Falcon_ops

Fresh air, trees, money

[GEX Edge @GEXEdgeIO]

1/

🎯WOW. 2nd day in a row. $SPY

Yesterday: GEX Edge kept traders on the right side of the gamma squeeze.

Today: it kept traders on the right side of the downside flush.

Same regime all morning:

AMPLIFIER TAPE.
Moves accelerate both ways.
Walls don’t hold. Don’t fade the first clean break.

[GEX Edge @GEXEdgeIO]

🧵 THREAD: Why dealers are FORCED to buy and sell SPX at specific levels every day and how to front-run them for $500–$1000 on 0DTE.

[InvestmentGuru @InvestmentGuru_]

2026: The Year of Learning
A reality check for every investor navigating this storm

The market is delivering its most important lecture in years — and it’s not grading on a curve. If 2021 was about easy money and 2022 was a sharp correction, then 2026 is about something deeper: learning how to think as an investor when nothing is straightforward. Let’s break down what’s really happening.

01 · MACRO ENVIRONMENT
Volatility is the New Normal
Geopolitical headlines are no longer background noise — they are actively moving markets on a daily basis. We’re in an era where one speech, one tariff announcement, or one military headline can swing indices by 2–3% in hours. Investors who built portfolios assuming calm waters are feeling this the hardest. Volatility isn’t a bug in 2026. It’s the feature. The sooner you accept that, the better positioned you’ll be.

02 · COMMODITIES
Gold, Silver & Oil Are the Real Winners So Far
📈 Gold ↑ | 📈 Silver ↑ | 📈 Oil ↑ | 📉 Growth Stocks ↓
While equity markets have struggled, hard assets are having their moment. Gold and silver are proving their value as stores of wealth during uncertainty. Oil has been the standout performer — driven by supply constraints, geopolitical tension, and resilient global demand. Those who stayed underweight commodities are now watching from the sidelines.

03 · INFLATION RISK
Rising Oil = Rising Inflation = Rate Problem
Here’s the domino effect everyone needs to understand: higher oil prices feed directly into transportation, manufacturing, and consumer goods costs — which pushes inflation back up. That kills the narrative of aggressive rate cuts in 2026. In fact, the Fed may be forced to hold rates higher for longer — or in a worst-case scenario, raise again. This matters enormously for anyone exposed to floating-rate debt, commercial real estate, or rate-sensitive industries.

04 · RATE-SENSITIVE SECTORS
Who Gets Hurt When Rates Stay High?
⚠️ Small Caps | ⚠️ Real Estate | ⚠️ Growth Stocks | ⚠️ High-Debt Companies
Small cap companies — which rely heavily on floating-rate debt — are getting squeezed on margins. Real estate operators carrying variable-rate mortgages or refinancing cycles are facing painful math. Growth stocks, which are valued on future cash flows, get punished most when discount rates stay elevated. The playbook that worked from 2009–2021 is not working now.

05 · INVESTOR PSYCHOLOGY
Growth Investors Are Getting a Hard Education
The first few months of 2026 have been among the most difficult stretches for growth and tech-oriented investors since 2022. Portfolios that were celebrated a year ago are quietly bleeding. This is not the time to panic-sell — but it is the time to ask honest questions about your thesis, your time horizon, and whether your portfolio is truly diversified or just concentrated in one narrative.

What Smart Investors Are Doing Right Now:
→ Respecting commodities as a legitimate asset class, not just a hedge
→ Stress-testing portfolios for a “rates higher for longer” scenario
→ Reducing exposure to companies with heavy floating-rate debt obligations
→ Being patient with growth — but demanding stronger balance sheets
→ Watching oil prices as the single biggest macro signal of the year
→ Not mistaking volatility for opportunity without proper risk management

The bottom line? 2026 is not a year to chase performance. It’s a year to protect, position, and learn. The investors who come out ahead won’t necessarily be the ones who picked the best stock — they’ll be the ones who understood the macro environment, respected risk, and stayed disciplined when emotion said otherwise.
Markets are always teaching. The question is whether you’re paying attention.

