The Fear Or Missing Out Drives This Market - Market Outlook (Ep. 29)

Last week--Monday, April 27 to Friday, May 1, 2026--the stock market had a strong week with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq closing at record highs, driven by stellar tech earnings--notably Apple and Google--and continued AI enthusiasm.  The week saw the S&P 500, the Nasdaq  and the Russell all rise significantly as investors looked past ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.  The Nasdaq crossed 25,000 for the first time on May 1, powered by a 3% rise in Apple following strong results. Thursday marked the end of April, which was the best month in the stock market has had in six years.  You have to go back to April of 2020 to find a month this strong.  

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Transcript

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Welcome to this week's edition of Market Outlook. I'm your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT. Market Outlook is a weekly podcast where I take a look at last week in the market, as well as previewing the week ahead. I will also share with you some potential options trades that I think are interesting for this week. But first, what were the major stories in the stock market this past week? So this past week, Monday, April 27th to Friday, May 1st, 2026, the stock market had a strong week with the SP 500 and the Nasdaq both closing at record highs, driven by stellar tech earnings. Notably, Apple and Google had very good earnings. We also saw continued AI enthusiasm. The week saw the SP 500, the Nasdaq, and the Russell all rise significantly as investors looked past ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. The Nasdaq crossed 25,000 for the first time on May 1st, powered by a 3% rise and Apple following strong earnings results. Thursday marked the end of April, which this past April, this April was the best month in the stock market in six years. The last time we had a month this strong was actually April of 2020, and that was the rally right after the big COVID crash. So a very strong month of April. Markets gained significantly early in the week on strong corporate earnings, mitigating some concerns about persistent inflation. And also the war in Iran was still kind of weighing down the market. But the energy sector outperformed this week, rising 3.4% for the week. Oil prices, they fluctuated. Initially, they were rising earlier in the week as tensions in the Strait of Hormuz continued again to weigh on the market. But those tensions eased a little bit later in the week because on Friday, after updates on the Middle East conflict potentially could be coming to an end, oil prices started coming down a little bit. Big picture, I think the market continues to grind higher despite economic concerns, right? I think investors are still concerned about rising oil prices and this inflation that just doesn't seem to go away. But right now, we're in this weird period where the strength of the semiconductor stocks, the AI-related stocks, the Mag 7 type stocks, the strength of this basket of stocks is really overpowering all of those concerns, right? Because right now, I think this market, the strength of this market, is mainly a momentum-driven market. The strength of especially the tech sector is driving this market. And you know, this is not a macroeconomic driven rally, right? This is purely, hey, everybody is buying all these AI-related stocks. The stock market's going up. Let me jump in. Right now, this is a FOMO market, right? This is the fear of missing out. And as the market just screams higher, more people jump in on the buy side, trying to catch a little bit of that wave. But of course, at some point, the move up has to slow down, right? At some point, that move up has to either uh come to an end or maybe even pull back a little bit. But right now, for me, I'm keeping a lot of long deltas in my portfolio. I am still quite long this market because again, I'm part of the momentum/slash FOMO crowd, right? If this market is screaming higher, as long as what I'm staring at on the chart says, hey, we're in a bullish trend, I'm going to ride that wave until the market signals something has changed. So let's jump into the charts and check out what the major indices did last week. Let's start with the SPX, the S P 500 index. The SP 500 was up 0.9% on the week. If I go back to the close of the previous Friday, to the close of this past Friday, we saw a gain of around 65 points in the SPX. That is a gain of just under 1%. If we move over to the NDX, which is the Nasdaq 100 index, if we take a look at the close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, the NDX saw a gain of more than 400 points, around 406 points. That is a 1.5% gain in the NASDAQ. Moving over to the