5/12/25 Recap

The market is up enormously today, the trade war is over, for the next 90 days at least. All that tough talking resulted in a small hike to 30% tariffs on China. From a technical standpoint we’re finally over the 200 day again and have cleared all the key moving averages now. Stocks have looked good ever since we got up over that 21 ema 13 sessions back. Right now we’ve created a huge gap to the close from friday and I would focus on selling puts into that. We are very extended now with the 21 ema way back below 560, I assume we go sideways for a bit and let these moving averages catch up. This is where you put on risk if we confirm over the 200 day. Your stop would be a close below the 200 day which now sits at 573.46.

The whole premise originally of the tariffs was to pay down our debt and onshore jobs and that is all looking like it won’t be happening now. The bond market was not too happy with the trade deal as rates are rising right now. Now Trump can focus on his tax bill which is going to add trillions to the deficit and we could be staring at a debt crisis in the near future. Whatever it is, the recent period of tariff nonsense is over for a few months and hopefully they can come to a resolution because if they can’t, get ready to do it all over again this summer. The bottom line is they saved stocks, they always do, click my pinned post, it is the 2nd bullet point

Stocks falling so hard quickly along with rising interest rates really changed the trajectory of the original tariff plan. So while it is nice that stocks are back on track, rates are still causing issues so we had to save face somehow. It is absolutely not good that we as a nation cannot handle a month of austerity and the President had to mostly give up his crusade before losing his popularity. It just shows how important equities are to the overall picture in America today, which as someone long equities, you want to see. Like having your money in one of those “too big to fail” banks during the GFC, you know they’re always going to come and make sure you are ok if you’re long the S&P.

Here is where we stood to end 2024

12/31/24 Close

SPY - 586.08

QQQ - 511.23

IWM - 220.96

GLD - 242.13

IBIT - 53.05

As of right now all of the indices are still red on the year with the IWM being the worst. Gold is down hard today but it is still outperforming the market by alot this year with Bitcoin not far behind nearly up double digits year to date. Markets today are making a big catch up move

My Open Book

I have alot to say here, I am back to positive on the year, what a swing that was. I was up 20% in February after closing my META calls and the large AMZN call spread I had. Then I misplayed the early April dump as I never thought he’d take things that far and now I’ve gotten it all back, leverage leads to violence in both directions. It makes me laugh when people ask me why I’m not more aggressive or use short term calls and I always tell them I’ve built this book up alot from when this substack began in June 2022, at that time I had a little under $1.5M and look where I’m at today over $6M. Typically the bigger your book grows, the less risk you have to take, most people just use a more conservative approach so I’d say with all the leverage I’m using, the fact I’m still selling puts,etc on a book this size tells you I’m a little nuts. I did get conservative during that dip switching from leaps to commons just because its dangerous to use leaps when the market is in a downtrend but the reality is most people with a book this size would just put in some safe dividend stocks or bonds and go sit on the beach all day but I have a whole book of safe stuff, this was my trading book from the beginning so yes I’m conservatively aggressive with it, but no I’m not going to buy weeklies like I would if I had $100k book.

Overall I cannot complain with the crazy 5 weeks we just had, being positive year to date is a win. I always joke about it but stocks feel like they go up 90% of the time and that is why I want to be levered there, but its how you handle and react to the 10% of the time stocks don’t go up that ends up making or breaking you. Had I panicked and closed everything at the bottom I would be crying today but fortunately, I stayed composed and I am back to outperforming the market again even with my large BTC allocation underperforming today. I still have a ton of short puts which keep me levered to the overall market and I feel good about my positioning going forward. Bitcoin front ran this whole move the last few weeks and that MSTR position I took at 315 in mid April is still up 30% in 3 weeks, so a small period of cooling is normal as moving averages catch up, but with the massive tax bill Trump is planning and deficits running wild, I don’t think any space will outperform bitcoin as it is basically built to go up on reckless government spending and money printing.

Here is my open book and the positions I added/closed today. I think I will use this format going forward just so its easier for you to see what I added/closed.