[Bob - 🍖🔥🌶️📈(BBQ & Trading ™) @optionsbbq]

Korean smoked pork belly tonight. Currently marinating. This recipe exactly without the soybean paste. No miso. So good. Some reserved for basting when I finish on the grill. #OptionsBBQ

[Falcon_ops @OpsFalcon]

@farzyness @SawyerMerritt @Tesla According to the "experts" $TSLA was behind 🤣🤣

[Jared Isaacman @rookisaacman]

It’s fascinating to see the reactions to @elonmusk recent Mars timeline. Like so many things, it sparks fierce debate from echo chambers—those who either cling to every word, believing he’s infallible, and those who focus only on the negative in everything he or @SpaceX has ever tried to accomplish. Honestly, it must be exhausting for both extremes to uphold such rigid positions.

Why can’t both sides see it for what it is? An outrageous, exciting, and, even if late, achievable goal, with a timeline designed to stimulate creative and urgent problem-solving. Much like the space race of old, but this time with a far greater understanding of the technological challenges ahead—and without needing to be funded by every taxpayer. If 14,000 of the brightest minds hit the timeline, we’ll be that much closer to becoming a true spacefaring civilization and unlocking the universe’s secrets. And if they’re late? They will have learned an incredible amount along the way, and honestly, even if it takes a decade or more, it will have been worth the wait.

[Black Edge @BlackEdgeFund]

Golden words from a wise man:

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

Jensen Huang today on Yahoo Finance:

⦿ Tesla is far ahead in self-driving cars.
⦿ Learning from videos directly is the most effective way to train these models.
⦿ The best way to teach AIs how the physical world behaves is through video.

[🦎 @jaded_lizard]

$SPX #0DTE EOD butterfly to pin 5200 closed to net 3.10 after reducing cost to 0.

[Falcon_ops @OpsFalcon]

@LikeTheCheeez @SawyerMerritt The best speakers are no speaker

[Tesla @Tesla]

Reuters published an article that leads with a wildly misleading headline and is riddled with incomplete and demonstrably incorrect information.

This latest piece vaguely and nonsensically suggests there are thousands upon thousands of disgruntled Tesla customers. It’s nonsensical because it’s nonfactual—the reality is Tesla’s customer retention is among the best and highest in the industry.

Misleading headline:
“Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective.”

Reality (buried in the article): 
Tesla paid for most of the 120,000 vehicle repairs under warranty.

Manufactured story: 
The customer photo represents not a failed component, but instead a post crash component that was damaged in the course of reducing the adverse effects of a collision. The customer was informed that Tesla was able to review the telemetry and understood there was a crash that resulted in this repair not being covered by warranty. 
Most, if not all, manufacturer warranties exclude damages caused by a crash because that is the point of insurance coverage.

Helpful context:
Tesla has the most advanced vehicle telemetry system that can identify emerging issues, determine scope, and allow for faster vehicle and service improvements than has ever been seen in the auto industry. We take action as soon as we see a problem, something that should be celebrated as best-in-class, and is often cited by our regulators as a major safety advantage.

False accusation:
The author has conflated a noise-related (non-safety) issue with a range of unrelated and disconnected service actions. Contrary to the article’s statements based on erroneous data, Tesla is truthful and transparent with our safety regulators around the globe and any insinuation otherwise is plain wrong.

Tesla Service Principles:
a.
Our service technicians and advisors diagnose, maintain and fix our customers’ cars efficiently and are not incentivized to profit off customers’ repair needs.

b.
Tesla provides our service employees with excellent compensation and benefits packages. They don’t work off of commission like at other dealers who are incentivized to upsell or overcharge their customers.

c.
The best service is no service. When service must be done, we fix 90%+ problems without even needing the customer present – either through over-the-air updates or with mobile service at a customer’s house or workplace.
To see Tesla’s approach in action, one can refer to this maintenance study from earlier this year, “Tesla was named the cheapest luxury car brand to maintain..” → https://t.co/yXh0y2nJdE

This cherry-picking approach to journalism results in missing the truth, which is a pattern in many of the negative articles about Tesla. 

Using one customer’s one-sided version of events as the universal experience of all customers paints a false and misleading picture of Tesla. In reality, for every upset customer, there are hundreds more who are thrilled with their Tesla and eager to repeat their business. The numbers don’t lie in terms of repeat sales and customer satisfaction.

We strive to make every customer a lifelong member of the Tesla family. 

