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Want to know what the market is thinking? Here’s the one number that can reveal exactly what the market thinks is going to happen. It’s called the VIX Zone. As a quick refresher, the CBOE Volatility Index (or “VIX”) is…

We’ve been talking a lot about gamma this week. For good reason, I might add. When people lose money, it’s almost exclusively because of their gamma exposure. What’s terrifying is that most people have this kind of exposure in their…

When people lose money, it’s almost exclusively because of their gamma exposure. And when a Gamma Bomb explodes, it can blow up entire fortunes. You can think of it as the ultimate Black Swan…  An extremely rare market event where…

Have you ever watched kids explode a watermelon?  It became a popular “science” activity back when everyone was staying home during Covid, and a quick search pulls up dozens of youtube videos. The videos are pretty much all the same….

There’s a serious market risk many investors don’t know about… And it’s hiding in some of the biggest index funds out there… and possibly in your own portfolio. But you likely won’t see it, nor even think about it, until…

We have a wild week in store for all options traders – and one massive opportunity in AMZN that we haven’t seen in a year… This Friday is expiration Friday – the date many options expire – so volatility is…

Around here, we like to focus on Big Money Flow. Why? Because it’s the driver of all things. Volume is the key to the market… especially this market. And that’s why I take time every day to go through the…

I’ve been quiet while on vacation. When traveling, I prefer to have no trades open (or very few) so I can enjoy what is going on. As Mark says, “Why let the vacation cost twice as much?” He and I…

The newest volatility indicator just dropped yesterday, Monday, April 24. Although it is not intended to replace the VIX, VIX1D has its own unique value as an independent measure of daily market sentiment. VIX1D will be an insanely useful tool…

The big news coming from earnings this week is in the banking sector.  That may come as a surprise… considering we’ve been talking about a possible collapse in the sector since Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) went under on March 10…

Just a few days ago, Warrant Buffett made a bold proclamation. He said that, as far as bank failures go, we’re not out of the woods yet. In fact, he even went so far as to say that the temptation…

It’s a big numbers week.  Unless you live under a rock, you know we have CPI out Wednesday and PPI out Thursday. You also know that Wednesday is Fed Minutes day… and on Friday, the banks kick off earnings season….

Investors are making a coo coo-bananas bet on the Fed’s interest rate plans for next year… based on nothing but their wish for change. Listen up and listen good! Don’t follow these people down this rabbit hole. It’ll chew you…

Using indicators to trade is an important skill to learn. Here’s an example. Options use their moving inputs – price, volatility, time – to change value. Accordingly, you can use these inputs to your advantage. Mark, Frank, Licia, and I…

Here’s an understatement: The first 3 months of this year have been wild!  Completely coo-coo. Listen to this. Since January 1, we’ve borne witness to the Sam Bankman-Fried debacle… a slew of tech layoffs… the Silverbank saga… the collapse of…

So much of what we do as traders wouldn’t be possible without options.  At their simplest, they are relatively safe instruments to trade.  You can amplify the gains on the movement of the underlying stock. And you would only lose…

From the outside, you see wild swings in asset prices… like the big sell-off in oil futures that rattled commodity markets during mid-March. From the inside, such price movements are far easier to understand. I explained why this morning during…

It looks like even the Fed isn’t completely blind to the consequences of its actions.  Given the path they’ve stuck to for the past year, it wasn’t hard to imagine they’d stay the course. Ha! Who am I kidding? The…

This afternoon’s breaking news: the Fed hikes another 25 basis points, with plans for one more hike this year, and then it’s taking its foot off the gas. In short, it’s about the banks and the latest disaster they’ve brought…

Hey there Profit Takeover reader, Your man, Andrew Giovinazzi here. How’s it going? I’ve gotta tell ya… it’s definitely an interesting time in the markets right now. In fact, it’s possibly THE best time to be an options trader.  But,…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Anytime a member of the Federal Reserve speaks, it can cause a lot of tension in the market. Today was yet another perfect example. We see a lot of chop up and down beforehand, which is…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, I was so fortunate to meet Andrew Giovinazzi over a decade ago and learn to trade options through his training program. Hundreds of floor traders have made millions using Andrew’s options trading methods – just like…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, I owe all my success with options trading to two things: #1 – The options training program that Andrew Giovinazzi created. This taught me the basics and gave me a strong foundation for options trading. #2…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, We’ve seen major chop in the market and in AAPL for the past few days. Now it looks like we’re reaching critical mass. The question is, how can we know when investors decide on their next…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Licia Leslie, affectionately known as the Queen of the Candlesticks, is the Head of Trading at Option Pit – and she’s an expert candlestick analyst. Understanding candlesticks is helpful for traders to make predictions about the…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, If you haven’t heard my earnings motto yet, it’s Trade to it, NOT through it… This is my strategy to buy and sell options before earnings but not hold them through earnings, then trade options again…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, You know my earnings motto: Trade to it, NOT through it… That’s because of the bittersweet post-earnings volatility crush – when option prices divebomb. Now, if you are already in a trade you’ll want to get…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, During the live Profit Takeover show, I promised a free trade this week, and here’s what I found… When I ran my Big Money Flow scanner, a familiar name popped up: CCJ – Cameco Corp (NYSE:CCJ)….

