The S&P 500 broke its channel and closed lower. Metals, mining, and energy were the only groups left standing. Blake Young sees the Chaikin accelerating. Money is distributing out of equities right now. He’s watching for a drift toward 736 from here. Every other sector finished negative today. Even basic materials closed below yesterday. Look closer at that group though. XLB gapped down and closed up, and it has defended the same range since March. Blake’s thesis starts with the Treasury. If it buys up bonds, inflation hedges get bid and metals prices follow. He wants gold on a pullback. He is not buying it today. Copper is the cleaner setup. It held its ground without rallying, which is exactly the kind of tape he wants to sell puts into. That’s the whole approach right now. Get paid while volatility rises everywhere else. Here is what he walked through in

Stocks were higher. Gianni Di Poce pinned this pullback on a single sector. Energy was the top performing sector last week. That one fact puts the bullish case on hold. Tech and energy now sit neck and neck for the best performing sector of the year. Gianni treats that race as the real scoreboard. When tech pulls ahead, the tape turns bullish. When energy pulls ahead, the tape turns bearish. Every time crude oil finds strength, tension builds underneath stocks. We watched it happen again today. The S&P 500 fell about 47 points. The index hovered near the lows of the day. The Nasdaq absorbed the brunt of the selling. The Dow barely budged. Gianni still calls this a fantastic dip buying opportunity. He sees the market one domino away from bulls reasserting momentum. That domino is energy. Crude has to pull back. The futures curve supports him. Oil sits

Brandon Chapman booked a 195% gain today on a zero DTE spread. He knew which way the market would break before it opened. The recent tape looked bullish. Anyone reading price action alone leaned long this morning. Brandon read the gamma exposure map instead. That data pointed down. Here is how the setup built. A significant level at 750 broke and carried price to 760. The break of 760 punched through major walls and created dealer convexity. Volatility rose with price, which forced dealers to hedge by buying stock and futures. Then price slammed into the wall at 775 and 780. Brandon had those lines drawn last week. Price glided along 775 for three straight days. Once it finally cleared, 780 arrived in a single session. Friday the structure shifted. The gamma exposure flipped and the cushion under the market thinned out. This morning price sat below 776 in a

https://youtu.be/jioJYaBZ1_M Micron trades at $970. The calls sitting 330 points out of the money cost $10. The puts sitting 270 points out of the money cost $4. The market is pricing double the risk of a melt up over a crash. I call that trading stupid. That inversion gets wider the further out in time you go. Micron does not report until September 23rd, so this has nothing to do with earnings risk. The reason it exists is simple. Nobody is paying for downside protection anywhere in this market. The VIX closed at 14 today. You have to go back to Christmas Eve to find a print like that. S&P futures traded 800,000 contracts. That is the lightest volume since the holidays, and it is garbage. The indices are stuck. The advance decline line has been a pure 50/50 slop fest all week, so the index products sit in complete

https://youtu.be/dc6pW8OSZGE Volatility skew has gone flat in the SPDRs. Calls and puts are trading for nearly the same money right now. I built a tool to track this in real time. What it showed me today has almost no historical precedent. Nine days out in SPY, there is no skew left at all. Ten delta calls and ten delta puts carry virtually identical implied volatility. Thirty days out, the gap narrows to six implied volatility points. Go thirty six days out and near money options sit at 13.4 against 12.4. One point of separation. Markets never carry equal risk in both directions, yet that is exactly how this tape is pricing them. AMD pushes it past absurd. The thirty day skew is inverted at 104, meaning the calls cost more than the puts. Push it out to 90 days. Push it to 120. The calls still cost more than the

Blake Young spent today’s session on the one corner of the market where utilities and energy overlap. He calls it nuclear and uranium. The demand math is not subtle. Nuclear demand in the United States is expected to run 50% to 100% higher over the next 10 to 15 years. Uranium demand climbs right alongside it. Blake puts that increase at 30% on the low end and 80% on the high end. Here is the part that changes how you position. Blake is not buying these names outright at today’s prices. He sells puts and gets paid while he waits for the pullback. Cameco already broke through accumulation on the zero line. Blake wants a retest near 94 before he commits, and he maps upside through 120, 130, and 150. The cleaner vehicle sits in the ETF. URA trades near 45 and carries a 9% annualized dividend for anyone who

Gianni Di Poce caught the handoff last week. Software outperformed semiconductors. Chips beat tech. Tech beat the S&P 500. Software beat all of it. That order matters more than the headline highs. Semiconductors carried the second quarter by themselves. The S&P 500 and the Dow ripped to fresh all-time highs last week. Stocks eased back Monday and again today. The Nasdaq has not joined the all-time high party yet. It still outperformed both the S&P 500 and the Dow on a percentage basis. Gianni calls that a risk on signal. Look at the math underneath the tape. Technology makes up around 34% of the S&P 500. Ten or eleven stocks account for over 40% of the index. Inside the tech sector, semiconductors are roughly 40% of the weight. Software is roughly 20%. Gianni wants semiconductors to do nothing into year end. That is his best case scenario. Software takes leadership

https://youtu.be/BCC2mLhzw0U Brandon Chapman pulled up the volatility curve after today’s close. Three month VIX futures sit 22% above spot VIX. Spot VIX closed near 15 and a half. That premium prices a 5% to 10% correction in the S&P 500. The VIX finished below 15 on Friday. The futures market spent today saying the opposite. Contango in the /VX curve is steep across September and October. Brandon reads that structure as bearish. Skew supports it. The reading dipped below 130 last Tuesday. It popped right back above and sat near 132 and a half on Friday. The tape itself barely moved. The S&P 500 closed at 773, which landed exactly on max pain. 775 stood as the call wall all session. Dealers sold into strength and bought into weakness around it. Brandon traded that framework in the morning. He closed his spread for a 100% gain on the break under

https://youtu.be/GKeuDUuaBP4 The S&P moved 260 points this week against an expected move of 111. That is about 2.4 standard deviations outside what the options market priced, so I recorded my weekend update on what it means for next week. Trade is about to get erratic, and the reason has nothing to do with the jobs number. We breached the volatility box to the upside. All the open interest that normally holds a market together is sitting way back down at 7511. Up here in never never land, there is almost nothing. So a couple thousand SPX contracts can move the whole market, because there is no structure to absorb it. Here is what I cover: → Microsoft added $700 billion of market cap this week. Half of it came in one session. → The sector suddenly outperforming, and why it does not leave me warm and fuzzy. → Where I

https://youtu.be/GFtlVcRoFcU Two central banks are selling US Treasuries at the same time. Blake Young recorded this afternoon’s video on how to tell which one is doing it on any given day, and it takes two charts. Put bond prices next to the yen. Falling bonds alongside a strengthening yen means the Bank of Japan is selling Treasuries to raise dollars and defend its currency. When bonds fall while the dollar strengthens instead, the selling is coming from inside the US. Heavy volume on top of that points at the Federal Reserve. He walked back through the last two weeks and showed both patterns. A two-day spike in the yen against falling bonds was Japan. Four days of heavy volume with a strengthening dollar was something else entirely. Today it was the second one. None of that stays in the bond market. More selling pushes prices down, which pushes borrowing costs