RUT, which is the Russell 2000 index, week over week, we saw a gain in the Russell of about 25 points. That is just under a 1% gain in the RUT, very similar to the SPX gain. Moving over to the DJX, which is the Dow Jones index here. This saw a gain of just around one half a percent on the week. Now, the Dow Jones here is only 30 stocks, and it's not especially tech heavy. And this week was mainly driven by a lot of tech, especially tech earnings. So the DJX was definitely the underperformer as far as the indices. For me as a trader, I don't pay much attention to the Dow Jones. Uh, for me, the three indexes that matter are the SPX, the NDX, and the right. Uh so the Dow Jones is kind of, you know, this is your boomer index. This is your grandfather's index, you know, the Dow Jones is what they talked about. I remember on the news, you always heard about the Dow Jones industrial average, you know, in the 1970s, 1980s. That was what everybody talked about. Nowadays, you know, I I could ignore this index if I really wanted to, because for me, it's all about really the SP 500 these days. One last index to take a look at is the volatility index, the VIX. And the VIX, if we take a look at the close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, you can see a nice decline of around $1.72. That's a 9% decrease in volatility week over week. Let's take a look at what some of the major market sectors did last week. Let's start with the biggest mover to the upside, which was XLE. This is the energy sector ETF. Energy was up 3.5% on the week. Of course, a lot of that has to do with rising oil prices as the price of oil goes up. The uh oil-related companies do well. So that's why energy was by far the biggest performer to the upside this week. Uh, the other major sector that drove this market was the tech sector. If we take a look at XLK, which is the tech sector ETF, you can see this had a nice little gain of about 1% on the week in tech as a weighting, especially in the SP and the NASDAQ. Tech is very heavily weighted as far as the big megacap tech stocks. I know they're all the big tech companies. So when tech does well, the market does well. Another very tech-related kind of sector, XLC, the communications sector, uh, Meta and Google are actually part of the communications sector. And because of that, this was up very similar to tech. It was up 1% on the week. Some other sectors that had very similar weeks. XLF, the financial sector, ETF, this had a gain of about 1% on the week. XLP, which is consumer staples. Consumer staples tends to outperform when the market is doing bad. It tends to underperform when the market is doing good. But this week, even though the market was doing good, consumer staples did pretty good too. It was up 1.1% on the week. XLRE, which is the real estate sector, ETF, had a good week as well. This was up 1.1% on the week. XLU, which is the utilities sector, also had a similar week, 0.8% up on the week. Very similar moves in all the sectors. And this is actually a pretty uh impressive broad sector kind of rally this past week. XLV, the healthcare sector, was up 0.7% on the week. Now let's talk about some underperformers. I'm going to start with the home builders industry ETF, uh, XHB here as home builders. This was down pretty significantly. This was down 3.1% on the week. XBI, which is the biotech industry ETF, was down about 2.1% on the week. XLB, which is the basic materials sector ETF, this was down 1.1% on the week. XLI, this was an underperformer, but it didn't have a negative week. It was up 0.3% on the week. So a very small up week. But since most of the other sectors were up, I would say it definitely was an underperformer. Retail was also an underperformer. If I take a look at XRT, uh, I can't find it here in my watch list. There it is. XRT. This finished the week down very slightly down 0.2%. And finally, XLY, which is consumer discretionary, which tends to do well when the market is doing good, tends to do bad when the market's doing bad. The market had a great week, but consumer discretionary finished the week practically unchanged. It actually finished the week uh down 0.1%, uh again, essentially unchanged. Now let's take a look at what some of the individual stocks, especially some of the tech stocks, did this week. Let's start with some of the big movers to the upside. Let's start with Apple. So Apple this week finished the week up 3.3%, and that was because it reported after the bill on Thursday, it reported earnings, and then Friday made a crazy move up. Nice move up in a very large company as far as market cap. I mean, Apple is, isn't it, a $4 trillion company these days? Yeah, $4.1 trillion. So when this makes a move, you know, it moves the market. I mean, this is largely why the market was up this week, is when uh a large company