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Friday, July 25th
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
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Markets Today
🌏 Asia-Pacific: Down
🇪🇺 Europe: Down
🇺🇸 United States: Mixed
🛢️ Oil: Down
⚡Crypto: Down
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[ON-DEMAND] State of the Apple Broadcast
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Major Market Events
- Trump’s tariffs resurface as a corporate burden — With foreign governments dodging the cost, American companies are footing more of the bill as tariff threats ramp up again
- Intel slips after cost-cutting and chip woes — Despite slashing its workforce and cutting costs, Intel stock slides as sales and margins disappoint
- Japan pushes back on US trade profit split — Dispute over how to divide profits from Japan’s $65B investment in the U.S. could derail trade negotiations
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🤔 My Thoughts
Is the Tail Wagging the Dog? – How options flows might be steering stock prices — not the other way around.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the stock market called the shots.
You’d look at the chart. You’d scan the headlines. You’d read the earnings reports.
And then, if you were an options trader, you’d find a way to react to the stock’s movement.
That’s the way it worked:
- The stock moved first.
- Then the options followed.
But that’s not how it’s working anymore.
These days, the options market is often the dog — and the stock market is the tail.
Let me explain…
If someone comes in and buys 100,000 TSLA calls in a single swoop, the market maker on the other side of that trade has a problem.
They’re suddenly short a ton of deltas — meaning they’re on the hook if the stock goes up…
So they have no choice but to hedge that risk by buying the underlying stock.
Multiply that kind of flow across all the big tickers… and it starts to affect the entire market.
That’s the hidden force nobody talks about:
Options activity, especially call buying, is now pushing stocks around. When the opposite used to be true.
And this isn’t theory. It’s observable fact.
In fact, Kane Shieh showed it in real-time on yesterday’s Profit Panel.
He walked through how market makers are forced to adjust their hedging activity when gamma exposure gets too high — creating “sticky” price levels where stocks pause, bounce, or magnetically gravitate.
Jack Carter chimed in too: “It’s a crazy phenomenon,” he said. “My whole career, the underlying stock controlled the price of the option. That’s not the case across the board anymore.”
This is a big deal.
If you’re ignoring options flows and gamma exposure, you’re trading blind.
Because the price action you’re seeing on your chart?
It might not be “fundamentals” or “sentiment” at all. It might just be the ripple effect of some market maker trying to stay hedged.
And if you do understand it — you don’t have to predict the move. You just have to know where the pressure builds… and be ready to ride the wave when it hits.
If you missed the discussion yesterday, join us now and ask your questions in the chat:
Register your spot here to join us next time we go live!
To Better Trading,
Alex Reid
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