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Stop Watching news - Start Making it.

Last time we saw this kind of overnight volatility spike was back in early 2022. The headlines are screaming this morning—a third US carrier deployed, Trump addressing the nation on Iran. My first instinct, honed over five years as a market maker in Chicago, isn't to panic buy puts. It's to pull up the VIX chart. As I expected, we're seeing a gap u...

I saw it again this morning. A guy on Twitter, account barely a year old, posted a screenshot of his $50,000 loss on weekly SPY puts. He bought them Friday afternoon, convinced this weekend's headlines out of Iran would crash the market. Instead, futures are flat, and his options will open Monday worth pennies. He bought a lottery ticket based on f...

The number that stuck with me this week wasn't the SPX hitting another high. It was this: in one Cliffwater fund, investors tried to pull out 14% of the assets and only got 7% back. That’s a gate. And when financial giants like Morgan Stanley and Cliffwater start limiting withdrawals from their corporate lending funds, my old market-maker instincts...

I got a message this morning from a young trader I mentor. He was ecstatic on Wednesday after buying weekly calls on a hot tech name ahead of earnings. He was right on the direction — the stock jumped 8%. But he woke up Thursday to find his calls were down 50%. 'What happened?!' he asked. The answer? He got steamrolled by Vega and Theta. He won the...

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...