And here we are currently a few points below SPX spot when that article was published and exactly the price from unclench day after December’s opex:

But….one BIG thing has changed, the pricing of forward volatility - a clear trend in rising SPX option prices, which is rather typical for this time of year:

And, OTM prices, put skew has been on the rise; there is either a cohort collecting some late Feb/March protection for seasonal weakness (almost time for some sort of almost annual banking crisis?) or at the very least simply unwilling to sell it- the vol smash mafia (outside of daily 0DTE games) has been on hiatus, wingy vol supply has been lacking:

From Charlie the celebrity quant yesterday:

“SPX / NDX / RTY -Index Skews have again steepened substantially as the underlying thematic reversals and single-name Vol expansion feels unstable, i.e.

particularly seen with SPX 1m Skew 100%ile on a 2Y window, as a function of both increased demand for hedges and Calls kinda dying on the vine as Spot index Equities have lost their momentum”

And, the gamma situation is adding to this whippy two-sided price action lately, as we sit in negative gamma generally while markets respite in occasional calm under the auspices of the 0DTE crowd:

At this vol, when markets rise they are met with high vol call overwriting and dealer gamma supply, which keeps revealing itself in the afternoons, when 0DTE calls bleed and the index rolls over when .3DTE puts get instant amnesia and are simply too cheap:

Spotgamma highlights this negative gamma landscape/positive gamma rescuing market combination regime nicely:

We all know it’s chaotic under the surface, there are dead bodies strewn around the sectors you’ve all heard about. This fascinating chart shows an incredibly rare occurrence, one truly authored by peaking dispersion, holding the indices in place while stocks veer off wildly in opposite directions. Overbought and oversold stocks spiking at the same time!

This level of dispersion has not been seen in the last 30yrs absent a tech bubble or financial crisis:

This heatmap of SPX YTD performance illuminates this situation as fin-comical in nature:

So, I will have another post later this week on individual stock vol time spread pairs, because NVDA is really offering some terrific prices structuring end of month with March tenors. But in the meantime a few sets of spreads focused on using/owning NVDA related market implied vol.

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The same thing in META, the calls around $675 and the resulting mid-day parabola:

And yesterday’s Mag8 piece de resistance, AVGO $350 calls from .10 to $3 and the tail wag dog of modern market structure in the golden age of options trading:

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And just to bring this home, it’s making a joke out of GARP, with a last quarter PEG ratio being a miniscule .11:

So, it is probably only a matter of time until it joins the one trillion dollar market cap club. But that is not what the point of this article/trade thesis is today, it’s that MU is about to embark on a series of near term catalysts that should boost it higher in February. They are threefold:

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And lately SPX our calendar spread trades have been quick hitters with superb results:

Even better results in QQQ by utilizing giga tech earnings vol:

So, back to the well, this time utilizing NFP vol and CPI vol to acquire longer dated vol on the cheap. The first set will be selling NFP vol to own CPI vol and the second set will be utilizing CPI vol to own cheap holiday week vol.

Looking at NFP vol, as I’ve trumpeted ad nauseum here, the short vol mafia and non-discretionary/formulaic/ETF vol sellers like to suck the event vol out of the market before the event, which then frees up the market to move on event day without the restriction of excess residual premium, that on event day would be sold to hold price in check.

Here is a chart of the 6925 Jan 9th payrolls straddle as it was whittled down from $110 the Friday before to $43 the night before the report:

What resulted that day was a move of +60 SPX, so the straddle was profitable most of the day, multiple opportunities to sell it for 55pts, if you didn’t leave it lying around vulnerable to the .1DTE last half hour crowd and their games.