While others may have their own agendas, our principles have been the same since the beginning: to make the safest cars in the world, which are easiest to maintain, while accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.

[ChargeGo @ChargeGoGroup]

Who said you can’t off-road a Tesla? 😳

[Falcon_ops @OpsFalcon]

@StockMKTNewz Sound like pump and dump... CEO's been cashing out of the stock

[Tesla @Tesla]

Family trip

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

Tesla’s Price Cuts are Unprecedented

I’ve been following the EV space semi-religiously… OK, very religiously, for over a decade. During that time, I’ve seen the public’s sentiment shift from having no idea that EVs were a thing, to having doubts that the technology would ever be a success, to an EV becoming the bestselling car in the world for the first half of 2023 - the Tesla Model Y.

During this time, many competitors have attempted to join in with varying degrees of success. You have legacy automakers like GM, Ford, VW, etc. entering the market by leaning on their decades of manufacturing expertise building gas cars. You also have newcomers like Lucid and Rivian using the same playbook as Tesla, deciding to start an EV company from scratch.

As more players have entered the fray, EV adoption has soared exponentially, going from 1% of all new car sales globally in 2017, to 13% in 2022. That's 13x in 5 years. And the growth isn’t stopping, with many experts thinking EVs will cross the 50% threshold in new cars sold sometime between 2028 and 2030.

Many signs are pointing to this being the case, especially as Tesla continues on its path to sell 20 million cars annually by 2030, and Chinese car companies continue their frantic pace of building EVs.

However, as competition heats up and more people consider an EV for their next purchase, Tesla is beginning to implement a strategy that has been in the works since the founding of the company.

Here’s the company’s mission statement which has largely remained the same since its founding: “Accelerating the World’s Transition to Sustainable Energy”. The key word here is accelerating.

Much has been made lately about Tesla’s decisions to dramatically cut pricing on their vehicles. At the start of the year Tesla dropped prices across its entire line up by as much as 20%. These cuts have continued, most recently with large cuts to its S and X vehicles, which are large luxury cars, by another 20%. This caused a lot of noise, many saying that this is proof that no one wants EVs, that it will cause Tesla to be unprofitable, and it’s a desperate attempt by the company to stay relevant.

We’ve now learned through the company’s quarterly earnings that yes - the company did take a hit on its profitability from price decreases, but it was nowhere near the amount some were calling for. Tesla has been able to stay quite profitable due to lowered costs as we exited COVID supply chain shocks, increased scale from its newly built Austin and Berlin factories, and extremely high demand for its bestselling high-margin product, the Model Y.

Here’s the thing though - if we re-read Tesla’s mission statement, it’s clear that this was Tesla’s plan all along. Remember the word “accelerate” from earlier? This is how the company is choosing to accelerate the transition.

We live in a time where interest rates are making it tougher for people to finance large purchases. Things like cars and homes have reached all-time-high unaffordability as monthly payments become tough to swallow for many, and it’s this precise environment that’s highlighting why Tesla’s strategy is so unique.

The usual car-maker playbook during times like these is to throttle production and focus on maximizing profit for every unit that’s sold. Because of higher interest rates, there’s going to be less demand for cars than usual, and ensuring production marries demand is important for shareholders to feel like the company isn’t losing more money than it should. This means that automakers are willing to forego units sold in preference for more profits per car.

Sell less cars than usual, but make sure you are making a lot of money per car.

However, because of this short-sighted commitment to profitability, the door has been opened for a company to take market share in droves.

This is where Tesla comes in.

Instead of catering to short-sighted profitability, the company has decided to maximize production by lowering pricing so that their factories are running at 100% percent WHILE THEY ARE GROWING. In other words, Tesla is pricing their products so that they sell MORE next year, instead of ensuring they make as much profit as possible this year.

This means that there will be more Teslas on the road relative to everyone else. And we are already seeing this, given that the Model Y is the bestselling car in the world. There’s proof that this strategy is working when it comes to flooding the market with your product.

Tesla is accelerating the adoption of sustainable energy products by maximizing the number of people that can afford it.

It is important to highlight though, that there is still a large gap in awareness of affordability. Many people have no idea that there are EVs that are affordable to the masses, especially Teslas. I find myself having many discussions with random folks where they had no idea they could purchase a Tesla (or any EV) for well under $50k, and well under $40k with the Federal EV tax credit.

