1/4 Recap. The Market Was Green, I Was Greener.

Welp, another day of nothing, we’re just stuck in the range I’ve been pointing to for a while, until we get out from either side, it’s just a chop fest that is going to eat up all the people buying premium. Now if you’re selling premium like I am, well, you probably had a really good day, I closed up over 3% today but I’ll go over that down below. Overall, as you can see below we need a close over 386 or below 376 to really get our next direction set in stone. We likely get that next direction Friday on the jobs number. On the positive side, the MACD looks like it wants to flip bullish, but bears would tell you that we’re treading along in a bear flag that is ripe to breakdown. As usual the market is ready to stick it to the most amount of people possible, the people gambling on the outcome of this.

Oil was crushed, again, down 5%, back to $73.xx. I mentioned the bearish engulfing yesterday and today there was a follow through. I’m more surprised the oil names weren’t hit harder with it flushing to lows, interesting divergence there. The MACD appears set to turn negative on crude tomorrow, we will see how low this can go, but today there were a ton of risk reversals put on in oil names so maybe we’re near a bottom.

The VIX continues to decline towards 20 which is fascinating with all the uncertainty we have seemingly daily. Today we had awful housing data, to this point I can’t think of a datapoint recently that was “good” and yet the VIX signals all is fine, nothing to worry about, keep buying stocks.

Today’s Unusual Options Activity & What Stood Out

Well we’re one day into the year and in my post yesterday I highlighted that odd lot of CRM put sales, 15,000 of them at $150, a $225m notional value trade. Naturally the next day Salesforce announces a workforce reduction and the stock explodes higher. Just amazing how they always seem to time these up perfectly!

Let’s take a look at some of the ones that caught my eye today