Recovery Under Fire: Markets Rally Amid Looming Risks
The S&P 500 closed up nearly 5.6% after an absolutely wild week. We had a brutal selloff Monday only to rip right back to where we’re closing today. That puts us at about the halfway point between the index’s low and high. But we’ve got to have perspective; it took pure chaos to get us…
Volatility Is Down… But Not Out
We opened with a huge move to the upside this morning. The market’s liking what it’s hearing right now in terms of cooling off the trade war and Elon Musk leaving D.C. to go back to Tesla (after one hell of an earnings miss yesterday). The VIX dropped below 30 and stayed there for the…
Markets Pause… But Volatility Is Far from Dead
The VIX dropped more than 8% today, which probably felt great to traders who’ve been put through hell… one 5% daily swing at a time… this month. The cherry on top? They get the day off tomorrow. Calm, right? All good, right? Back to normal. Nope. There’s virtually no volume today and it’s the same…
From Rally to Rollover: It’s Whiplash Week in the Markets
The markets closed up today, nearly 2%, which would be nice if this were anything like a normal market. But I’m here to tell you, these gains - 2%, 1%, 5% - don’t mean a thing. We’re going to spend some time talking about price action, sure, but that has to take a back seat…
Stocks Will Try to Hold Gains, But China Matters Most Now
“A 90-day pause” on tariffs was the secret sauce. That was all it took for majorly beaten-down stocks to go ballistic this afternoon, anywhere from 6.4% to 9.3% by 3 PM. (Don’t get comfortable - more on that in a minute.) More than 75 U.S. trading partners caught a break, but there’s one country that…
Markets Descend Into the Eye of the Volatility Storm
China just punched back, and for stocks it was a body blow. We’re closing out an absolutely epic trading day - trading week, in fact. In the chart I’m going to show you in a second, you can see U.S. stocks plummeting right into the storm. I’m talking about the second straight day of powerful,…
Get Ready for the Whiplash - It’s Coming
Whether you’ve been psyched for “Liberation Day”... or completely freaked out by the stiff tariffs that just came down… you need to hear what I’m going to tell you tonight. We’ve been dealing with a range bound market that’s seen some wild, but increasingly weak, reversal rallies over the past few sessions. Sure enough we…
Get Ready: Another Wave of Risk Is Imminent
Volatility is in backwardation… That’s not a horoscope or a fortune cookie, it’s real and it’s happening right now. We’re staring down the barrel of an intense, though possibly short, wave of volatility here. But this is a great market for trading. Earlier this week, while the markets were trading more or less flat,…
Risk Comes Raging Back - Here’s What to Do About It
The S&P 500 is down around 1.3% and volatility is up - nearly 9% for the day, in fact. THE CHOP is back, baby! Big-time. And we’re perfectly positioned for it, too. The sell-side activity we’ve seen today came from bigger fish out there, which is one reason why the Nasdaq isn’t doing anywhere near…
The Market’s Calm on the Surface - But Risk Is Lurking
The S&P 500 closed today massively unchanged from where it started the week - tame compared to last week’s mayhem. I’m seeing the words “back to normal” and “calm” thrown around a lot out there. The VIX came down below 20 today, which might make it seem like calm is returning, but don’t buy it…