heavyweight earnings reports on the same afternoon. The S&P 500 stayed stuck in the middle anyway. The tape got choppy when Kevin Warsh hit the stage. It flattened out once he stepped off. Earnings delivered a split decision. Microsoft caught a fairly strong bid after hours, while Google came off hard and fast. I don’t care about earnings per share on these reports. I care how the

Everybody keeps arguing about whether AI is a bubble. I’m going to throw this out there. If you believe AI is a bubble, and I’d suggest most of you probably do, it has already burst in most other parts of the world. How many people have taken the time to look at China? I mean, take a good long look at it. The Bubble Popped In China Alibaba is right in the epicenter of AI in China, and it can’t catch a bid. It’s down 36% year to date and 44% over the last year. Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, is down 50% year to date. Together, they’re putting a huge crack in FXI, the fund that tracks China’s biggest companies. Never in the history of Chinese markets have there been this many back-to-back losing weeks. Then there’s NIO, the electric car maker. A year ago, it was one of

My $1,200 coffee machine is in the closet on timeout. It started fighting me on Sunday. It wanted to be descaled, and it demanded its own special descaling tablets. You can’t use vinegar, and it’s smart enough to know when you use the generic ones. Yes, the coffee machine knows. So I asked my AI agent if it could go in there and talk to Mr. Machine for me. I was thinking Star Wars. Apparently, we’re not at that point yet, so I drank crappy iced coffee out of the fridge. A Mad Dash For Cash AI can’t negotiate with my coffee maker yet, and Meta still needs a fortune to build it. On Monday, Meta told investors it’s selling $22.5 billion of new stock and $12.5 billion of mandatory convertible preferred stock, a type of share that turns into regular stock down the road. It also plans a $60

My inbox is full of 401(k) complaints this week. The S&P 500 is a couple of percent from its all-time high. But the emails all say some version of the same thing: the market’s a couple of points from a record, so why does my 401(k) look like crap? One guy put it perfectly. He’s getting killed by bonds, and he’s getting killed by tech. I believe it. The only way your portfolio looks good right now is if you own a handful of tech stocks, because everything else looks like crap. People are now calling it the stealth bear market. I don’t care what you want to call it. So let me put it to you straight. If you’re flat on a year-to-date basis, you’re doing pretty good. There are a lot of 401(k)s out there that are off 10% to 20%. The Safe Stuff Got Hit Hardest And