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Bed Bath & Beyond Inc (NASDAQ:BBBY) is a meme stock now, just like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc (NYSE:AMC) and GME – GameStop Corp. (NYSE:GME). A meme stock is popular to trade based on social sentiment and…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Last week on Fed Day, February 1st, during the Profit Takeover, Licia Leslie, Head of Trading at Option Pit, joined me to cast her prediction for where the market would go once Fed news dropped. Licia…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, BP, DIS, UBER, and some other really big names all have earnings next week… but you know my earnings motto… “Trade to it, not through it.” But what about after earnings? Implied volatility (IV) tends to…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, The market has been roaring since yesterday when Jerome Powell laid out the Federal Reserve’s plans for the next couple of months.  Interest rates are up by 25 basis points in an attempt to continue the…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, I sent some notes to Jim Cramer yesterday for his special on CNBC… Jim wanted to know my market analysis ahead of the Federal Reserve this week.  And I noted that the S&P 500 is at…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, There’s a phenomenon that is currently happening at the macro-level of the trading world that could change how every trader reads the market going forward. Every year prior to 2023, the volatility of the market has…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Licia Leslie knows candlestick charts like no one else. She predicted that AAPL would move to $150 before falling again and it is already on its way. As I write this, AAPL is sitting at $145….

Dear Profit Takeover reader, One of the biggest tech names in the industry has been steadily failing over the past year…  Take a look at the MSFT – Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) chart since 2021: Image from Yahoo Finance Since its…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, One particular strategy is my current favorite – and it’s insanely profitable so far this year… I’ve named this method harnessing Big Money Flow, This is my most accurate trading strategy of 2023 so far, AND…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, I have successfully profited by watching massive million-dollar wins all month long… My current favorite strategy is harnessing Big Money Flow, Not only is this process my most accurate trading strategy all year so far, but…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, My most accurate trading strategy all year is also one of the easiest ways to profit. I call it harnessing Big Money Flow – and it’s currently my favorite strategy since I’ve won every trade so…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Earlier this week, I shared my SURE system to analyze million-dollar moves and make easy profits. And the most important part of spotting and harnessing Big-Money Flow is #2: Understand the Full Picture. It is crucial…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, There’s a phenomenon that’s one of the easiest ways to profit – and for the first step of this strategy, all I need to do is sit back and watch… I call it harnessing Big Money…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, This upcoming Friday, January 20th, is an incredible opportunity to take profit.  Between $1.2-1.4 trillion will be coming off the table as traders exit trades going back three years.  And we are going to get in…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, My biggest moneymaking tool is the VIX – Chicago Board Options Exchange’s CBOE Volatility Index… hands down… But there’s something happening right now with the volatility of VIX – or the expectation of VIX movement –…

This is your chance to make a generational trade on the VIX. All week, I’ve been showing you the VVIX, the index that tracks volatility on the VIX. The VVIX directly correlates to the price of VIX options – and…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, The volatility of market volatility is at a 5-year low. It sounds like a bunch of gibberish, I know. But the implications of this are HUGE. It means options on VIX – Chicago Board Options Exchange’s…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, This week I am hyper-focused on earnings season – the time of year when earnings determine whether a stock will pop or drop… And traders win or lose based on their wagers pre-earnings… Right? Wrong. I…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Licia Leslie joined the live Profit Takeover show on Wednesday to give an inside look into her market analysis.  She shared a trend line on QQQ, going back all the way to 2009… QQQ continues to…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Andrew Giovinazzi stopped by on the Morning Show yesterday to share how he plans to trade ahead of the CPI number release on January 12th… Andrew is the guy who wrote the training program that taught…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, The January Effect is a common belief for stock traders stating that typically, markets will rise during the month of January. But I’m here to tell you the truth – That’s a load of crap. Let’s…

The single most important – and also the most difficult – question that riddles every investor’s and trader’s mind the moment they’re about to put any money down, whetherthey’re placing their first trade or have placed thousands in their life, is…  Is it cheap enough?  It’s so fundamental because a dollar or two more on the expensive side can mean…

We’re not seeing a ton of momentum in the market today ahead of the holidays – but there are three sectors that are catching my eye: Energy, which is moving a bit higher… XLE 12/20/22 | Google Finance Tech, which…

Dear Reader, Big money, institutional flows, unusual options activity… All leading into one another and topics we cover here every week – and for good reason. The hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars on the move in a…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Our K-Street expert, Frank Gregory, joins the live Profit Takeover show every week to give the inside scoop on the ways policy can affect the market.  Yesterday, Frank and I talked about the latest CPI drop,…

My wife and I live a very Norman Rockwell-type life. Perfect house, white-picket fence, raising some great kids, no financial stress, and realistically very little stress at all. But it wasn’t always this way.