like this has that kind of move that drives everything else. Amazon also reported earnings this week. In fact, five of the Mag 7 reported earnings. Apple, Amazon also reported it reported after the belt on Wednesday. And after the bell on Wednesday, it gapped up and then sold off hard to actually be uh actually slightly down at one point on the day before it finally rallied to be up on the day. But overall, Amazon had a nice week. It had a gain of 1.6% on the week. Moving over to some of the other big tech stocks that had earnings, Google reported after the bell on Wednesday. And you can see the big gap up between Wednesday and Thursday. Google finished the week up an astounding 12%. And Google is another trillion dollar company, $4.6 trillion now in market cap. It's almost a $5 trillion company. So yeah, again, when companies this size, you know, I mean remember the SP and the NASDAQ are market cap weighted. So the biggest companies have the biggest weighting. So Apple and Google are some of the biggest weightings in those indexes, and then they just had huge moves. Those drive those moves in the Nasdaq and the SP. A couple of other Mag 7 stocks that reported, Meta reported after the bell on Wednesday. Meta fell pretty hard on uh Thursday. You can see the gap down between Wednesday and Thursday. Meta had a drop of about 10% on the week. So that was definitely the biggest down move in the Mag 7 stocks that reported this week. Microsoft was the fifth of the Mag 7 stocks that reported this week. And it also had a drop after earnings, but a much less significant drop compared to Meta. Microsoft finished the week down, though it finished the week down 2.4%. Going back to some of the other tech stocks that did not report earnings this week. AMD had a nice week. AMD had a gain of 3.7% on the week. Coinbase, which of course is crypto related. Uh Coinbase has actually not been doing well lately, though it has been trading in a range, I'd say, the last couple of months. But this is one that, you know, I've been bullish on, but it just doesn't seem like it wants to go anywhere fast. Coinbase this past week finished the week down 4.3%. Let's move over to Micron. Tigger symbol MU. Micron had a great week. It finished the week up 9.2% on the week. NVIDIA was moving around a little bit this week, although NVIDIA actually had a negative week. This is one of the uh few uh stocks in this big mega cap tech stock list that didn't have a good week. NVIDIA down 4.7% on the week. And then Tesla, let's talk about Tesla. Tesla finished the week up 3.9% on the week. Tesla now trading at $390 a share. But Tesla just a few months back was trading right at $500 a share, so still trading at a bit of a discount. A few other stocks that we should talk about because they made some significant moves this week. Uh Intel, and this is one I've been playing. I've actually had some trades on Intel at a monster move after its earnings the previous week, and then it just that momentum has continued, and that momentum is really out of control. Like Intel now is trading just a hair under $100 a share. And before earnings, Intel was trading at 66 and change. So you're talking about a stock that has basically seen a 50% increase in a week. So I've been selling puts in this, they've been doing well right now. Uh it looks like I've taken them all off. I but I sold a put, it won rather quickly because of the move in after earnings, and then I just kept rolling puts up, kept rolling puts up, and you know, riding that wave up. And uh I took off a trade actually Friday at the end of the week. I took off another short put for essentially a 50% winner. And if we get a pullback, especially on Monday, we'll we'll come back after the weekend. If we get a pullback, I may sell more puts, or even if we don't get a pullback. If this momentum looks like it still has some room to run, I'll keep selling puts, keep selling puts. And uh, you know, I'm not afraid of Intel dropping. I mean, it could happen, but for me, if that happened, I'd probably just run the wheel, right? I'll take the shares and then you know sell some covered calls if that happens. Another stock that has been moving around recently because of earnings, Robin Hood, ticker hood, uh, didn't have great earnings, gapped down. So it saw, you know, a bit of a decline. If you take a look on earnings day, it was trading at 8174 or thereabouts, and then it dropped all the way down to 7132. So that is a pretty significant drop in Robin Hood. If you scroll out here and zoom out on the chart, you can see it has been in a downward trend for a while. Robinhood is very much crypto related in a lot of ways, and its chart is very similar to that Coinbase chart, which is crypto related, obviously. And its chart, you know, for the past several months has also been trending down. One