8/22 Recap

We got that move down that I discussed earlier this week, almost to the 8 ema(dark blue line), maybe we touch it today in the afternoon, but overall this isn’t anything unusual, people taking chips off before such a big event tomorrow. I hope you all took warning these last few sessions and raised money where you wanted. I still don’t see much concern going into tomorrow, the market is still sitting over the 21 ema(light blue line) and until that breaks, there is nothing to fear, so barring a Powell selloff tomorrow, we probably are ok just looking at the buying that’s gone on the last few sessions. The gap fill below lines right up with that 21 ema, maybe we get a panic flush there before moving up? We will see what tomorrow brings. For now we’re back in 2021 shitco season where Affirm, Peloton, and Zoom are all flying today. Also congrats to SleepySol I know he reads this, he nailed Peloton up 35% today, I’ve told you all before he is one of the few people on Twitter I have notifications on for, I think he’s brilliant and he nailed that trade today.

As for all this economic data coming in, I’m not going to lie to you and say I care because I really just trade charts, charts are a visualization of buying and selling and the why really doesn’t matter to me, but something is really wrong with our economy.

I get stocks always go up, I even joke about it because we always save stocks, but that has more to do with the wealth effect and maintaining consumer confidence through asset price stabilization. You look at every major selloff we’ve had the last 15 years, we instantly backstop equities. The covid era, we saved assets first because we had to keep consumers confident so they’d spend money. The point I’m getting to is, this isn’t normal what we’re seeing where every week we get data and it is revised lower later, actually it is kind of criminal because we give whatever is needed for the stock pump and then quietly give the real data later. This is why I really don’t waste time shorting stocks, there is every reason for equities to go up, but never to go down. Yesterday we adjusted down 818,000 jobs? I mean really? I get we have an election in a few months and the party in control would like to win so we can fake data as we choose, but this is a joke? 800,000 humans is not a typo. This is just like it was in 2022 when we had a real recession by definition, 2 quarters of negative growth, and we changed the definition because it didn’t fit the narrative they wanted to give us. So without being political, obviously most of society that isn’t actively trading the market daily isn’t up to date nor do they care about this stuff, but I think we can all agree that is absolutely not ok to constantly revise data later which our government does on nearly every datapoint today. It’s a joke if we’re being honest here.

All I’m saying is more than ever you need to watch these moving averages daily, especially that 21 ema on the SPY, you will never get caught up in a market sell off if you respect that rule and close things below it, we’ve had 2 sharp selloffs this year and I’ve pinpointed them both in here just by following that premise. Something is really not pretty under the surface in our economy where we have to fake data constantly like this. We can prop this up into the election because it isn’t far away, but at some point bad data is going to be bad data and you’re going to see where that selling is when these moving averages break in charts. So don’t get complacent just because we’ve rallied hard recently, this data is pretty bleak, but for now, we live over the 21 ema and stocks are fine until that changes.

Recent Trades

CRH - I highlighted this one on 7/2 here and at the time the stock was 71.60 and a player bought a massive 82.50/100 call spread in December for $1.90. The stock is up over 20% since and those call spreads are still in the open interest and are north of $7 now with the stock at $88 with a few months to go. I don’t even know what this company is or what they do, but this player bought the 10,000 calls at the perfect time and it worked out beautifully for those of you who followed.

Trends

1 Week

2 Week

1 Month

Unusual Options Flow

Here is today’s link to the database, as always it will expire tomorrow morning and the rest of today’s trades will be added by this evening.