Don’s Trading Desk is the free daily market note from Don Kaufman, TheoTrade co-founder and former thinkorswim Chief Derivatives Instructor. Every trading day Don shares his market read, trade ideas, and volatility notes: what he’s watching, what he’s trading, and what everyone else is missing.

The rotation has lost it’s damn mind

Toll Brothers is up 11% this year. Apple is only up 1%. You’re telling me Toll Brothers is better off than Apple? This is a home builder. With rates going up. Every home builder out there is like, “Yeah, with rates up like this, business sucks. Our margins absolutely suck. You should definitely not buy

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How to Read Market Rotations Before They Hit the Headlines

You know what I was going over this morning in TheoTrade Chatroom while drinking my second Monster Energy? Something that would have completely confused newer traders – but it’s exactly how you spot major rotations before they become news. The S&P was selling off. Big tech getting crushed. But the advance/decline line? Getting better. Let

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I Just Made Bank on a Trade That Didn’t Exist Last Week

Holy crap. I’m sitting here on this island with my old computer that keeps freezing up on me, watching the S&P futures cycle through a hundred-point range overnight, and I just executed something that’s never been possible before. A Friday-to-Monday zero DTE butterfly. This didn’t exist until this week. Like, literally couldn’t be traded. And

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The Volatility Beast is Back (And It Looks P****d)

I got to tell you something. While everyone’s celebrating the S&P hitting fresh all-time highs this week, I’m seeing warning signals that are making me want to hide under my desk and rock back and forth. The market finished “massively unchanged” after one of the wildest weeks we’ve had in months. But here’s what nobody’s

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Why Silver’s Record Move Should Terrify You

Silver just posted its largest single-day percentage move in modern history. If you think that’s bullish, you’re about to get destroyed. Look, I get it. Everyone’s celebrating this moonshot like it’s Christmas morning. Silver rockets from 102 to 117, then pukes back down – people were “puking their guts out in the street,” and somehow

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The $8.5 trillion gamma bomb is about to go live

  Alright, so on January 26th it all goes down…but nobody’s talking about what this actually means.  Tesla, Apple, NVIDIA, all these trillion-dollar names just got zero DTE three times a week instead of once. You think last Friday was nuts with Meta jumping eight bucks in seconds? That was one expiration day. Now it’s

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Chocolate Covered Hand Grenades Just Got More Frequent

Look, when my buddy Frank first watched retail clients trade S&P futures back in the day, he said they looked like they were “juggling chocolate covered hand grenades.”  I’ve used that line ever since because it perfectly captures what happens when you give powerful tools to people who don’t respect the explosive potential. Well, starting

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Don Kaufman Don Kaufman

TheoTrade co-founder, former CBOE market maker and thinkorswim Chief Derivatives Instructor.

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