And here is the same strike straddle for this Friday:

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And so here we are again in the exact same situation, let’s call it ‘deja vol’. And in what is another rite of passage, the call crowd gets to enjoy the giga tech names doing the lifting right on time. Only half a fortnight ago, the masses of lazy pundits were declaring this the great broadening out, a fallacy I continue to debunk because now IWM and XLF, the ones to lead said pundits to 2026 performance greatness, remain anchored to the same price as two weeks ago. (XLF is down on the year actually, I was told they were going to make just so much money on deal books coming out of their ears…)

Meanwhile, to rub it in, the old guard has wrested the baton back from that feeble profitless debt-laden hoard again, now that hedge funds have been forced to cover short positions in what was a horrible period of factor drag, their crowded longs sucking and their shorts ramping. No more.

I foreshadowed the obvious, suggested some call plays for end of month, expecting these behemoths would rise/firm up as earnings approached and lo and behold, QQQ threatens all-time highs. Just look at AAPL in January 2025 for example, how much it dogs it from mid-December into late January, but then magically:

I even put up a call chart from that period into earnings:

Now, you know what to do when it opens up on earnings, and look at that chart once again, what will probably work after Feb opex.

But the topic at hand today is yet more evidence of the continued evolution of the golden age of options trading. Maybe you might call it a progress paradox, layering on more market risk to satisfy the gambling crowd, but that volmageddon and eventual Senate hearings fiasco will be the topic for another day when Japan finally ruins global markets. ( Just kidding, nothing bad ever comes out of Asia to infect the rest of the world ((especially in financial markets, amirite? Two jokes in one joke.))

So, we have Monday and Wednesday options listed now for the Mag 7 names, and just in time for earnings, how convenient. Let’s give them a whirl by selling some earnings vol, and owning some residual/fade the move vol.

MSFT $475 Jan 30th/Feb 4th put calendar spread, net debit $1.05:

Three days for $1 and this isn’t too fond of earnings in general, thus the strikes just below spot. The biggest positive reaction it has had in recent times, was last April when it had to be repetitively bashed over the head by Trump tariff tantrum markets into submission before it could have such a good relief result, 7.6%.

But, once again, even in those bleak times it followed one my aforementioned self-evident rules, that giga tech will rally going into the release:

So, if you believe it will tank or soar, avoid this trade. Target, $2.

On to robot central, where Peter Pan will pull out his flute and lead his followers in Neverland. Of course I mean:

Same premise, Jan 30th/Feb 4th, 3-day wide put calendar spread just below spot, for $1.60:

Now, in another bit of fantasm around this shareholder cult, you know that for this trade to fail to the downside, you have to break the will of the 420s, and unbelievably, these tokers have held the line since last summer:

So if you think these folks are nothing but a Maginot line for bears to waltz through because car sales are in the toilet (obviously well known), or if you think it has a big day in store, i.e. he gins up even more fantasies among his flock during the call and it spikes, avoid this. Target $3-4.

META in my opinion is just too volatile on earnings for a trade like this. The last two earnings saw dueling and opposite 11.3% returns. That has to be like a scorigami for earnings. And over the last 12 earnings, it has an absolute move of 9.5%, so, will avoid.

Next week AMZN is a candidate for this type of trade but GOOGL is probably too volatile as well. This is trial run for this type of trade, keeping them small, let’s see how it goes.

I suggested SPX put calendar spreads that sold Fed day vol to own giga tech earnings vol, shutdown vol, and NFP vol:

These are now $35 from $22 thus far. On the same premise, I also started QQQ put spreads:

Those are now $6. Not too shabby, so I am going back to the well, but selling all the event vol this week, Fed/giga tech/red hot AI/SMH name earnings releases/PPI Friday to own next week’s vol which includes NFP vol of course. First, an SPX 6930 Jan 30th/Feb 6th put calendar spread for 18.75:

And a QQQ $623 Jan 30th/Feb 6th put calendar for 2.50-2.55:

I’ll be targeting $30-35 for SPX and $4-4.50 for QQQ. You know the end of month is the underappreciated opex, and odd things happen. Last year, it was quite volatile both overnight and intraday, a real two-sided affair:

So, if we ramp on giga tech earnings late this week, good chance that will subsequently be given up and you can blame part of that on February seasonality and part of that on end of month opex. But, we can probably assume at the very least, this week will be a 0DTE playground as we get into it, exacerbated by these factors.

