J Stan

[J Stan @jstan009]

@shentrades Entry precision is key. Tight stop. Not easy to do. Need the right tools

[J Stan @jstan009]

@RentYourStocks When I met my wife she had a 2001 with 285,000 miles on it. Thing was a tank

[J Stan @jstan009]

@akafaceUS Is this rage bait?

[J Stan @jstan009]

@SawyerMerritt What is the trend with the small circle tail lights? Needs to be killed ASAP

[J Stan @jstan009]

@TrendSpider I bought May1 puts and May15 calls. Basically for this exact reason

[J Stan @jstan009]

@R0326556monito @MichaelPBento Did the same thing

[J Stan @jstan009]

@traderhc Also. Check the 665 put strike at Opex. That large OI was part of why I went short this week.

[J Stan @jstan009]

@traderhc My call spread expires Friday at Opex. Plans to see where dealers position next week and see what Iran news comes over the weekend before anything but I’m happy to wait out next week if I have to.

[J Stan @jstan009]

@Remzztrades I struggle with it constantly

[J Stan @jstan009]

@market_sleuth SKEW at 150 this morning. Low low volume rally. And Oils up. Seems more mechanical. Every market except S&P seems to be worried.

[J Stan @jstan009]

@TheTradingChamp Same spot. Been trading SPX bear call spreads entire last month. This week the price activity is odd to me. Onward and upward.

[Seamus (FreedomToons) @seamus_coughlin]

If you were just complaining that a $4 billion dollar trip to space "could have fed the poor" but you're silent about the $126 billion dollar train to nowhere, it's time to stop pretending your politics have anything to do with feeding poor people

[J Stan @jstan009]

@traderhc Thanks, I agree with the sentiment. I’ve been sitting on my hands since Thursday. I don’t think we’re on the up and up yet. Especially not until we get clear resolution to oil flows out of hormuz

[Mila Joy @Milajoy]

There were more Americans killed in Chicago this weekend than have been killed in four weeks of war with Iran.

[Will Chamberlain @willchamberlain]

Imagine being the IRGC

You get completely owned for five straight weeks, and then you FINALLY shoot down one plane, and then the US Military just sends in Delta Force, rescues both pilots, and kills a few hundred more of your men because they can

[J Stan @jstan009]

@Oilfield_Rando Just had mine a month ago. Showed my parents this video today. First thing my dad said was “your son will never have that and that’s terrible”. Really is a shame

[Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio]

Until recently, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter were green card holders living lavishly in the United States.

Afshar is the niece of deceased Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. She is also an outspoken supporter of the Iranian regime who celebrated attacks on Americans and referred to our country as the "Great Satan."

This week, I terminated both Afshar and her daughter's legal status and they are now in ICE custody, pending removal from the United States.

The Trump Administration will not allow our country to become a home for foreign nationals who support anti-American terrorist regimes.

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride

For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.

The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.

Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.

In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.

In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.

A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.

By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.

In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.