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Commodities trader, ex-Trafigura. 10+ years in energy and metals markets. I trade crude, natgas, gold, and agricultural futures. Geopolitics is my technical analysis. Moscow → London → independent.
Geopolitical headlines are just noise until they start pricing into volatility, and right now, the options market is whispering, not shouting. I woke up this morning to alerts about Iran, US talks, and restored nuclear sites. My first instinct wasn't to check crude oil prices. It was to check the VIX term structure and front-month implied volatilit...
So the rumor mill is churning, and the hot story is that Stripe might be kicking the tires on PYPL. My phone lit up this morning with alerts. The immediate reaction from the peanut gallery? 'Buy calls! To the moon!' And that’s precisely why I’m looking at selling premium. When everyone is screaming to buy, my inner market maker wakes up. I learned ...
This morning my feed was flooded with chatter about Russia's latest OFZ bond auction. A 14.75% yield. Sounds juicy, right? Wrong. The herd sees a big number and gets excited, but they're chasing a ghost. I learned on the trading floors in Chicago that the headline is never the real story. This isn't a signal to buy Russian debt; it's a massive, fla...
Every week, I see retail traders pile into LEAPS (Long-Term Equity Anticipation Securities) thinking they've found a clever, capital-efficient way to 'buy and hold' a stock. They buy a call option two years out, close their laptop, and hope for the best. This is, to put it bluntly, a lazy and deeply flawed approach. You're not buying a stock. You'r...
I got a text this week from a friend who’s new to trading. It was a screenshot of his account, down 90%. The culprit? He bought a bunch of weekly, way out-of-the-money calls on a tech stock right before earnings. A pure lottery ticket. He was hoping for a 10-bagger and instead got a zero. It’s a story I’ve seen a thousand times. It reminds me why m...
Every morning, I scan the options flow and see the same story. A flood of retail money pouring into zero-day-to-expiration (0DTE) and weekly options on the SPY and TSLA. It’s a casino. They're buying lottery tickets, hoping for a 10-bagger, and getting crushed by theta decay 99% of the time. I made a living on the other side of those trades at a pr...
