There’s a profound mental shift that happens when you flip from being in positions where bad luck could damage or ruin your trading account, to being in a position where the unexpected might actually make you a ton of money!

For options traders, an excellent example of these two positions is a short straddle vs. a long straddle.

In a short straddle, a trader is naked short an equal amount of calls and puts at the same strike and expiration. The PnL graph of a hypothetical 100-strike short straddle looks like this:

You’ll notice that as long as the underlying price (as displayed along the x-axis) stays +/- $20 from today’s price of $100, the trader will likely earn a profit as options expiration approaches.

Traders like these trades because they are high-probability bets, meaning that one has a better-than-average likelihood of earning a profit. Of course, when winning odds are favorable, the payoff usually isn’t all that high. And even worse, if the unexpected happens and a large directional move materializes, not...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

What a day.

The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite were both up more than 5%. The market liked the October CPI data and also what Fed speakers had to say.

This is the video recording of the November 10th, 2022, Weekly Town Hall w/ Willie Delwiche.

11/10/22 2:00 PM ET

In early October I was invited on to BNN Bloomberg where I was very clear in saying just how AGGRESSIVELY we wanted to be buying stocks.

See here: Buying Stocks & Fading Dollars (10-4-22)

That worked out well for us, and anyone else who was smart enough to follow along.

On Wednesday of this week I was invited back on to follow up on some of those comments.

Why was I so bullish?

Why was I ignoring all the noisemakers?

Because I'm a grown adult.

I don't need bedtime stories to go to sleep.

The Fed means nothing to my life. And it shouldn't impact yours either.

Here's what we're doing now:

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

We held our November Monthly Strategy Session Monday night. Premium Members can access and rewatch it here.

Non-members can get a quick recap of the call simply by reading this post each month.

By focusing on long-term, monthly charts, the idea is to take a step back and put things into the context of their structural trends. This is easily one of our most valuable exercises as it forces us to put aside the day-to-day noise and simply examine markets from a “big-picture” point of view.

With that as our backdrop, let’s dive right in and discuss three of the most important charts and/or themes from this month’s call.

Guys, this is Technical Analysis 101.

You don't buy an asset that's just broken a level of support. If you do, you're only asking for trouble.

As technicians, we keep things simple, and we tell it like it is. We're not afraid to call something a piece of shit if that's what the data tells us.

I find a level of beauty in this process.

It doesn't matter how elegant your theory or big your I.Q. If the market is below a certain level, it's all wrong.

We've adjusted a position in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

We had a resting GTC order filled at our profit target in the Paid-to-Play portfolio today:

The largest insider transaction on today's list was reported in a Form 4 filing by Matthew Jacobson, an independent director of Datadog $DDOG.

Jacobson reported a substantial purchase worth roughly $50 million.

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

CPI data for September was released on October 13 -- the turning point for the market. We trended higher the rest of the month after that news.

Will today's release of CPI data for October (8:30 a.m. ET) be a turning point where we trend lower? Do we bounce, even temporarily? It's anybody's guess.

Welcome to the 2 to 100 Club.

We use various bottom-up tools and scans internally to complement our top-down approach. 

One way we're doing this is by identifying the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega-cap status (over $200B).

Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.

But the scan doesn't just end there.

We are only interested in the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.

Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.

When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on...

From the Desk of Kimmy Sokoloff

It was a rough one for the market today.

Tomorrow's release of CPI data for October (8:30 a.m. ET) is dragging on things.