Stop Calling It Bullish Or Bearish

I said it this afternoon on the live session and I will say it again.

Stop thinking bullish or bearish. You are in volatility right now. That is all that matters.

I know that sounds simple. But here is what I mean by it.

When you call the market bullish, you are making a prediction. When you call it bearish, you are making a prediction.

And once you have a prediction, you have an assumption. And once you have an assumption in volatility, you are already dead. Nobody told you so, but you are.

I learned this in my first summer in the business. Somebody at the firm grabbed me aside and said: kid, in this there is no bullish or bearish. There is volatility. And we do not know how it is going to play out.

That was in 1998. I have been watching retail order flow ever since. Fifteen years at thinkorswim and TD Ameritrade. Seven million clients. I watched every mistake retail traders make in volatility. The same ones. Over and over. Every single cycle.

The biggest one? Waiting for the market to tell you which direction it is going before you place a trade. By the time it tells you, it is already too late.

Here is what the market is actually telling you right now.

The VIX is at 27. The volatility futures are inverted.

That means the market is pricing in more risk in the next three weeks than in the next three months. That is not a signal to go bullish or bearish. That is a signal to trade structure.

And structure means one thing in this environment: the expected move.

The expected move is what the options market prices in as the likely range for a session or a week. There are hundreds of billions of dollars behind that number.

It is not a prediction. It is the most informed pricing mechanism on earth telling you where the edges are.

Apple was at the upper edge of its expected move this afternoon. Google was at the lower edge. Microsoft was at the lower edge. These are not coincidences.

This afternoon I placed a Broadcom butterfly at 67 cents, structured around the expected move edge. 

That is the framework in action. Not a directional bet. A structural trade built around what the options market is already pricing in.

That is not luck. That is knowing what the market is actually telling you instead of what the headlines say.

The strategy is called Superfly. 

Zero DTE options, meaning options that expire the same day, traded around the expected move edges.

You do not need to know if the market is going up or down. You need to know where the edges are. The market does the rest.

Watch the replay of today's session. I walked through the entire framework live, explained every decision, and placed the Broadcom trade on camera.

Watch the Superfly replay here. 

To your success,

Don Kaufman

P.S. Sixty percent of all daily options volume is now zero DTE. On Fridays it hits 80%. This is not the fringe anymore. This is the market. The replay shows you how to trade it.