Last night was quite a ride, wasn’t it? In the span of a few hours, we went from markets collapsing to markets being virtually neutral. Here we have the S&P 500 futures below. It looks very dramatic, but as I am typing these words, the /ES is down 0.02%!
In turn, the VIX blasted to nearly 20 and then utterly gave it away, since apparently the whole Israel-starting-WW3 thing is a complete joke.
Fear about a huge Middle East War sent crude oil flying, but it’s down hard now!
Gold, the safe haven, apparently is not required anymore by haven-seekers.
All I can say is that there is a mass of people there in options that expire today who are either going to be relieved or infuriated. Can you imagine being loaded to the teeth with QQQ puts, for example, excitedly watching the market last night and and picking out your Lambo color, only to see this morning that you’ll have to stick with your AMC Gremlin?
Incidentally, at the start of this year, I had said I’d be stick with just ETFs for trading. A few days ago, I started to crack a bit and got puts on Shopify. Sadly, this is what it looks like this morning, thanks to JP Morgan pushing their target price higher.
One of you were asking me why I only wanted to trade ETFs, and the example above reminds me PRECISELY why – – because I’m not going to wake up one morning and find out what some investment bank that wants to offload its position to the public has instructed an analyst to issue a Strong Buy rating. It’s this kind of nonsense I can live without, so I’m dumping these puts and will re-strengthen my resolve to trade ONLY ETFs!
