It's beginning to feel more and more like last week's volatility event was just a blip on the radar of a bull market. Great!

And if that's the case, then we'll get rewarded for positioning in the next set of leaders that carry the market higher. Rotation, baby!

So with this in mind, we're going to go after a potential short-squeeze candidate today.

When the storm is upon us, it's too late to purchase hurricane insurance. Nobody will sell it to you. Of if they will, the prices will be obscene.

Last Monday, when the VIX printed a 65 -- it was too late to buy downside protection. If you did, you were asking for your face to be ripped off. And it likely was.

Now that the dust has settled a bit, volatility has abated significantly, and the relative winners and loses sorted themselves out, we're seeing some good setups to position ourselves for any additional downside action.

Additionally, it offers me a good chance to balance out some of the risks I still have on the books in my long positions.

It's fashionable in certain circles to talk about having a Canadian escape plan if shit gets too weird here in the United States.

I'm not one of those. Though I love Canada, having grown up across the border in Buffalo, NY.

There were many times in my younger days, while spending a day across the border, where I'd find myself short on cash and I'd have to hit an ATM to get some loonies! And most often, those ATMs were run by CIBC.

So maybe I should attempt to earn back some of those ATM fees (plus interest!).

A surprising outcome for some of my defined-risk long delta trades this week is that my losses weren’t as pronounced as I would’ve expected given the vicious sell-off we’ve seen in many tech names.

Why?

One thing that isn’t often discussed about being long options premium when expressing bullish or bearish bets is that owning long options (calls or puts) also means we’re long volatility.

In situations like these where we saw VIX briefly with a 65-handle, the rapid rise in options premiums put a floor in many of the calls I had long positions in. So while many bullish positions in my portfolio were losing money, the losses were rather pedestrian relative to what others who were holding long stock or futures positions were likely experiencing.

It’s not a win, but it felt like one this week.

We discuss this and a whole lot more in this week’s Options Jam Session:

The stock market likely has a couple of aftershocks left in it. But if the worst is over, I have to believe this is a great opportunity to buy the dip in some names that will be beneficiaries of the AI boom.

And there are few bigger and well-positioned names than Microsoft.

This market environment still demands that we define our risks and we're going to leverage elevated volatility in a way you might not expect to express our bet.

What do you do when the stock market sh*t hits the fan?

Be honest.

Do you tend to freak out and panic into quick exits? (if so, you aren’t alone!)

Do you recoil in fear and call it “zen detachment?” (there are more of these than you know!)

Do you get busy reading everything you can, talking to everyone you can, and watching all the financial TV you can to try to figure out why this volatility is happening?

Do you stoically go down with the ship turning your trades into investments?

We all have our different ways of dealing with the mental volatility that stock market volatility stokes in all of us. These past couple of weeks have revealed new things to ourselves.

Volatility is blowing out for the second day in a row.

I'll cut to the chase. This is a good time to sell defined-risk, delta-neutral options credit spreads.

We're going to do it again today.

VIX is near its highest level of the year and this is being reflected in options premiums nearly across the board.

It's also earnings season, so we want to be careful not to get caught in any potential earnings-driven landmines.

With this in mind, I've got a big cap name that has already reported earnings, is trading in a range, and is still exhibiting elevated options premiums -- the perfect recipe for a delta neutral options trade.

What do you call a blend of systematic and discretionary trading?

Systionary trading?

Discretionatic trading?

I think I’m leaning towards the latter.

Early in my trading career, I started up a small commodity futures hedge fund and prided myself on being fully systematic.

An algorithm derived the signals, I entered each trade manually, and I honored each signal religiously. To my credit, I stuck with it, no matter what. And I was rewarded for doing so, earning my investors 58% net returns on their money (net of my 2/20 performance fees) in just 18 months.

So, it was ingrained in me early on that systematic trading was good for me. It kept my emotions out of the decision-making process.

I’ve been chasing the systematic dragon in index options trading ever since.

In today's Flow Show, Steve and I put our heads together to find a good trade to take advantage of elevated options premiums in a big-cap name that may have seen the worst of the selling and is now may be putting in a pivot.

That name is Amazon $AMZN and here's the chart where it stands right now:

Another man's trash is another man's treasure.

And that certainly is true for Republic Services.

As can be seen in the chart below, $RSG has certainly been winning over the long run. And with this week's earning report sending the down 5%, it feels like a great opportunity to get positioned on the dip.

The Berkshires is a wonderful place to visit. And it can often be a great place to ride out the heat of summer.

Similarly, Berkshire Hathaway $BRK/B is often a great place to ride out the heat in the market.

And given the volatility backdrop in $BRK/B options, the options market is offering to pay us to catch the turn.

Let's get after it!