The Market Broke Down And Nobody Pulled The Trigger

This is telling me the market is bracing for harm. It's predicting that there is bad news out there, and we have not received that bad news yet.

And think about when this is happening. It's July. The hedge fund guys are in the Hamptons drinking rum, they're not sitting at a desk dealing with this. You don't get volatility like this in the summer, usually. Somebody's positioning for something instead of responding to something.

Now, whenever I catch myself getting a little too sure about a read, I go do this.

I pull up the Dow.

I never look at the Dow. But every news channel out there references it constantly, which means a whole lot of people are forming their entire opinion about this market off that one chart.

So I put it up, and it's doing the opposite of what SPY and QQQ are doing.

One of my favorite things to do as a trader is to help break your bias. Go ask somebody who doesn't do this every day what they think about the market.

Whatever they say, that's what the crowd believes, and the crowd's belief matters whether they're right or not.

Then there's Apple, and this one I don't have a clean answer for.

Apple has been trading inverse to this market lately. It's basically been acting like a VIX.

And today both of them went up together with a vengeance, which is not what's supposed to happen when one of them is behaving like the fear gauge.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you what that means. It's on my screen and I'm watching it.

What I'm actually watching for is Wednesday. Meta and Microsoft report.

And I'm not watching the numbers, I'm watching what the market does with the numbers.

Anybody can gap down on a miss, that's normal, that's boring.

What I want to see is what happens if one of them puts up a monster quarter and this market just sits there and doesn't care. That would tell me a lot more than a bad print would, and that's the scenario where something like SQQQ turns into a conversation.

I'm not doing anything today. I want to see Wednesday first.

And look, we've been in a full-blown bull market for years now. This is a little correction. It's normal, it's fine, it's supposed to happen.

But we're options traders. We don't need this thing to go up to have fun with it. We just need it to move.

Right now it's moving and nobody told it to.

Rock On,

Voz

P.S. There’s a lot of question marks in the market right now. But there’s one corner of the market, where someone already has the answers to the test. Except they don’t get an A for being right, they get paid. Mark can’t name them, but he can spot them, and profit alongside them. Find out how it all works here.