The one thing you check every morning that's useless now

For thirty years you were taught to check the futures before the bell.

S&P futures, NASDAQ futures, first thing, every morning. If they were red, you braced. If they were green, you relaxed. A lot of you have a couple of rings around your tree, and that reflex is baked in deep.

Stop looking at that crap.

I'll say it plainly, with all due respect to how you were trained. What the futures say pre-market hasn't meant much to any given session in a long time. 

This morning was a perfect example. The S&P opened down 0.3%, the weekend headlines made it sound like all hell was going to break loose, and by the open the advance decline line was stellar. Seventy advancers against a red tape. The pre-market told you nothing.

It lies now for a simple reason. You're staring at three products in the pre-market, and they're heavily retail-driven. When the financials looked bid this morning, that bid was sitting on maybe 100,000 shares traded. 

That's anemic. 

It tells you nothing about what happens when real size shows up. So with all due respect, if that thin tape is all you're looking at, you have no idea what order flow looks like once the bell rings.

And order flow is the whole game.

The market shifted. 

It's less about investors now and more about short-term gamma and traders. You move a stock day to day by buying calls and buying puts, not by admiring the pre-market. Order flow can come in and smash the tape in the first two minutes, or rip it higher, and the futures gave you no warning either way.

So what do you watch instead?

Stop looking at price. Start looking at percentage change. I can see Apple up six bucks and it means nothing to me on its own. I see it up 1.8% and now I know something. 

The percentage column lets you discern what's moving and how fast, and you can read a rotation the second it starts. 

When Microsoft ticks up and the financials roll over in the same breath, that's the tell. You catch that in the percentage view. You never catch it staring at the futures.

This is hard for people. It's a retrain. You spent decades building the pre-market habit and now I'm telling you it's noise. 

But go look at your own screen tomorrow morning. Watch the futures, write down what they told you, then watch what order flow does after the bell.

They won't match. They almost never do anymore.

The traders still leaning on the pre-market are trading a market that stopped existing years ago. 

Don't be one of them.

To your success,

Don Kaufman

P.S. — The very first options trade most beginners are taught? It's the most dangerous one on the board. There's a one-line test that flags it before you risk a dollar. I walk through it in the checklist — free today