8/16/25 Best Idea For The Week Ahead

There is nothing to say here that you don’t know already on the SPY, the levels to watch here to the downside if we get weakness are the 8 week down at 626.43 and the 21 week at 605.70. We have the big Jackson Hole meeting this week and if you remember back in 2022 markets plunged on the outcome there. I think this time the market is really pricing in rate cuts starting next month and any shock to that notion would be what would cause a selloff. With the hot PPI data this week I don’t see how Powell, who hasn’t cut yet, finally cuts, but the market is pricing in a near certainty he does. Maybe the pressure from Trump is going to finally get to him but based on data, which Powell says he operates on, I don’t see it. The next set of earnings to matter to the market are NVDA but that is in almost 2 weeks. From a perspective of put sales I think anything below 585 a few months out is probably a good spot to long should we get there.

This week’s best idea is a former darling that has really had a rough time recently, but there have been a myriad of put sales indicating a bottom should be near. It always looks bad in the moment but the large put sales tend to mark bottoms. Do you remember how many NVO put sales came in while it was looking catastrophic a few weeks back? Here let me remind you. NVO got down to 44.x and looked so bleak as it was red everyday and now look at 9 days later it is $56 today afterhours. These institutional put sellers are very sharp, they rarely miss on sizable trades and the pinned put sale data post goes into that more for those who missed that one. We’re going to look at all the puts sold on this over the last month and a half and discuss levels to sell our own puts at looking at multiple timeframes.