Now, on to GLD. In the chat I put up a few different SLV structures to capture a vol surface that is absolutely meme wacky:

But trading silver futures right now is like Talledega Nights, cougar in the front seat, a bag of cocaine taped to the bottom of a car with Staties on the way. Driving fast and taking chances. SLV vol went full loco in a gross exaggeration of spot up vol up:

Option volumes were in unchartered territory 6 million contracts yesterday:

And the 2x SLV ETF had quite the day for itself as well, this is now about $4B in size:

So, while the SLV chat trades have already left the barn on yesterday’s reversal, let’s stick to GLD on this one with more approachable vol, which in and of itself is not exactly snoozing but more in line with other expiration events:

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Up 135% in the last nine months and 10% in the first eight trading days of 2026, it’s enjoyed a low vol ride; nobody has had to sweat in this during those occasional AI bubbly moments that have forced gut checks/air pocket drops in the other AI darlings:

And, the earnings have been quite reliable- tell everyone that you can’t supply enough and that bookings are through the roof as far as the eye can see. But since they report revenue around the 10th of every month, folks are continually kept abreast of the situation, and thus the earnings reports don’t elicit massive spike parties most of the time:

So, if it always goes up (or if down, not by much) and it then gives some of that back in predictable fashion, using earnings vol to get some later dated vol for cheap appears to be a high probability trade. Therefore, a January 16th $320/Jan 23rd $317.5 put diagonal spread near the money makes sense on this premise for about .90:

If it does nothing or even retreats a few percent, this trade will work nicely. It will not if it spikes 10% on earnings or falls more than 5%, so if you see either of those scenarios as likely, avoid this. Target, $2.50.

A lower risk but lower return version of this would be a put calendar spread. This pair at $320 Jan 16th/30th has two weeks in the back leg, for about 1% of spot/about $3.90, so even if the stock moves higher you get the benefit the of end of month rebalancing timeframe, target $6-7:

In other news, financials have been hit by a myriad of verbal attacks by you know who. One of the many caught in the crossfire is V, which is not used to candles like this:

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From 130k late last week, the straddle open interest now is over 150k:

These short straddles are part of larger multi-strike short volatility/gamma trades:

And the fact they are done during earnings season makes sense, since correlations drop/dispersion increases due to the reporting season. Correlations are near 52 week lows, around 7 was last seen right as October’s earnings season was winding down:

And SPX realized vol appeared right when everyone was expecting a free ride higher into Thanksgiving/Santa:

In the meantime, these effects on SPX are undeniable, any attempt to deviate from the pin price, like today as the XLF/JPM/banks slide, is negated by semis rising yet again to counter the losers and hogtie SPX near this price:

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Yes, the usual suspects in AI land- semis, memory… and space stuff, power systems and of course SLV. Everyone needs to have that, I mean, GS (the vampire squid) has been continually pounding the tom tom on metals as their premier 2026 theme. So you can see the performance above of the first three days adjacent to the one year performance and clearly there is a correlation. In fact, a lot of this stuff has gotten outright silly in only a couple of days, like SNDK (which oddly was recently spun out of WDC which is amazingly running a close 3rd on the above screen):

Fin-comically, Barron’s came out with the headline, “SNDK is up 27% The Reason Why is Unclear”:

You have to make something up, that is half of financial news. “Stocks Rise on Fed Cut Optimism” for example, purely contrived bullshit to explain moving asset prices to the masses while us in the trading world see a real/tangible and typical opex giga tech fueled gamma ramp.

