There’s a chart on Jeff Bierman’s page I keep going back to. It’s a $2,000 account taking every one of his trades since April, one contract each, winners and losers. It climbs to $4,907 by the middle of this month. Now think about what you’ve sat through in that stretch. Records, then a chip selloff overnight, then oil at a 5-month high, and this morning every screen fighting over Tesla and Meta.  If you trade the famous names, every one of those headlines took a swing at you. A good week, then a bad one, and you can’t tell why. I watched that pattern for 15 years at TD Ameritrade, across 7 million traders. Most of them never broke out of it, because they never left the crowd. Jeff left it.  His trades came from Gap, Starbucks, Abbott and Medtronic, stocks that don’t move on a Tesla or AI headlines

Everybody’s calling this a rotation back into tech, and I’m not buying it. I sat down with Schwab Network’s Big 3 this morning and put up 3 live trades right there on air. But the trades only make sense once you see what’s going on underneath this tape. When I look at the semiconductors, the bid back, the buy-side activity, is meager at best. What we need is that quintessential rip-your-face-off rally, and we’re not getting it.  So either this rally gets it on, or we fall flat on our face and dive right back into more sell-side activity in the coming days. So I built 3 trades around exactly that, and all three lean the same way. One goes after a sector that looks a lot healthier than it is. The chart shows a nice rally, but the big names you’d expect to be carrying it haven’t rallied, and

Somebody told me they were down 10 grand right at the opening bell. What the hell do you mean you’re down 10 grand? The market wasn’t even moving that much. We had like a percent and a half move in the Nasdaq. I’ll say this as eloquently as I possibly can. Not everybody fits into this, but the generation of traders we have now has absolutely no clue what to do when markets start to sell off, and we’re not even two weeks into this selling. Eventually, maybe they’ll figure out how to buy puts. I’m being a little sarcastic. What I mean is, you can cut your exposure in literally two tenths of a second. 26 Deltas Is A Nothing Burger Delta is how much a position gains or loses when the market moves a dollar. Beta weighting turns every position you own into one number, measured in shares

The SPX traded 650,000 option contracts early Monday morning. Just to give you a feel, the SPX is a $7,700 product, and Meta is a $700 product. So every SPX contract is 10 times the size of a Meta contract, and it’s doing 650,000 of them. The SPDRs (SPY), which are basically the same thing, had already done 1.5 million. When I left TD Ameritrade, I remember having conversations about this in 2014. The biggest days we ever saw back then were like 25, 30 million option contracts. We knew options could move certain products on certain days, but I never thought we’d see a day where the options became the market. That changes how you should read every trading day, starting with the premarket. Wipe That Slate Clean For 20-plus years of my career, I looked at the S&P’s in the premarket, and whatever the futures did, so goes

More S&P 500 stocks now have negative beta than positive beta. Now that is downright lunacy. Let me explain you something. Beta is how much a stock moves compared to the S&P 500. If your stock has a beta of 2 and the S&P moves up or down 1%, your stock moves up or down 2%. Negative beta means the S&P goes up 1% and your stock goes down 1%. McDonald’s has negative beta right now. And before somebody comes at me with “the beta says 0.43, you monkey,” that’s a five-year beta. Look at the three-month numbers, because they’ve gone negative. If you have a 401(k), you should be very afraid. I’m not here to bear up on you, but you should be afraid. The Rotation Into Crap Nobody Ever Wanted Heavy buying in Lulu. Heavy buying in McDonald’s, which was down 24% and all of a sudden explodes

Jeff Bierman goes live in 1 hour. Since April, he has 44 closed signals, and not 1 of them is a Magnificent 7 stock. On a hypothetical $2,000 account, 1 contract per trade, that record came to $4,652. At 2 PM ET, he opens all of them up and then pulls up the 1 dark ticker he’s watching right now. The room is open.  Click here, and you’re in We’re also giving away $1,000 cash during the session.  You have to be in the room live to win it. To your success, Don Kaufman

Wednesday’s inflation report was nothing more than a fuse. The marketplace has been a pool of gasoline, a powder keg out there, and this CPI report lit it.  So when I went on Schwab’s Big 3, I brought three bearish trades. One is a retailer doing something the options market says it shouldn’t. Four weeks in a row, it has moved further than its options priced in. That’s a statistical anomaly, and I’m looking for a brief, violent pullback. One is a stock that retail traders have been squeezing higher by piling into calls.  I’ll admit this trade is standing in the way of a freight train. But that freight train looks like it’s coming to a stop. And one sits in every S&P 500 index fund, one of the biggest tech stocks in the world. This trade transcends the company. It’s a bet on what happens to the whole

Goldman Sachs was priced for a $36 move on earnings. Early this morning, it had moved six bucks. And Goldman’s numbers weren’t the problem, either. Equities revenue was up 72% from a year ago. The expected move is how far the options market is pricing a stock to travel by a certain date, in dollars. JPMorgan was priced for a $10 move and moved a dollar. Citi had a $5 expected move and moved two bucks. And Wells Fargo, do I even need to cover Wells? It was priced for $3.80 and barely moved a buck.  Not one of these was anywhere near its expected move. That in and of itself is an anomaly. Why Retail Traders Ignore The Biggest Banks In America JPMorgan reported earnings and traded only 40,000 option contracts around the open.  Nobody’s trading anything in here. Retail doesn’t even know what JPMorgan is. They don’t know