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

https://youtu.be/fWQj8Jwohmk Nobody cared about AMD earnings. Nobody cared about SpaceX either. Both were non-events. The only thing that moved this market was the S&P crossing 7,700, and I want to explain why that single level mattered more than every headline this week combined. We had been trading inside a very finite range with 7511 sitting at the center of it. When price stays in one neighborhood that long, an enormous ball of risk builds up in the options, rolled forward day after day, and a lot of it in zero DTE contracts. The second we crossed out of that range into uncharted turf, the entire professional world had to buy S&P futures. Servers turned on and we went parabolic. I recorded tonight’s video on what that did underneath the surface, because the structure is the story now, not the level. Here’s what I cover: → The skew reading that just

Gianni Di Poce bought the dip last Tuesday and got whipsawed out of it after Fed Day. Then he bought it back Thursday, because that is what the model said to do. Two sessions later the S&P and the Dow ripped to new all-time highs and the Nasdaq added over 950 points. He recorded his nightly video on why that low is going to hold, and hold for a long time. His read comes down to what is leading. Consumer discretionary took the top spot last week, tech came storming out of the gates this week, and that sequence is textbook early cycle behavior coming off a bottom. Here is what he covers in the video: → Why he is not getting excited about semiconductors even though they are outperforming again, and what he would rather watch them do for the next several months → The sector he is positioned

https://youtu.be/suLzz5EMhb0 Two competing Iran headlines hit the tape today. Neither one did a thing. Brandon Chapman recorded his nightly recap on why. The market opened squarely into positive gamma with a cushion running down to 740, and from there it ground higher all day without ever giving the bears a foothold. That structure is why every pullback got bought. Five minutes here, ten minutes there, and each one recovered, because buying weakness is exactly what the dealer is obligated to do when the market is positioned like that. Price pinned at 755, broke 756, retested it, then ran at 760 before a $2 billion gamma level stopped it cold at 758.65. Here is what he covers in the video: → The 757/759 call spread he flagged this morning, and where it closed → Why tomorrow’s cushion will be thinner, and the exact volume reading that tells him so → His

https://youtu.be/RHq-Z9PUTLU The bond market broke today. Interest rates are exploding higher. The TLT now sits near the lowest point it has ever traded. One thing can burn this marketplace, and the bond market is it. The S&P 500 closed right at 7511. That number has been the center point of every trade since May 4th. We tested 7350 this week and bounced. Traders immediately called it a bottom. Too much remains unresolved for me to agree. The NASDAQ ran from 27,200 to a high of 28,600. That is a 5% move off the low. It still could not reclaim 29,000. Some of the most ferocious moves you will ever see happen inside a down move. This one reeks of a bear market rally. Here is the part almost nobody caught. The advance decline line stayed negative during yesterday’s 130 point rally in the S&P 500. No fresh money is entering

https://youtu.be/EzOvkei3120 Don here… Blake Young pulled the fundamentals on the home builders today. Toll Brothers now needs 16 months to sell the inventory it used to clear in 13. Their net profit margin fell 15% in a single year. Costs are climbing faster than home prices. Yesterday set the table for it. The Fed held rates steady. The market treated that as bad news and sold off hard. Blake points to Warsh. He intends to fight inflation aggressively back toward 2%. That path runs through selling bonds or raising rates. The selling dropped the S&P 500 almost perfectly into Blake’s buyer zone. It gapped up from 727 and spent today trying to close higher. He is watching 738.50 into the close. A close below that monthly monkey bar puts 727 back in play, then 716 or lower. Housing is where the real opportunity sits. Inventory has climbed against average sales

https://youtu.be/-X7CwZ-D4as The volatility futures sit roughly 20 cents from inverting. That one print would change how I feel about this market substantially. We are not there yet. We are close enough that I want you watching it tonight. Start with the damage. The S&P 500 shed about 130 handles and closed down almost 2%. The Dow took it worse at over 2.3%, and the Russell dropped 2%. The Nasdaq carries the real story. It now sits 11% off its recent highs. That puts it officially in corrective territory. Here is the piece nobody is flagging. The advance decline line still shows rotation. Nobody came in and pummeled 100 stocks today. Capital moved into Netflix, Walmart, and Starbucks. Consumer staples still hold a bid. Traders still have belief. Volatility does not really get started until correlation shows up. We are not home yet. The selling began overseas. South Korea hit multiple