Woke up to a house full of groggy football fans and an even groggier futures market. Nothing like a surprise CME outage to kick off a short post-holiday session. Coffee optional—vigilance required.
Key Takeaways
CME Goes Dark
- A cooling failure halts CME Globex futures globally.
- Equity options and stock trading stay live, but the system loses its primary hedging anchor.
- Dealers are flying without their usual headlights—expect wider spreads, sudden jumps, and overall fragility.
Momentum Flips Hard
- Markets ripped from breakdown to breakout in under a week.
- Japan’s stimulus + a wave of insider buying stabilized the system and sparked the squeeze.
- But fast up can become fast down—this strength may simply give funds a better exit ramp.
Liquidity & Structure Matter Today
- Stocks, options, futures—different pipes, same plumbing.
- A futures outage disrupts risk hedging across all of it.
- Treat today as an education day if the noise isn’t for you.
Sector & Ticker Action
- NVIDIA: Still trapped in a pattern of lower highs/lower lows. Watching for a possible move toward 186 and using NVDQ as the tactical mirror.
- Google: Still the rotational favorite. Higher highs, steady inflows, and supportive fundamentals.
- Coinbase: Benefiting directly from stimulus-driven crypto strength.
- Rig (Transocean): Quiet but persistent strength—higher highs, higher lows.
- Riot: Momentum still constructive with crypto tailwinds; long-term accumulation thesis intact.
- HIMX & JOBY: Beaten-down names with defined levels—opportunities in selective premium selling.
- Starbucks & Paychex: Weak consumer and job-market signals continue to drag these charts lower.
December’s Shadow
- Rate-cut hopes keep rising for December.
- Positioning into month-end becomes more important with today’s compressed session.
What I’m Watching
Today is all about how the market handles an environment with impaired price discovery. With futures offline and hedging tools restricted, I’m watching bid-ask behavior, VWAP responses, and volume quality across the majors. Momentum is still positive, but the backdrop is delicate—exactly the kind of day where a squeeze can fade just as quickly as it formed. Key moving averages, especially on tech and crypto-linked names, remain the roadmap.
Days like this are rare—once-a-decade structural hiccups that remind us how interdependent the financial system actually is. If you’re trading, be intentional. If you’re learning, absorb everything. This is the kind of session traders remember not for the gains, but for the lesson in how markets behave when one of the gears suddenly grinds.
Until next time,
Garrett Baldwin
TheoTRADE