A fascinating research paper published just last week caught my attention. Two mathematicians at Cardiff found that weekend crypto volatility predicts Monday volatility in the S&P 500 (!!!). And it holds up after controlling for Friday's VIX, and it gets even stronger when Friday's VIX is already high. We can ignore crypto as an investment, but still it seems to know something about Monday. They tracked BTC, ETH and, yes, XRP weekends back to 2017, and since 2024 it shows up in EVERY pair they tested, across stocks, gold and Treasuries. What surprised me most is that Friday's crypto volatility predicts nothing, so the signal really comes from the hours when stocks can't trade. As someone who sells premium for a living, I keep thinking about two Mondays that open at the same IV after very different crypto weekends. Am I selling the same premium against two different risks? It's only 116 Mondays and the paper never touches option prices. They even wonder whether the effect gets arbitraged away once people notice, and, well, people are about to notice. I'm testing it myself for you now and will post what I find here. Has anyone here compared weekend crypto with Monday implied vs realized? Or is this already priced in and I'm late to the party? Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.35702

Oh no! In early October I shared a corn Jade Lizard. Three weeks later, corn is down 10% and the trade is underwater. Yesterday a subscriber emailed me. His screen shows a loss bigger than the trade could ever make. Nothing is realized yet, but he's frozen, waiting for a bottom. That's the moment most traders turn a paper loss into a real one. When I opened this trade, it had a 70% probability of profit (PoP). Most traders stop reading there. But there's a second number almost nobody checks: probability of touch (PoT). It's the chance the price hits your strike at any point before expiration, and it runs roughly double the chance of expiring ITM. For this trade, it was about 60%. Getting tested was the likely outcome from day one, and the plan for it was written before I clicked send. So now the real trading begins. Corn hands option sellers a gift in a spot like this: May corn trades 8 cents above March, and July 15 cents above. Roll out in time and the market moves you further, and pays you to do it. Before you touch anything, check your chart. Mine was drawing the wrong corn contract and made the position look twice as bad as it is. If you trade options on futures, it takes 10 seconds. I wrote the full step-by-step plan for everyone holding this trade.

Most options content I see stops at the entry, the part almost nobody shows is what happens when a position goes against you and you have to make the hard call with real money on the line. I opened a small, separate tastytrade account to do that in public. Most of the positions sit right where the market is likely to test them, because a trade that never gets tested can't teach anything. The first 10, plus BOXX for idle cash: - CRM: unbalanced iron condor - DRAM: Big Lizard - JNJ: put credit spread after earnings - NVDA: Nov/Dec put calendar through earnings - O: short put - SLV: short put - SMH: unbalanced iron condor - TLT: short strangle - URA: short straddle - USO: call ratio spread Some of these are not great trades by the numbers. SLV has the worst premium of the bunch, and selling a straddle on URA with IV near its annual floor isn't textbook either. They're in there because they're the most likely to get tested. I'll post updates as they get tested, including the ones I end up closing for a loss. Which one do you think gets tested first, and what would you do when it does?

The VIX jumped 5 points to 20 in a week. But what's shocking is that only about 1.5 of them came from the market moving. I went through Cboe's new volatility report, and the other 3.5 came from traders scrambling for crash protection. S&P 500 put skew went from the 15th percentile to the 82nd, a week earlier, implied correlation sat near a 10th-percentile low. Most of that new premium went into the puts, which means a VIX 20 market can still hand you calls that barely moved. The VIX formula leans heavily on out-of-the-money puts, so it exaggerates a spike like this for anyone selling near the money. So before you sell the spike, always check which part of the surface spiked: 1. The gap between the VIX and 30-day at-the-money SPX IV, when it widens, the spike's in the wings. 2. Put IV and call IV at your expiry, separately. 3. What your protective put costs. Steep skew marks it up more than the put you sell. 4. Where skew sits against its own history. That's why I put so much effort into surface targeting for every trade idea I share on Patreon. Source: Cboe Macro Volatility Digest, Oct 19, 2026 When skew spikes like this, do you lean into the expensive puts or move to the calls?

Today I just posted a trade with a 97% probability of profit. If SPY goes up, it makes a little. If SPY drops 5% to 10% by December, it makes 20 times more. But there's a catch. It hates speed, so if the market crashes fast and VIX explodes, this trade goes red long before December. That's the risk I'm paid to carry, and the article shows exactly how I manage it. I also posted a BAC trade: a strong bank that just printed a weak quarter. Both are on Patreon, plus a small-account version of the SPY trade. Link in the first comment.