SNDK (which amazingly doesn’t as yet have a 2x ETF dedicated to something so en fuego) is reporting on January 29th, and while it might get somewhat muffled by simultaneous giga tech earnings from TSLA/AAPL/MSFT during that time, it will still be an event; memory is a grand cru theme of 2026, the finest of investment ideas from the ‘analyst’ community. (Analysts have the easiest job I can imagine. You upgrade stuff going up, downgrade stuff going down, by changing a couple cells in an AI enhanced spreadsheet, then set the earnings estimates way too low, end of the work day. ((If you are one of the best analysts, you put out your upgrade during a quarterly opex week, tell your buddies to buy calls beforehand and enjoy the gamma spike party.)) If you are the chief investment analyst, you take the SPX at 12/31 x 1.07 for your 2026 price target, task complete.)

So, due to the ludicrous realized vol in SNDK, the implied vol surface is relatively flat as the front vols are keeping up with the earnings vol week vol:

With surface ivol so even across tenors, instead of having to pay up for the earnings release vol, we should be able to sell vol in front and get the event vol for much cheaper than usual. The art here will be finding the strikes on a wild animal out of its cage, but assuming the breakout strikes just below $300 should hold/be support, then let’s start with a Jan 23rd/Jan 30th $325/$320 put diagonal spread for about $7. And, while we’re at it, let’s also start the same strikes for Jan 16th opex/Jan 23rd for 2.75, which yields a very attractive P/L diagram:

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QQQ $500 to $535 is a 7% range, so pretty volatile. Owning alternating calls and puts naked or in vertical spreads at turns/swings was a high yielding strategy. CES with Huang was highly anticipated/frontrun…good to keep in mind because, yes he’s back… back again (SMH/NVDA call flies on dips?):

But you can see how NFP/CPI/OpenAI news/Jimmy Carter closure/Deepseek/giga tech earnings, there was just a lot going on.

Proof of the owning vol on dips/owning calls on dips trading performance is seen by simply looking at implied vol, it was experiencing alternating bouts of dementia/amnesia, vol of vol was high:

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But let’s be honest. Cars and profits haven’t mattered for a long time no…

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This is not a chopped liver survey, these folks run about $500B in assets and as you can in this second chart, it’s clearly the most bullish survey since post-covid; everyone is convinced the economy is about to accelerate in a ‘run it hot’ scenario:

Color me skeptical. When it comes down to all of these big beautiful tax refunds, you had better be rich or own a home, the lower 60-80% of earners are getting jack squat:

In fact, when you look at the net stimulus for households, it looks rather pathetic vis a vis what the hype machine in DC has been pumping out:

I mean, I knew a lot of folks in the restaurant industry in my younger days, and they claimed a mere 10-20% of their tips in the first place, so you can pretty much throw that out as something special. But it’s really always about jobs and another narrative is that you should ignore all those new unemployed government folks and focus on private payrolls. They say that the bottom is in and that private employment is accelerating. Is that what this chart says to you:

https://wolfstreet.com/2025/12/16/the-fed-should-look-at-private-sector-jobs-growth-and-not-get-distracted-by-the-massive-federal-government-job-cuts/

You’ve seen the layoff announcements and you’ve seen the sentiment, so bad that it’s signaling recession, folks are petrified about losing their job and managers don’t expect to hire next year:

But the ‘analysts’ have weighed in, on the side of the FMS survey, they all expect big things out of the equity markets next year:

Who is wrong, the investment managers or the people on the street? To me, it sounds like a recipe for volatility in 2026….Anyway, last year saw a lot of realized vol and it started in mid December with the Fed induced mini volmageddon, and it basically didn’t end until May. Here was how QQQ navigated that timeframe:

I like this pattern to repeat somewhat again. An unclench up into Xmas eve when the Santa rally officially begins, even though we’ve been hearing about it since Hallmark’s Christmas in July movie series. Then, the stuff people want to unload with big gains over the past couple years into a new tax year, the puts being bought and calls being sold putting pressure on the market after that. The drop on Dec 27th was notable, there was no news at all to trigger a sizable down day, except for TSLA rolling over after being yanked by Dec/Jan LEAP calls to all-time highs during December opex week, sound familiar?