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Today, my colleague and K-street expert Frank Gregory joined the live Profit Takeover show to share his insider expertise on news, policy, and market effects.  Frank mentioned that Apple Inc is putting pressure on China and…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, You probably have a good idea of someone who is a disciplined trader. But if you are still getting comfortable with trading or gaining confidence, there are several skills you can learn to manage your trades…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Yesterday was the wildest trading day of the year. My colleague, Licia Leslie, joined me yesterday to share her expertise in candle analysis and she and I both agreed that the market was teetering on the…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, I pay attention to volatility as an indicator of option pricing.  When a stock’s Historical Volatility (HV) is higher than the Implied Volatility (IV) that means it’s a great time to buy options.  Just like stocks,…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, I wanted to do a breakdown today to help explain when to choose spreads vs butterflies vs straight calls and puts… When a trader buys multiple calls and/or puts at different strike prices simultaneously, that is…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, We have an adjusted trading schedule this week because Thursday is Thanksgiving Day. But just because some people are taking the week off of trading doesn’t mean all traders have to.  This Friday after Thanksgiving especially,…

I’m back.  For the past few days, I haven’t been hosting Profit Takeover on Money Morning LIVE… But I wanted to give you a little peak at what I was doing: Okay, so this wasn’t during working hours. But on…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Lately, I have enjoyed getting back to options basics to help new traders gain trading confidence.  Once you understand how calls and puts work, and what they are, it’s important to know how you are going…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Some stocks highly correlate to the market – and there’s a simple term for this market exposure phenomenon… It’s one of my favorite option Greeks: Beta.  Beta is the measure of a stock’s movement relative to…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, One of the fundamentals of trading options is understanding how volatility affects options pricing.  In this video, I broke down the two primary factors I consider when looking at options on individual stocks: Historical Volatility (HV)…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, During yesterday’s live Profit Takeover show, Andrew Giovinazzi, Chief Options Strategist at The Option Pit LLC, joined me to chat about options, volatility, and the trades we are watching… Andrew wrote the program which taught me…

Yesterday, the market chopped around before the Fed meeting, then once Powell made his announcement we saw a huge drop. There are some signs that the market won’t stay down for long… There’s one indicator that I am watching every…

Three major events are happening in a week’s time, and one of my favorite indicators is about to make major moves.  The November Fed meeting is happening today and news is dropping tomorrow…  The non-farm payroll report drops this Friday,…

Earnings season is one of the wildest opportunities for volatility and movement on each individual stock. And you know how much I love watching volatility… High volatility is my favorite indicator to take profit on trades we have already entered. …

You hear me mention this indicator every day during the live show because it’s the single BIGGEST factor I consider when explaining how to profit with options trades.  It tells you when there’s a buying opportunity… It tells you when…

Recently, I touched on why I like trading butterflies and how I use them… I use butterflies on the SPX and XSP same-day expiration plays. Butterfly A butterfly is a combination of a bull spread and a bear spread where…

The buy-and-hold model for stocks can’t work for you like this method can. There’s a way to make faster profit in weeks rather than months or years… and instead of making 10% (projected stock market gains) you can make 50%,…

Everyday during the Profit Takeover show, I cover… My top-watched stocks Big money flow I’ve spotted And overall market moves And on Tuesdays, Frank Gregory, our K street to Wall Street expert, pops by to talk about the policies affecting…

Earlier in the week, I walked through some options basics… Today, I wanted to share some trading strategies that utilize buying multiple calls and/or puts at different strike prices simultaneously and the costs and benefits of those strategies. There are…

I want to walk you through some must-know basics to get started trading options.  But what are options? An options contract is an opportunity, not an obligation, for the buyer to buy or sell the underlying asset.  I, and many…

We are still in backwardation.  Cue Ryan’s booming voice modulator.  Backwardation occurs when the current price of an underlying asset is higher than prices trading in the futures market. And it’s not a good sign for the market. Today during…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Brazil is getting ready to choose a new president – and this election could have a dire effect on one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world: Petrolio Brasileiro (NYSE:PBR). Brazil has got two guys…

It is finally happening… XSP, SPX’s little brother, is expiring every day starting next week.  SPX is the best way to trade the S&P 500 – , because  rather than getting assigned stock at expiration, traders get the benefit of…

