Your Order Doesn’t Go Where You Think It Does
You hit send on an order and you assume it goes to an exchange. It doesn’t. Here’s what actually happens, and I’ve drawn this out on the whiteboard enough times that I can do it in my sleep. Your order leaves your screen and goes to your broker first. Schwab, ThinkOrSwim, Fidelity, doesn’t matter who. […]
A $500 Billion Company Isn’t Worth $500 Billion
Intel is a half-trillion-dollar company. That number is a lie, and I’ll show you why in about ten seconds. Look at the volatility. Intel is running 107% implied vol out at 31 days. It reports this week, and the market is pricing Friday at 180.8%. Nearly double the back week against the month, because that’s […]
Don’t Trust The Pre-Market
Micron ripped $50 higher this morning before the opening bell. An $850 stock that all of a sudden was a $900 stock, up 40, 50 bucks in the pre-market. Your eyes go straight to the price. Big green number, big move, something must be happening. So ask the question almost nobody asks. How much size […]
19 for 19
Nineteen for nineteen. That’s where this trade sits right now at TheoTrade. Nineteen trades, nineteen winners, and we can show you every single one of them. Now here’s what I actually think about that number. Be the skeptic. I like the skeptic, in fact. When somebody tells me their strategy is running perfect, my first […]
The problem with my own trade
Here’s what my reputation actually costs me on my highest winning trade. Half the year, I’m sitting on my hands. You know me as the chaos guy. Vol spikes, everyone’s hiding under their desk, I’m collecting premium from panicked institutions. I earned that. But the Xmas Tree is built for loud markets, and when the […]
The 25% Crash That Landed Right Where It Was Supposed To
IBM opened down 25% this morning, and it stopped exactly where I would have guessed. That is not a brag. It is a lesson about how panic behaves. A stock gets a pre-earnings warning, it gaps into freefall, and most people think the bottom is random. It is not. Price falls to what I call […]
The number that tells you when the fear is fake
The weekend news wanted you scared. By Sunday night you would have thought the semiconductors were going to open in a crater Monday morning. Korea off big. Chips getting tagged. All hell breaking loose. So the tape opens, and the S&P is down 0.3%. That’s it. That’s the disaster. This is why you go look […]
There’s one setting up in the market right now
Why Selling Volatility Works When Fear Spikes While I was live earlier today, one of these started setting up in the market. Right in the middle of me talking. Number 20 in a row. Here’s the thing about that, and it’s the reason I’m writing you tonight. You can rewatch everything else I did today. […]
I am not calling it a rotation anymore
The advance decline line looked beautiful this morning. The market sank. That combination is the whole story right now, and almost nobody is reading it correctly. Let me show you what I watched happen at the open, because it tells you where this is headed. The NASDAQ took a real hit this morning, down about […]
What else you got? Because this tape has not moved
My best trade this morning was the one I skipped. The S&P was up 50 points. Looked green, looked fine. It was an absolute slop fest. One stock, Broadcom, was carrying almost the whole tape. Take it out and what else you got? Nothing. This thing has not moved. The advance decline line was a […]