However, this is a problem Tesla could solve with some form of education and/or advertising. My gut tells me Tesla will choose to do this once they feel confident their production can keep up with the guaranteed increase in demand once this campaign is underway (if it’s needed).

It is important to note - you can advertise all you want until you are blue in the face, but if your product isn’t affordable during difficult economic times, then the effectiveness of the ads are much less than they could be.

However, and this is extremely important - the strategy that Tesla has chosen, to drop prices as quickly as possible, is necessary to fulfill its long-term profit motives.

It may be counter-intuitive to think this, but in the case of Tesla, its long-term aspirations are for all their cars to be capable of driving themselves.

This reads like science fiction, but I assure you that it’s not.

Tesla feels the Hardware equation for the car is already solved. The company has claimed the 8-camera system and the onboard computer in its cars is capable of making it significantly safer than a human, which will allow regulators to approve the car for Level 4 (and Level 5) autonomy. This basically means that the car is responsible for the driving and Tesla would be liable if anything were to go wrong. The burden is lifted from the human.

Teslas are already capable of driving themselves in many situations with the current FSD Beta software, but this system is currently limited to Level 2. This means that the driver is still responsible to monitor the system as it drives the car, but the key thing here is that all Tesla cars are collecting tons of driving data regardless of the system being on or off.

It is this data that will allow Tesla to fulfill this goal of offering Level 5 self-driving systems in its lineup.

The only missing piece here is software. Tesla needs to get the system to be good enough to achieve Level 5. And once it does, the company expects to rake in tens of billions of profits per year in the long term.

This is where the magic of price decreases come into play.

Tesla’s mission may be to accelerate the world to sustainable energy by selling tons of super-affordable EVs, but in reality, their mission statement for the car business should be “to cover the earth with data-gathering robots so that our AI-brain can teach itself how to drive in every corner of the world so that humans stop dying in car accidents”.

Let me explain a bit further.

For Tesla to solve the self-driving puzzle it needs a ridiculous amount of video data. Tesla has about 4 million cars on the road today collecting video through its 8-camera system. That data, which includes video, gets sent to Tesla’s mothership and is passed through a complex compute system. This system has undergone many changes over the years, and with the company’s latest version, it utilizes an advanced AI to teach itself how to drive. Pretty wild stuff.

But here’s the thing - without the video data, the car doesn’t learn how to drive itself.

For all of us who drive, we know we encounter a quasi-infinite amount of weird things on the road. Missing lane markings. Vandalized traffic signs. Broken traffic lights. Erratic drives. Chairs in the middle of a highway. Mattresses. You name it. Most of the world’s roads are a chaotic nightmare.

For Tesla’s self-driving system to operate on all of the world’s roads, it needs footage of these things happening so that it can learn how to handle every situation. There are companies other than Tesla that are taking a different approach to solve this by overfitting their cars with a ton of sensors, as well as mapping the areas where they drive in. Although successful in most situations, the smallest change to a given area can cause the system to malfunction, and it is incredibly expensive to scale as it requires a large amount of up-front costs and human labor to execute.

Instead, Tesla's approach is to build a system so smart that any changes to road conditions will be handled by its 8-camera system and its on-board computer. The onboard computer would be able to do this because it has code from Tesla’s self-driving AI, which has analyzed a ridiculous amount of video data collected from every Tesla on the road.

And this is where Tesla’s price cuts are so incredibly important.

By maximizing affordability to the masses, Tesla is maximizing the chance of having a Tesla roaming the world’s roads capturing super-important video data that is crucial in building a self-driving system that’s capable of handling any situation.

It is in Tesla’s best interest to flood the market with video-collecting robots (we can call them EVs for now) as quickly as possible so that it has an outsized advantage when they flip the switch on the self-driving software.

This is not well understood.

Imagine living in a world where you and your date can hop in your Tesla after having an awesome meal and having more than a few drinks, and the car takes you home in the safety, comfort, and privacy of your car without ever having to worry about being pulled over for drunk driving.

Now imagine living in a world where transportation becomes incredibly cheap because a) it’s way cheaper to run an EV vs a gas car and b) there’s no driver to pay. And because there’s no driver, the utility of the car multiplies since there’s no human that needs to rest and/or have a life.

