Tom

Active options trader 🔔
Daily gamma levels · flow alerts · market analysis
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[Tom @RTBtrading1]

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Put Wall: 6,600 → Vol Trigger: 6,800 Gamma Exp: -$1.189B → Regime: NEGATIVE

This is what I watch every morning before the open.
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https://t.co/szNsQrvvN3

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

Not bearish

[Exec Sum @exec_sum]

BREAKING: Ray Dalio celebrated his 77th birthday partying in Ibiza at the [UNVRS] club till 4am

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: Berkshire Hathaway has begun deploying the $397.4 billion cash pile that Warren Buffett accumulated for 14 consecutive quarters.

Details include:

1. Instead of continuing stock sales, Berkshire was a net buyer of equities in Q2 with $19.8 billion in net purchases

2. Berkshire now holds $364.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents

3. The company invested $10 billion in Alphabet, $GOOGL, during Q2 in addition to acquiring Taylor Morrison Home for $6.8 billion

4. Berkshire bought $23.5 billion of equity securities during in Q2 and sold $3.7 billion in the same period

Berkshire Hathaway appears to be leaning bullish again.

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

@smartertrader Good risk reward

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

Something fishy with $UNH flow today - like news is coming

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

This was a healthy day. After a 6.5% five-session rip and a Tuesday where the straddle underpriced the move by 5.5x, we got a 95bp inside range that respected the model's own lower guardrail at 7,720 and closed with vol down instead of up. The 0DTE vol sellers got paid back for their Monday-Tuesday beating, the 15k-lot 7,850 call got closed at noon, and the squeeze fuel came out of the tank. I'm still constructive — spot is 200 handles above the Vol Trigger and 260 above Zero Gamma, dealers are long gamma and damping, and put selling dominated the flow. But I want to be honest about the two things I don't love: there is still an air pocket of thin gamma between 7,700 and 7,520, and someone is selling longer-dated Nasdaq calls in size while the metals break out 4%. Neither of those is a sell signal. Both are reasons to keep size honest and stops real. Above 7,720 I stay long-biased and lean on the 7,800 Call Wall as the target. Lose 7,700 and I want to see how fast we travel, because on this gamma map the answer is "fast."

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

Tomorrow and Friday will be very very important for the market. I’m thinking something is off and bulls should be careful.

[OddStats @OddStats]

FUCK.

SPX just set a new all time high in the last two days while seeing a +6.5% mid-day peak over the low of the previous 5 days.

The bloody column on the right shows the worst draw downs over the *next* 20 days.

Oh. Hello, 1928 and 1929.

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

I like $AMAT

[Stanphyl Capital 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 🇺🇦 @StanphylCap]

Warsh is a smart guy, so I'll give you with a "charitable explanation" for his apparent cowardice:

He *knew* the 10 & 30-year rates would spike if he did nothing, so he got the MEANINGFUL rate increases he wanted without pissing off the clueless dummy who apppointed him.

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

@MrC_Mathematics The Nembhard, Kalk, Hawkins set was prettttty fun

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

There it is.

US long-term borrowing costs are officially up to their highest level since 2007.

The US 30Y Yield is now above 5.20%.

"Higher for longer" is back.

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

Boom

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

Scenario A — STRESS PERSISTS (Vol Higher, Base Case):- Crude stays bid → Rates Vol continues rising → Warsh trapped → Fed meeting next week volatile → CTA flips Short at SPX 7,249 → Dispersion unwind begins → VIX Calls squeezed → Dealers forced to buy → VIX spikes into August illiquidity seasonal window - Timing: next 2–4 weeks into Fed meeting and August illiquidity - VIX analog: +4m forward = +32.7% median (84% hit rate)

Scenario B — MACRO CONSTERNATION SETTLES (Vol Bleeds):- Crude/Rates stabilize → AI Earnings Micro (next 2 weeks) remain constructive → no "Correlation 1" shock → Dispersion continues to profit → "Rich Vol Will Bleed" in absence of more shocks - Requires: Warsh threads the needle, Crude backs off, AI earnings beats sustain single-stock divergence - Caveat: VIX Call monetization notoriously hard even if VIX spikes initially ("Sell the Vol Rip" conditioning)

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

What if he cuts though

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

If you even slightly entertain the thought of failure, you give your mind a chance to start noticing reasons to fail. But if the only option on your mind is to win, then the world seems to conspire in your favor, because your mind will notice opportunities it wouldn't have before. Become delusionally optimistic, not because it's realistic, but because it's effective. It drastically increases your chances of success.

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

The market is now pricing a 32% probability of a Fed HIKE tomorrow. Per CME FedWatch: 68% hold, 32% hike. Read that again. Following the Citadel Securities note, the discussion around a hike has gone from tail-risk chatter to nearly one-in-three odds priced. That is a genuinely binary event, and it is not a "will they cut 25 or hold" setup — the risk is skewed to the hawkish side of the distribution, which is not what equity beta is positioned for. And here's the tell that nobody is truly hedged for it: VIX closed 18.20. VVIX closed 98.5. Vol-of-vol under 100 with a live hike risk 24 hours away means the market is treating this as an event to trade, not an event to insure against. Fixed-strike IV rose only 1–2 vol points for this week's expiries and actually declined beyond this week. SPX ATM vol for Wednesday is 19.25% and Thursday 19.45% — implying moves of roughly 120bp and 122bp. That's the market's number. If we get a hike, that number is wrong.

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

🌅 SETUP FOR TOMORROW SPX Levels- Vol Trigger / Risk Pivot: 7,465 — reclaim this and structure flips friendly - Zero Gamma: 7,424- Spot: 7,413- Put spread shelf: 7,385 / 7,380 ← the level that matters most - Downside: 7,365, then Put Wall 7,300- Upside: 7,500 / 7,518 (Implied 1-Day High), Call Wall 7,600- Implied 1-Day Move: 0.63% (7,424.68 – 7,518.82) | Implied 5-Day: 1.62%

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

Fahrenheit 451

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

@itskoz3 Get in shape - get a dog

[Tom @RTBtrading1]

Scenario A — STRESS PERSISTS (Vol Higher, Base Case):- Crude stays bid → Rates Vol continues rising → Warsh trapped → Fed meeting next week volatile → CTA flips Short at SPX 7,249 → Dispersion unwind begins → VIX Calls squeezed → Dealers forced to buy → VIX spikes into August illiquidity seasonal window - Timing: next 2–4 weeks into Fed meeting and August illiquidity - VIX analog: +4m forward = +32.7% median (84% hit rate)

Scenario B — MACRO CONSTERNATION SETTLES (Vol Bleeds):- Crude/Rates stabilize → AI Earnings Micro (next 2 weeks) remain constructive → no "Correlation 1" shock → Dispersion continues to profit → "Rich Vol Will Bleed" in absence of more shocks - Requires: Warsh threads the needle, Crude backs off, AI earnings beats sustain single-stock divergence - Caveat: VIX Call monetization notoriously hard even if VIX spikes initially ("Sell the Vol Rip" conditioning)