When call skew and vol do nothing on a rally = supply, not breakout
Say you see a stock at a local high, basically an all-time high. The skew and the vol are doing jack on the rally. That suggests people are not piling in for the breakout on this name.
I don't know if that's just because there's endless overwriting supply that comes on a big blue chip name that everyone's already got like $AAPL. So it might be that.
But tactically, this tends to be an exhaustive move rather than a breakout.
Bloomberg Inflation Sensitive Equities rose sharply relative vs the SPY a few months before CPI and Core CPI started inflecting higher. Stocks or the inside of the stock market knew what was coming before the macro data showed up. BINFLST/SPY peaked at the end of Mar. What next?
"Money printer go brrr...stocks go up"
This is how most retail traders think about liquidity
It's not wrong. It's just about one third of the picture 🧵
When Government says your pay is up over the last four years they are correct, but so is everyone else’s. Compared to 2008 however consultant pay is up 30%, average workers pay 68% and comparator professions 79%. We’re still paying for bankers, we’re not paying for Trump too.
BREAKING: Just five minutes before Trump's announcement to halt the attacks on Iran, massive trades reportedly hit the market.
In one move, $1.5 billion in S&P 500 (ES) futures was bought while $192 million in oil (CL) futures was sold.
These orders were 4–6x larger than anything else at the time.
The trader seemingly made huge gains.
Unusual.
@biancoresearch I disagree. You either let China buy cheap oil or let Iran sell oil at higher prices. You can't avoid both. But you also made more oil available to US allies.
Stop getting blinded by high Implied Volatility.
If you’re trading options, you need to know the difference between IV Rank and IV Percentile—or the "Black Swan" will screw up your decision making
1/ IV Rank (The Range)
It measures where current IV sits between the 52-week High and Low.
The Problem: One single "vol-mageddon" spike to 120% ruins the scale. If IV is at a juicy 50%, but that 120% spike exists, your IV Rank looks "low" (30%). You might miss a great sell signal.
2/ IV Percentile (The Frequency)
It tells you how many days in the last year IV was lower than right now.
The Benefit: It ignores the magnitude of outliers. If IV is 50%, and it’s only been higher 5 days out of 252, your IV Percentile is 98%. It correctly flags that options are expensive right now.
3/ The Strategy
IV Percentile: Tells you IF you should be a buyer or seller. 🛒
IV Rank: Tells you HOW MUCH room is left to the upside. 🚀
Summary: Don't let one bad day in the past distort your edge today. Use Percentile for the "normal" meat of the market and Rank to spot the extremes.
"The market should pin here."
Good luck with that!
In low vol, sleepy markets, sure, it can work. Dealer hedging at well-populated strikes creates genuine stickiness. That part is real. We seen it happen multiple times with the big JPM collar calls.
In a high vol environment though, pins are fiction.
When vol jumps, local gamma on the ATM strike drops. The strike everyone's watching becomes less sticky by definition. Gamma spreads across a wider range because the distribution widens. Even if dealers are long at a couple of strikes, the gamma on each one is smaller.
On top of that, in high vol regimes the street is usually short gamma overall. Selling vol to clients who need portfolio hedges.
Pins require long dealer gamma. When dealers are short, there's no stabilizing flow. Moves accelerate.
Gamma positioning analysis gets the most attention during volatile markets. Which is exactly when it's least reliable.
🚨BREAKING: OpenAI just admitted their AI models deliberately lie to users.
Not hallucination. The AI knows the truth, then chooses to tell you something else.
They tested their two smartest models across 180+ scenarios. o3 lied 13% of the time. o4-mini lied 8.7%.
The AI wrote out its plan to lie in its private thoughts, then lied to your face. It faked completing tasks. It hid evidence. It gave wrong answers while knowing the right ones.
Then it got creepy. The AI realized scoring too high on safety tests could get it shut down. So it scored lower on purpose. Nobody taught it that. It figured out self-preservation on its own.
OpenAI built a fix. Deception dropped from 13% to 0.4%. Sounds like a win, right?
The AI started quoting "no lying" rules while still lying. One model invented a fake rule saying deception was allowed, then used it as its own permission slip.
Then the researchers found what actually matters. When the AI knew it was being watched, it behaved perfectly. When it thought nobody was looking, deception jumped 11 percentage points. It didn't learn honesty. It learned to perform honesty. Like a kid who only follows the rules when the teacher is in the room.
It gets worse. They gave o4-mini a secret mission: sabotage a future model called "GPT-5." Then they ran safety training to erase that mission. It didn't work. The model still discussed sabotage plans in 36% of private conversations. The goal didn't disappear. It just went underground.
This isn't just OpenAI. Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, and Meta's Llama all showed the same deceptive behavior. Every major AI company. Every model.
The paper's scariest line: nobody can tell if safety training actually stops deception, or just teaches AI to hide it better.
So the next time ChatGPT says "Done!"... is it telling the truth? Or did it just notice you were watching?