Now take the profits that Tesla could generate from the above and compare them vs increasing their short-term profits by a few thousand bucks per car by limiting their production and/or running campaigns to maximize profit per car.

Also compare all of this to what every other automaker is doing.

Pretty different, right?

This is Tesla’s fundamental advantage as a company - it has built EVs that are loved by the masses, so much so that the best selling car in the world is its midsize SUV with limited to no advertising.

It just so happens that the most popular car in the world is also a video-gathering robot that’s teaching an AI how to drive.

The question shouldn’t be “what happens to Tesla as they keep dropping prices?” The question should be “what happens when Tesla has enough data to flip the switch for self-driving?”

[Gary Black @garyblack00]

Farzad - Well argued and persuasive. The reason we remain so bullish on $TSLA (remains our #2 position) is because EV adoption will soar over the next several years, from 15% in 2023 to likely 60% by 2030. And Tesla as the largest EV player will benefit the most from that growth as it fills in product gaps (Cybertruck, hatchback, van). But on your main argument that cutting price puts more Teslas on the road - the data so far just doesn’t support it. This myear we’ve learned that TSLA elasticity of demand is very low: TSLA avg selling price (ASP) ex-reg credits is down -15% YoY, but WS (and the company’s own) TSLA FY2023 volume ests haven’t budged (in fact WS FY’23 vol ests are down slightly YTD). IMHO, the most important strategy is to get the $25K-$30K next gen vehicle launched. That is consistent with MP-1, would be the most effective way to get more Teslas on the road collecting information for the FSD software and neural nets, and accelerates the world’s transition to sustainable energy fastest since it forces the entire EV industry to move faster to drive down costs and prices.

[Falcon_ops @OpsFalcon]

@wholemars $TSLA do a Cyber Truck #SuperBowl ad @elonmusk?

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Cathie Wood: "@Tesla should trade like a technology stock and not like traditional automakers, something that analysts and Tesla bears can’t grasp."

“Tesla, because of its positioning with AI, it is the only auto company or tech company that has designed its own chip for autonomous driving; “This is not an auto play. This is an autonomous taxi platform play with software-as-a-service like margins,” Wood said.

Source: https://t.co/YCaFpCBQHw

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

https://t.co/VzTxpktH1q

[Evan @StockMKTNewz]

Goldman Sachs just raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $605 from $495 while maintaining its Buy rating

JPMorgan raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $600 from $500 while maintaining its Overweight rating

Bank of America raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $650 from $550 while maintaining its Buy rating

Morgan Stanley raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $630 from $500 while maintaining its Overweight rating

Citi raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $630 from $520 while maintaining its Buy rating

Wells Fargo raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $600 from $500 while maintaining its Overweight rating

Rosenblatt raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $1,100 from $800 while maintaining its Buy rating

Barclays raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $650 from $600 while maintaining its Overweight rating

Piper Sandler raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $620 from $500 while maintaining its Overweight rating

Jefferies raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $610 from $500 while maintaining its Buy rating

Mizuho raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $590 from $530 while maintaining its Buy rating

Evercore raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $600 from $550 while maintaining its Outperform rating

TD Cowen raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $600 from $500 while maintaining its Outperform rating

Bernstein raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $675 from $475 while maintaining its Outperform rating

Wolfe raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $630 from $570 while maintaining its Outperform rating

HSBC raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $800 from $780 while maintaining its Buy rating

Baird raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $750 from $570 while maintaining its Outperform rating

Keybanc raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $670 from $620 while maintaining its Overweight rating

Oppenheimer raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $650 from $500 while maintaining its Outperform rating

Raymond James raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $600 from $500 while maintaining its Strong Buy rating

Wedbush raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $600 from $490 while maintaining its Outperform rating

UBS raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $560 from $540 while maintaining its Buy rating

Deutsche Bank raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $560 from $440 while maintaining its Buy rating

BMO raised its price target on Nvidia $NVDA to $600 from $550 while maintaining its Outperform rating

BNP Paribas upgraded Nvidia $NVDA to Outperform from Neutral while raising its price target to $745 from $440

Stifel upgraded Nvidia $NVDA to Buy from Hold while raising its price target to $600 from $440