Assigned on a put and now the stock is way below your cost basis? The covered-call playbook for underwater shares: strike choice, rolling, when to wait, and when to take the loss.
Market Analysis
Is Selling Options Actually Profitable? The Honest Answer to Theta Gang’s Favorite Question
If selling options beats the market, why doesn’t everyone do it? The variance risk premium, the tail risk that funds it, why professionals do sell premium (differently), and when premium selling fails.
Cash-Secured Puts: How to Pick Strikes and Deltas Like a Systematic Seller
How do you choose strikes for cash-secured puts? Delta bands, premium yield math, the weekly-income reality check, and how dealer positioning data (put walls, gamma regime) sharpens strike selection.
The Wheel Strategy Explained: Mechanics, Strike Selection, and the Risks Nobody Prices In
What is the options wheel strategy? The full cycle — cash-secured puts, assignment, covered calls — plus how experienced sellers pick strikes, choose DTE, and manage the one risk that ends wheel careers.
How Traders Can Play Low Volatility Environments
The S&P 500 has spent much of the summer grinding steadily higher to achieve record highs. Meanwhile, implied volatility has reset toward yearly lows for both major indices and many single stocks. When options become this cheap, the price of volatility itself can open new trading opportunities. The Term Structure chart reveals current SPX at-the-money […]
Welcome to the Summer Melt-Up
The S&P 500 delivered a high octane four-day run last week, establishing all-time highs with a 6% rise from weekly lows. Shifting interest rate expectations, easing Middle East tensions, and strong corporate earnings powered the dramatic rally. The sharp surge brought out notable divergences across the tech space. Software outperformed the broader market, with strong […]
The Machine Ran on Call Skew: What MSTR’s Dead Volatility Surface Says About Strategy — and Bitcoin’s Missing Bid
August 6th, 2026 Strategy (MSTR) filed an 8-K Monday morning lifting its USD reserve another $250 million to $4.0 billion — funded under a framework that monetizes bitcoin — while repurchasing $81 million of its STRC preferred stock. Read that sentence again: the company that spent five years converting every available dollar of capital-markets demand […]
The New Normal in Volatility Takes Shape
The final week of July proved to be quite dramatic. An FOMC decision, PCE inflation data, and the Super Bowl of Q2 earnings all took place over the span of just 2 days, with companies representing 36% of the S&P 500 by weight reporting results last week. The results were extreme: U.S. 30-year treasury yields […]
Anatomy of a Margin Call: How Situational Awareness LP Unwound a $20 Billion AI Book in One Trade
Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness LP sold its entire public book — to Citadel, per the WSJ — after July’s AI infrastructure crash. The positions, the margin math, and the cohort-wide repricing of the liquidation discount.
Big Tech Earnings and FOMC Collide
The Dispersion Unwind Arrives Last week, we noted in our pre-market Founder’s Note that markets were skating on thin ice. In addition to growing macro risks, COR1M had collapsed below 8 signaling extreme dispersion between index and single-stock volatility. After our Risk Pivot level was breached on Thursday, the growing negative gamma environment amplified the […]