All week during the live Profit Takeover shows, I’ve been focusing on breaking down my Daily Double strategy – an opportunity to take 2x profit on my investment every single weekday.  Here, I broke down the basics of SPX butterfly…

There’s a position so great, so volatile, and so exciting, that even if it expires worthless, there’s a chance traders can still profit.  Here’s how it works… Volatile weeks in the market cause wild intraday moves in the S&P 500. …

There are three main parts to understanding how to trade butterflies on SPX and XSP:  Prepare your trading account Understand the butterfly setup Take profits home It’s that simple. Today during the live Profit Takeover show, I broke down this…

Yesterday was wild, and even though VIX – the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s CBOE Volatility Index saw a nearly 10% change yesterday, members of Trade the Close, Expiration Trader, and the Profit Revolution had the opportunity to make 75%. Here’s…

It’s pre-Fed Tuesday, and I don’t trust this market sell-off… It also happens to be the day before VIX expiration. Currently, there’s an 84% chance that the Fed will raise rates to between 300-325. Image from CME group Since we…

Ahead of the Fed meeting this week, I will be watching AAPL and high-beta stocks. If I knew exactly what the market would do this week I’d be on an island somewhere, but I have some ideas of where to…

Quadruple-witching is coming tomorrow, and I expect to see another big volatility spike before the end of the week. $3 trillion are settling tomorrow as single stock futures, single stock options, stock index futures, and stock index options all expire…

This is the biggest week for volume and volatility that we’ve seen all quarter. Big events like the CPI number, which dropped today, and quadruple-witching, set for Friday, cause MASSIVE volatility spikes… But this week, it’s even more volatile than…

You can’t mistake the correlation between Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (NYSEARCA:SPY). Here’s AAPL since January: Image from wallstreet.io And here’s SPY: Image from wallstreet.io This is why I say, as AAPL moves, so does the market… And…

The market and the VIX is currently reflecting known unknowns.  The Fed is raising rates – but we don’t know by how much… We are headed into a recession – but we aren’t sure how bad it will be… There’s…

These are the BIGGEST insider moves I am watching this week: Luminar Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:LAZR) I saw a big money buyer pick up 30,000 of the September 9, 2022 $7.50 puts for $0.12. LAZR is currently up on the day,…

I spotted a crazy complex reversal big money play in MMM. Essentially, this trader wants to be long or short MMM but remove the influence or sensitivity that the underlying security price has on the options price – called “delta…

Our daily expiration trades on SPX and XSP aren’t always winners.  But even worthless SPX expirations can still make profit… Allow me to explain. On August 26, 2022, our traders opened the $4100-$4085-$4070 Put Butterfly for $1.10… They sold half…

Yesterday, I said big money can trick you – But sometimes big money is just flat-out wrong.  This is what happens when you are losing and stubborn about it… This buyer keeps doubling down on their losing CHPT calls, and…

Big money can trick you. Yesterday, I saw a massive 18,500-lot play in NKLA. But this big-money trader wasn’t just playing straight calls or puts… They were playing both: You’re looking at 18,438 of the September 16, 2022 $5.50 puts against…

Big money is shorting the market… I saw this trader buying a massive put spread in iShares iBoxx $ High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (NYSEARCA:HYG). This ETF, HYG, tracks the investment results of an index composed of U.S. dollar-denominated, high yield…

Our daily expiration trades on SPX and XSP aren’t always winners.  But when we win, we win BIG.  On Friday August 22nd, we hit a wild one.  Traders bought the SPX August 22, 2022 $4150-$4140-$4130 Put Butterfly for $1.22 at…

I got a great question during today’s live Profit Takeover show… Finally$$$ was asking about why I care what big paper is trading. And that’s a really important question to answer and to understand.  I took a few minutes to…

Today’s big money flow is mostly bearish…  Here are four names I am watching with big money moves: Nikola Corp (NASDAQ:NKLA) Big paper has already taken massive profits on puts in NKLA. They have already bought and sold puts and…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Here are the top four names I’m trading this week: VIX – Chicago Board Options Exchange’s CBOE Volatility Index I am going to be going short VIX. VIX is trading at 23.43 as I write this…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, Are you signed up for my text alert service? If so, you probably just made 66% in less than 24 hours with my first trade in BTU. On Wednesday, I recommended the BTU September 16, 2022…

Dear Profit Takeover reader, I watch big money moves every day, in order to pass along SMART options plays to retail traders. Because insiders get the news before everyone else, they know how to profit before anyone else. Before the…

Editor’s Note: Mark Sebastian here – I wanted to share some insight from Chief Investment Strategist, Shah Gilani, today… Dear Profit Takeover Reader, I can guarantee only a tiny sliver of investors read the dead-on story from the Financial Times…