So, a few QQQ trades, one for Santa, one for end of year, and one for GLD in the new tax year. Yes, that has a lot of folks sitting on the largest gains basically ever in that ETF:

Now, we just saw huge open interest in October and how that affected GLD, pulling it up into OPEX, a lot of calls then rolled out to December, an auspicious unclench, and then:

And there is giant January LEAP open interest positioning at $400 and $415, representing about 25 million shares of GLD notional, which if GLD falls and that premium burns will put pressure on the ETF as dealers unwind long hedges, similar to the Oct-Dec roll dynamic:

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In 2018 it was Autopilot Jay and the Christmas eve massacre, in 2021 is was the hawkish pivot to a hiking cycle, 2022 was volatile at the end of miserable market year (hard to remember what that was like) and the last two years saw mini volmageddons on both vixpirations, which saw puts act like this in December 2023:

So the Fed has moved out of December opex week and off of vixpiration day this year, something I mentioned as what they should have done long ago in that article, and a topic I’ve harped upon over the years. And they are going to make this a thing; the December Fed meeting the next two years are scheduled earlier and in 2027 they’ve even moved June out of quarterly opex:

For vol enthusiasts, it’s mildly saddening, the lack of previously torched delta/gamma lying around to wreak havoc and light the market on fire temporarily; in fact Thursday’s straddles are still 75 points and the Dec opex straddles have 2% built into them which is probably plenty of juice to be stabilizing:

So, I don’t expect much of a kerfuffle after this meeting, regardless of dot plot shock and hawkish cutting; that’s consensus, a hawkish tone like last meeting is already expected. And folks have been selling calls on top of stocks for days on these spikes up, you can see it in the price action, pushing the indices down when they open higher, folks acting prudently in front of this meeting, whereas in October they were gorging on LEAP calls on the beloved AI/giga tech that everyone owns. In fact a reader (Ahsudheidb) shared this tweet in the chat, showing exactly that (annotations mine):

This kind of behavior (long puts/short calls) was mildly pressuring markets yesterday, calls sold to dealers mean they are selling the underlying and dealers being short puts means they sell the underlying to hedge as well, so the drippy price action most of the day.

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I respectfully disagree, it’s probably not going to be that easy. Rubner is not always right BTW, back at the Vampire Squid/GS he would make calls like this and be dead wrong on many occasion. That goes for McElligott as well, as great as they are in their mastery of systematic option driven flows, it forgets that humans sometimes sell stock. I know, it’s been so long right?

One of the most important charts out there presents a stark warning about how these tremors/massive giga tech stock swings should be taken very seriously. People are simply, from at home to fund managers, all in on the stock market:

And this turbulence in the beloved names…it’s forcing some hard choices. I surmised recently in the morning note that folks are making tough choices around end of year, trying to get to the 2026 tax year and the probability that AI becomes a political football in a turbulent mid-term environment where a sizable power shift may already be underway:

But seriously, there was a storm of put buying, a theme I keep harping on, people used to think puts were just for selling/smashing vol every morning, but now they’ve discovered 0DTE puts can wreak intraday havoc:

And post Euroclose is when this tends to happen:

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And so back to trades I like to do every quarter, pairs of options with the intention of being long the earnings reaction vol, and paying for that by selling some vol in advance of the event. Unlike NFP, CPI, and Fed meetings, this event doesn’t have its vol/premium sold to the nub before the event arrives.

There is a potential bonus with these trades….If this shutdown impasse gets resolved in the next week or so, that week could be a giant data dump of CPI/PPI/jobless claims/non-farm payrolls, and that would make owning this vol/getting there first before these dates are announced even better.

