The Fed raised 25 basis points and gave no forward guidance at all. Risk in this market went up after that announcement. One number proves it. The SPX priced a $128 expected move for the entire week. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are already in the books. Friday’s expiration still implies plus or minus $91. Most of the week’s risk now sits inside two sessions. I started tonight’s session in the September S&P 500 futures contract. We dropped right back into the volatility box and tagged 7511 almost spot on. I call 7511 the warm fuzzy spot. Risk goes there to die. The box runs 7350 on the bottom and roughly 7700 on top. The SPX dragged us back to it. Nearly five million contracts traded there today. Tesla traded two and a half million. Nvidia traded three million. Nothing else on the board moves that kind of notional value. Plenty

https://youtu.be/R8TrsMTMi3g Gianni Di Poce caught something yesterday that barely registered anywhere else. Software outperformed semiconductors by the greatest margin in history. That happened in a single session. Gianni has been building an overweight allocation into software for months. Yesterday paid him off. He’s already looking at the next rotation, and he’s walking through the whole framework live tomorrow. Wednesday at 2 PM Eastern, Gianni opens the room for free. He shows the four conditions he checks in the Nasdaq every week, the full track record since launch with the losing trades included, and a brand new second way every Tech Timer pays. One attendee leaves with $1,000 cash, drawn live. There’s no replay. 👉 Save my seat for Wednesday at 2 PM Eastern👈 Now here’s what has him watching the Nasdaq this closely. The index has done nothing since mid May. Four months of range, and the Bollinger Bands now

https://youtu.be/Bq4K0CrBVnU The 10-year Treasury note touched 5% today. Fed funds futures now put a quarter point hike Wednesday at 90%. Brandon Chapman spent today’s session explaining why that hike has close to nothing to do with inflation. Raising rates won’t rebuild the refining capacity we never built. It won’t bring down oil after we bombed a batch of Russian refiners. Brandon tracks the real pressure to a different place. The Fed needs the yield spread between us and Japan to stay wide. The Bank of Japan is raising rates to fight its own inflation. Their Friday policy statement lands right on top of that spread. Every tick of tightening in Tokyo narrows the gap. Investors who borrowed cheap yen to buy our Treasuries lose their reason to hold them. Brandon walked through the collateral math, and it’s the part I keep coming back to. A Treasury posted as collateral at

https://youtu.be/RgtNLDsYx80 The S&P futures closed at 7660. That’s the exact upper edge of the volatility box I’ve been marking since May. Every time we’ve tagged 7660, this tape has turned into a crap fest. We closed spot on it Friday. Friday looked like a snapback rally. I care far more about the other thing that snapped back. Correlation came back. We opened with 93 products trading on one side of the market, and I haven’t seen an open like that since April. That isn’t a bullish read or a bearish read. It tells me the index is getting ready to move after four and a half months stuck in the same range. The VIX argued the opposite. It measures 30-day implied volatility, so it can’t see short duration options at all. Short duration vol went up on Friday. The VIX feels like the last instrument to know. Look at the

https://youtu.be/hQH7tBfzBv8 Blake Young pulled up the Fed Watch tool today. A rate hike at the September 16th meeting now prices in at 71.4% probability. That number sat at 50/50 a week ago. Yesterday it jumped to 61%. Today it’s 71%. Crude oil was behind all of it. Today, it’s trading past $100 a barrel. PPI printed 0.4% month over month, right in line with expectations. Blake zeroed in on a detail nobody headlined. That 0.4% is four times last month’s number after revisions. Core PPI actually slipped from 0.3 to 0.2. Almost all of the producer inflation traces back to oil and energy. Oil and energy feed 17% of CPI directly. Oil added another 10% in the last three days. None of that appears in today’s report. At minimum, Blake expects next month’s PPI to climb 0.2%. He sees a path toward 1% or even 1.5%. Bonds are already voting

https://youtu.be/FKo9cf7frLo Brandon Chapman says market vulnerability is the highest he’s seen in a long while. The yen is the reason. This morning the Treasury bought back only $6 billion in bonds. Expectations sat near $10 billion. Yields broke loose. The 10 year pushed to a yield of 4.857%. That’s the highest we’ve been all year. Brandon backed the chart out three years. We’re breaking through and testing the high from October 2023. A stellar seven year note auction pared some of the losses. Brandon still pulled up the SPX at nine o’clock his time and showed a direct positive correlation with bond prices. The yen is what makes this bigger than a bond story. It strengthened against the dollar today. It strengthened against the euro and the pound too. Brandon calls it a bigger move than the one we saw at the end of July. He wants to know whether

https://youtu.be/t51fSF9Tw2Y Gianni Di Poce flagged the quietest setup on the board. The Nasdaq trades at the same price it held four months ago. Four months of movement produced nothing. The Bollinger Bands have squeezed tighter than they were at the March bottom. That earlier base ran six months before the index finally broke out. Gianni learned it as the bigger the base, the higher the space. He expects the resolution to be meaningful in either direction. His bias points higher because the longer term trend never broke. The Nasdaq has not printed a lower low. Gianni argues today’s dip carved out another higher low instead. Today’s tape handed him more evidence. Explosions tied to Iran hit the wires. Stocks barely flinched. The S&P 500 fell less than half a percent. The Dow dropped over 1%. The Nasdaq stayed green. Semiconductors climbed 1.5% on the session. AMD ran 6%. Money took

https://youtu.be/Uxkn8JKBXWM The VIX is lying dead on the floor. Skew just shot up to one of the highest readings it has posted. Somebody is buying protection that nobody else thinks they need. Those back month options far out of the money are juicy right now. I traded into a Christmas tree spread today because the skew got that rich. Three weeks ago skew was horrendously low. It reversed hard as of yesterday. We don’t know yet what that hedging means. We will know a lot more by Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. Now look at the tape underneath it. The S&P 500 has gone nowhere since early May, chopping between 7,350 and 7,700 for four and a half months. Every session turns into a game of Whac-A-Mole. Semiconductors pop and healthcare fades. Healthcare screams higher and the semis roll right back over. That rotation keeps the index pinned near

Blake Young found a correlation that has held for 20 years. It broke this week. The Australian dollar and Japanese yen trade in step with the S&P 500. Blake ran that relationship back two decades. It turned non positive in roughly 3% of those weeks. That’s about 20 weeks out of 20 years. Blake calls the pair his greed and fear gauge. Growth money lifts the Aussie. Uncertainty lifts the yen. Right now traders are selling the Aussie. They’re covering yen shorts at the same time. Equities keep pushing higher anyway. That split is the warning. Volume backs up his caution. The 10 day average on the S&P 500 sits at 33 million shares. The same week last year averaged over 64 million. Liquidity has been cut nearly in half. Blake won’t trust any directional move until volume comes back after Labor Day. He wants 50 to 60 million shares

https://youtu.be/hwnRyu3cCGc The 10 year yield cracked 4.8% today. I think it cycles right up to 5% and pierces through it. That move sets up the trade I have been waiting on. When treasuries crack, I am selling naked puts on the ZB. No spreads. I will buy the bonds wherever I get put at 105, 106, or 107. The reason I am willing to take assignment is simple. If treasuries slide hard, I expect the treasury to step in and backstop that market. I am waiting for my wave. When the ZB cracks into 107 territory, I start executing. Now understand what today actually gave you. Almost nothing. The S&P 500 finished up 36 points on roughly 1.2 million contracts. Options order flow was so thin it kept me out of trades I wanted in the SPDRs and even XSP. The advance decline line sat at 60/40 the entire session.