Don Kaufman here.  Last Thursday, we traded over 84 million option contracts. The average is 58 million. Nothing happened in the market that day. Nobody in the industry can explain why. Let me paint the picture: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of last week were some of the quietest trading sessions I’ve seen.  If the market’s heartbeat was this flat, you’d be dead. One sign of life on Wednesday around the Fed announcement, then back to meandering like a drunk in the woods. The Volume That Doesn’t Make Sense 84 million option contracts on Thursday.  To put that in perspective, the only times we see numbers this big are during market panic – like the selloffs back in April.  But April was pandemonium. Last week was a snoozefest. I’ve been asking buddies across the industry the same question: “Have you ever seen volume this significant without heavy volatility?”  Everyone’s saying the

Don Kaufman here Someone asked me my win rate on a webcast yesterday and I turned red. Seriously. Like, I get so pissed at that question it’s almost as bad as when somebody says “quadruple witching.” My blood pressure spikes and I want to reach through the screen. You know why that question makes me furious? Because who the hell cares what your win rate is? I could be wrong 90% of the time and still crush it.  In fact, that’s exactly what happened during one of the most profitable periods of my trading career. The Crisis-Seeking Years Back in 2007-2008, I was flying all over the world for Thinkorswim. Singapore, you name it. I literally couldn’t sit in front of screens all day for about two years because I was constantly on planes – and this was before internet on flights. So I switched everything to what we call