The market is up this afternoon, but most stocks are not. That sentence does not seem like it should be true, but here are the numbers as of mid-afternoon.  On the New York Stock Exchange, 785 stocks are trading higher and 1,976 are trading lower, which means roughly two and a half stocks are red for every one that is green. The S&P 500 is up about half a percent anyway. You see strength in that tape? Here is what is actually happening. A handful of large tech stocks are pulling the indexes up while the rest of the market bleeds, with chips and memory stocks doing all the lifting.  If you own anything outside of those names, your account is probably not feeling like it is having an up day, and the headlines are lying to you. This is what most retail investors miss when they look at the

AI is the most dangerous investment in the market right now. Investment, not trade. Those are two different worlds and the AI tape today is screaming the difference. The semiconductor ETF, SMH, is the cleanest AI proxy out there. It has not had a real pullback in months. None. The kind of move where you go “okay, the market took a breath” has not happened. The chart goes up, retail buys more calls, the chart goes up. Here is what is happening underneath that chart. A retail trader buys a call on an AI name. The professional on the other side, the market maker, sells that call. To hedge the short call, the market maker has to go buy shares of the underlying stock. That stock-buying pushes the price up. The price going up makes more retail traders buy more calls. The market maker hedges those by buying more stock.

The SPX is pricing in absolutely nothing for Powell today. Fed funds futures show a 100% chance of nothing happening. The volatility tape agrees.  Today versus tomorrow? Marketplace is asleep on it. I think that’s the trade. I sat down with Schwab’s Big 3 this morning and walked through three setups I’m working right now — plus the Fed-Day curveball nobody’s pricing in. Here’s what’s inside the replay: → Why I’m calling today’s Fed meeting a “chocolate-covered hand grenade” — and the cheap vol setup I may actually trade later in the session… → The gap-filled wonderland chart that looks like a stair-climber workout — and the exact $380 level where one of the most-watched insurance names runs out of gas (with the May 22 put spread I built for $3.80)… → The $64 trigger that could ignite a gamma squeeze in an ETF nobody’s watching — and the $0.65

Tiger Woods wears red on Sundays. I wear it when futures are negative.  Woke up this morning, saw the S&Ps were down, put on the red shirt.  Just kidding…I didn’t plan it…just happened.  After I got dressed I did what I do every single morning before I read a word of news or open a single app.  It’s four things: Inject myself with caffiene, look at oil futures, S&P futures, and check out what the XLF is doing. That is how I start my pre-market prep.  You see, oil tells me about geopolitics. When oil spikes, something is happening in the world that the energy market has already priced before the headlines catch up.  The S&P futures tell me where institutional money is positioned overnight. And the XLF tells me whether the fear is real or rotational.  Financials going up in a down tape means money is moving, not fleeing.

181,000 contracts traded in the S&P futures seven minutes before the cash open this morning. That number told me everything I needed to know before the bell rang. The news over the weekend was significant. Geopolitical tensions escalating. Iran headlines hitting again. If you were reading the pre-market tape you would have thought the open was going to be volatile and directional.  On a day when something genuine is happening in this market, you see 250,000 contracts minimum before the open. When things are really moving, you get 400,000 to 500,000. 181,000 contracts with that kind of weekend news is the market telling you the pre-market story is noise. Here is what the data says about why that matters.  Five years of E-mini futures data from 2020 through 2025 shows that 82 percent of opening gaps fill within the first two and a half hours of the regular session.  The

I was on the Schwab Network this morning and I left three trades on the table. One of them genuinely pained me.  I have been skeptical of this entire sector for months. But the numbers don’t care about my opinions. The chart was unambiguous and I had to act on it. The second idea is a stock which got swept up in the rally like everything else did.  That is exactly the problem. When a name goes up for no reason other than the tide coming in, you know what happens when the tide goes out. The third one, I called wildly overbought on air today. Three consecutive weeks of blowing past what the options market said it should move. That kind of setup does not end quietly. Now, if you want to find out the symbols, and specific trades I placed, click the link bellow.  Watch the Full Schwab

Somebody mentioned UVXY in the chat this morning. Bad idea. Not because it is a bad trade right now. Because it is always a bad trade. And I know this not from theory. I know it because I sat across from the people it destroyed. Fifteen and zero. That was my record as an expert witness for TD Ameritrade. Every time a client sued over a volatility product that went to zero, they brought me in.  Suit, no tie, never a tie. Caffeinated. Speaking slowly because the attorneys were billing $1,200 an hour and I did not care. The cases were almost always the same. Someone put serious money into TVIX. TVIX went to near zero. They sued.  I sat across from them and asked one question. At any point in the three years you owned TVIX, did you not realize that TVIX always goes down? The answer was almost

Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. I was at thinkorswim. Before we could look up from our screens, the market had already moved and everything was repriced. The damage was done before a single headline finished loading.  I watched it happen in real time and understood something I’ve never forgotten: by the time you see the news, the market already knows. That was the last day I had CNBC on in the background. I was employee #13 at thinkorswim. After TD Ameritrade acquired us, I spent 13 more years building the educational infrastructure retail traders use to understand options. I’ve seen every way traders lose money. The most common one is reacting to news that the market already processed hours ago. The move isn’t in the headline. It’s already in the price before the headline exists. That realization is what led me to the Judgment Days.  There are specific windows on

Look, I don’t care what you heard over the weekend about valuations or ceasefire headlines or any of that noise.  What just happened in the market wasn’t about fundamentals. It was pure gamma. The largest gamma squeeze I’ve ever seen in my career, and I’ve been trading the SPX since 1998. Three weeks in a row, we breached the expected move to the upside. Three. That’s statistically insane, and the only other time I have three consecutive breaches on record is the COVID crash going the other direction.  This is a crash to the upside, and if you don’t understand what’s actually driving this move, you’re flying blind at 180 miles an hour. The S&P moved 300 points this week. Microsoft had a nearly five standard deviation move. Tesla ripped on a Wednesday when zero DTE options were available, which is no coincidence.  Retail is rushing into the market buying

Just got off the air with Schwab Network. Live TV. And I said something most traders would think is crazy. I told them I’m NOT touching tech right now. Even though it’s the only thing working. Even though the S&P is about to print new all-time highs. Even though Nvidia and Amazon are the only reason we’re not underwater. Here’s the thing… When EVERYONE is chasing the same trade… that’s usually when the real opportunity is somewhere else. So while the entire market is piling into the Magnificent Seven, I just gave them three trades that have nothing to do with any of them. One’s in retail. One’s a hedge most people don’t even know exists. And the third? A name that just got absolutely destroyed… but might not be done falling. I walked through all three on air.  The setups. The levels. The exact expiration dates I’m using. Even