There is even another bonus, NVDA is doing this during a monthly expiration week. This is something they have essentially never done, reporting early enough to fall in this expiration window:

Now, folks love to trade options around earnings for a myriad of reasons- some like to sell covered calls with elevated implied for yield on a stock they couldn’t possibly sell as it would incur major tax repercussions, you have structural options being sold to generate yield in the growing space of income ETFs, both puts and calls, you have those that want to be put the stock at a lower price selling puts, you have time spreaders, selling earnings vol to own longer dated vol, say to own LEAP calls cheaper, I mean there are just so many reasons…

And what has this done to NVDA earnings realized vol? Destroyed it. Look at NVDA earnings reactions the last few quarters:

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While the AI punditry blathers on about how we are only in the 1^st or 2^nd inning of ‘progress’ (a lot of errors/lying/colluding/hallucinating to tamp out), with another NVDA GTC to fuel the giddiness (Jensen keynote tomorrow at noon), and then giga tech earnings to demonstrate endless cash spending on their 100 gigawatt token processing Atlantis, asset prices most certainly are not early in the game. They have realized years of future earnings that may or may not happen, but at least there will be a $2 trillion OpenAI IPO for VC billionaires shoveling cash in now at a $500B valuation to enjoy during the agentic job-olocaust. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/idc-futurescape-2026-predictions-reveal-123000266.html

On a lighter note, before 2026 becomes the inflection point for career disruption enhancing our K-Shaped economic dispersion (yes, the stock market is now the economy, when it corrects, so will the economy), we have the Santa rally, well underway due to Xmas creep, and bubbles don’t roll over during the holidays… I mean let’s just be honest with ourselves. Everyone will unite in a mass asset collusion sellers strike (‘We will worry about next year when next year comes, for now mark em up for the paychecks’), continue to buy calls/smash puts on dips, and Sullenberger will bring this bird in gently onto runway 7000 as year ends, right? Consensus and thus simple minded. But why 7000? Being a mere 2% away now, SPX can easily go to 7250, if we get the average monthly returns since April (6850 x 1.06 for the next two months is 7260):

And SPX 3% per month, that is child’s play, QQQ averaged 6.5% the last six years in November alone, so get your TQQQ rolling for a 20% November gain:

If you remove 2018 and 2022 from the following chart of seasonal QQQ performances, years in which Powell policy (‘autopilot’/rate hikes) got in the way of year-end QE entitlement, it’s hard to see how things get derailed:

If you want to drill down, let’s look at QQQ in 2017 versus 2025. The same year in the election cycle, Trump was in his first year and… wow does it look similar:

People certainly have high expectations for their holiday QE, a poll I started yesterday has folks thinking 7000 by the end of month markup, Halloween. Simply ghoulish for the bearish:

Of course the retail crowd remains en fuego, option volumes continue parabolic and stock volumes the highest since February of 2021 when things came to a bit of halt on, yes, inflation fears:

But inflation is fixed, I keep hearing that from the White House, and if it isn’t actually fixed (it’s not, food inflation was the worst since Aug 2023: https://wolfstreet.com/2025/10/24/food-inflation-the-price-spikes-of-beef-coffee-eggs-and-dairy/ ), they fixed it. Imputed prices in CPI were alarmingly high, but the market isn’t going to care, because the Fed doesn’t:

But the people know the truth, their wallets know. Why do you think the UMich survey shows one-year inflation expectations at 4.5%?

And the market won’t care about jobs either (ADP next week) because….the Fed of course. Fed meeting vol has been mercilessly pummeled, before the meeting, which is standard operation procedure. The Oct 29^th straddle is already down to 50pts, at 12 implied vol. The lower this gets the easier it is for the market to move, something we saw last December when ye olde dot plot shock got in the way of the market’s entitlement of Santa QE:

Now, guess what Jay has finally done….I used to have a subscriber to my newsletter from the Dallas Fed, and for years I have continually harped on the fact, with options exploding in volume and open interest, that having a meeting during a major expiration week was being oblivious to the Fed’s effect on asset prices:

From the note above:

There is your spot vix in dashed green and the insanely flat vix futures curve after Santa Powell the grinch awakened the convexity Kraken. Why he holds these meetings during the most important expiration of the year, I have no idea. So much for his price stability blather; it’s like he doesn’t know that options volume has exponentially grown over the last few years, partially due to the Fed’s decision making.

