Don't Get Distracted by the green on your screen.
| | Everyone's talking about this morning's rally. S&P up 0.6%, Nasdaq climbing, AI stocks getting bids. | I'm looking at something completely different. | While you're staring at those green numbers, I'm watching the order flow. And it's telling a very different story. | 118,000 Contracts is a Crap Fest | This morning's pre-market action in the S&P futures? 118,000 contracts. That's an absolute crap fest of low volume. | You want to know what normal looks like? | We need damn near 200,000 contracts in overnight trade to have any real conviction. Anything less and you're flying blind into the cash open. | When there's nothing behind the move, you can't trust what you're seeing on the screen. Period. | The options marketplace now rules the roost. That's what moves markets, whether you like that or not. | You can talk about your MACDs and Fibonacci retracements all you want. Options order flow dictates where we're going. | Take Tesla this morning - wildly bullish order flow out of the gate. Almost 25,000 contracts traded at the ask versus only 15,000 at bid or below. Pure buy-side activity on calls. | You could see that freight train coming from the first minute of trade. | Apple? Exact opposite. Calls being sold, people relinquishing positions. Negative for stock price. | That's real information. | Stuck in the Middle for a Month | We're trading exactly where we were all the way back on November 26th. You are literally a month into a range - a volatility box that's trapped between 6,800 and 6,900 in the SPX. | | A full month of trade, and we haven't done anything. We broke to the downside briefly, bounced around the middle, touched the upper edge for a fleeting moment. That's it. | Today's move? We're still stuck in the middle of nowhere. | With skew sitting at 150 and above, bullish trades cost 40-50% more than bearish trades. | If you want to trade Microsoft bullish right now, you're paying 40% more than the guy taking the bearish side. | It's like looking at two identical cars and choosing to pay 40% more for the red one. | I'm not bearish because I hate America. | I'm hunting the trades that make financial sense. When bearish positions are 40% cheaper, you listen. | While everyone's getting excited about green futures and Christmas rally narratives, the actual structure hasn't changed: Volume that tells us nothing about real conviction. | A month-long range nobody wants to acknowledge. Options flow driving more price action than fundamentals. Skew that makes bullish trades prohibitively expensive. | The professional money knows this. They're watching order flow, managing gamma risk, and positioning for when this range finally breaks. | But right now? We're stuck in the middle with everyone else who thinks green numbers at 11 AM mean something. | I'll keep watching what actually matters. | To your success, | Don Kaufman | | The Market Has a 7-Second Memory Now | 0DTE options went from 5% to 60% of SPX volume since 2016. That's $1 trillion in daily notional flow — and most traders have no idea what they're doing. | Markets that used to follow predictable patterns now explode without warning. 60-handle moves from nowhere. Technical analysis getting shredded by what looks like random action. | It's not random. It's gamma flips, dealer hedging, and compressed timeframes creating a completely different trading environment. | DON-DTE — Don Kaufman's first-ever 0DTE-only training. Tuesday, December 23rd at 1:00pm ET. | A simplified framework for same-day expirations. No theory. No hype. Just process. | REGISTER FOR DON-DTE | Last training before 2026. Don't start the year reacting to faster markets. |
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