And so I’m facetiously giving myself credit for the following…look at the Fed calendar, the December meeting has been moved a week earlier this year and next, and in 2027 they move the meeting out of quarterly opex week:

While I am on the Fed and cut-topia, the markets aren’t worried about inflation next year, it’s pricing in 3-4 cuts by June, not even giving it the whole year:

And to see how foolish the markets often are, and oddly they seem to exhibit the looniest of rate expectations at the end of years, this chart shows how volatile and wrong rate cut expectations often are:

Back to seasonality…folks are adding LEAP calls now on dips, TSLA being a great recent example. This is the modus operandi that usually helps drive markets higher into the first quarter earnings season (why bother with Dec when you can avoid tax until 2027?). Check out the open interest change of the 550 calls on Friday, when folks loaded those leaps on the TSLA earnings dip Thursday:

You can probably expect the same in any names that are beloved/highly owned that people will want to show on their end of year statements, should they see a dip on earnings. And even if not, they may just roll October end of month calls into Jan LEAPS anyway, it has been quite an year-end performance kicker. I often talk about end of month opex as a significant/kind of hidden one:

So, if you believe in Santa in November and recent market history, here is an SPX 6900/7050/7200 call butterfly for November expiration for about $35, $150 wide that will work perfectly if we get a 3% November:

Regarding the price action for CPI specifically, it generally results in either a positive immediate outcome, or a dip gets the short vol/long call treatment and it recovers. Here is August PPI/CPI:

This I would say is the most common outcome on CPI day, immediate spike and then ramp and camp, no soup for bears all day.

Here is the September reaction:

A bad number? No worries, the same magnitude move from low to high, again, very typical price action for a terrible print. So, can you blame the market today for trashing the vol if the vast majority of the time the outcome is up regardless of the release? (FWIW, Anna Wong of Bloomberg, she claims that September data was collected properly, since it was before the shutdown and that October which should be released next month is more of a problem. AND she expects CPI to come in light.)

One major caveat, BLS CPI releases come BEFORE opex, and that most certainly aids this typical price action, as vanna/charm/opex tractor beam are on full blast during that timeframe. Not the case on Oct 24th. How that affects things, and the magnitude of the seemingly inevitable QE on these days, we shall see.

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And SLV which also has 0DTEs three days a week now, it has joined the GLD options rager and raised the volume/s:

But, I am not alone in conjecturing that this is just a gamma gala gone giddy; Joe Weisenthal weighs in with his two soon to be uncoined cents:

But the point here, isn’t to make rational and cogent arguments that this nonsense will end badly, Mais Non!! We don’t live in a pragmatic period, this is the golden age of options trading, Mon Dieu!! ( L’âge d’or du trading d’options) So let’s see if we can find a glitch in the gamma matrix. And perhaps this is it, Thursdays:

What is it about 1am on Tuesdays and 9am on Thursdays? No idea other than to observe that the prior day was an expiring GLD option. A mini unclench perhaps???

So… two trade ideas. GLD $1 wide put diagonal, $376/375 for Oct 24th/29th which includes Fed meeting vol in the back leg for .48ish and a 24th/27th $376/$375 put diagonal that costs…0 cents:

Current one-day Fri/Monday diagonals are already .25-45, and they would light up if GLD retraced on Thursday morning:

And three trading day wide GLD diagonals are over $1-1.35 already with no monetary policy event in the back leg:

Avoid these if you think GLD is about to finally correct its parabola. OPEX 17th has a lot of open interest, so an early unclench is definitely a possibility, and adds even more credence to a potential Thursday dip:

On to CPI vol trades. It cometh shutdown or no shutdown, as it is needed to adjust social security payment formulas:

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