other stock I want to mention, one of the big tech stocks that had earnings, Qualcomm. Qualcomm saw a monster gain, right? So Qualcomm, you can see the gap between Wednesday and Thursday. So on Wednesday at close, it was trading around $156 a share, and then it finished trading on Thursday at $179.50. So a really significant gain in a very large company. Qualcomm is not a small company. If I take a look at the market cap, $187 billion company. So it's not one of the mega caps, but it's not a tiny company either. So that was again uh one part of the reason why the tech sector and the major indices were up this past week. Let's take a look at what some of the futures and commodities did this past week. Let's start with the biggest one that's in the news, has been for the last few months. It's all about oil. What is oil doing? Well, oil is at all-time highs essentially. Well, we sold off a little bit on Thursday and Friday, but we're still very near the highs in oil, at least the recent highs here. If I'm taking a look at the chart here of USO, which is the crude oil ETF, this finished the week up. If we take a look at close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, this finished the week up about 7.9%. And you know, rising oil is not good. It concerns people, it's weighing this market down a little bit. And yeah, we were just fortunate this past week to have all of those big tech stocks reporting and all of them, you know, running higher. So that kind of overpowered or overshadowed a little bit of the concern that's going on with oil prices right now. Let's move over to UNG, which is the natural gas ETF. This was also higher week over week. If we take a look at the close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, UNG was up 3.9% on the week. Moving over to the metals, let's start with GLD, which is the gold ETF. Gold finished the week down 2.3% on the week. And silver, while we're sticking with the precious metals, silver finished the week down 0.7% on the week. Moving over to the crypto space, let's start with Ethereum. I'm going to take a look at ETHA, which is the Ethereum ETF. ETHA finished the week down around 0.6%. And moving over to iBit, which is the Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin conversely, was actually up on the week. It was actually up around 1%. So uh Ethereum down half a percent, Bitcoin up 1%, a little bit of a divergence there, but overall their charts look very similar. Uh ever since the the big rundown, you know, where we had uh from October to around uh middle of February, where they made a bottom. They have since found a floor and have been trending higher ever since. So if I was placing a trade right now, if I wanted to do something right now in Bitcoin, I would probably be a bull. I would probably sell puts or buy shares of iBit or buy crypto itself if that's what I wanted to do right now. Though again, it just for me looking at this chart, I have to be a bull. Let's take a look at what some of the currencies did last week. I'm gonna pull up UUP. UUP is the dollar index ETF. UUP finished the week down 0.3%. So the dollar was a little weak this past week. If I pull up FXE, which is the Euro ETF, because the three biggest components of the dollar index are the euro, the pound, and the yen. So if the dollar was down a little bit, then the euro should be up a little bit, is typically what you think. But actually, that's not the case. The euro was actually down slightly on the week, or around 0.1%. If I pull up FXB and see what it did this past week, it finished the week, it finished the week up 0.1% on the week, and finally FXY, the Japanese yen. Now, this is gonna look a little strange because the Japanese yen had a huge gap up this past week. So the uh Bank of Japan, you know, decided to they needed to prop up their currency a little bit. It's been very weak for a long time. And you know, they do this every now and then. Many of these uh banks, these federal banks, these national banks, sometimes do this. They have to prop up their currencies because it's you know that that's how they keep it afloat. So FXY was actually up 1.5% on the week, and that would explain why the uh dollar index was down because the Japanese yen obviously had a monster up move there. One final thing to take a look at. Let's take a look at the bonds. I'm gonna pull up TLT, which is the 20 plus year treasury bond ETF, and the bonds this past week, they also finished red on the week. They finished down 1.3% on the week. So let's talk about earnings for this next week because we're kind of in the thick of earnings season. We just really had the biggest earnings week this past week. That was when most things reported. We had a lot of the Mag 7, we we all most of the important companies actually all reported in the same week, last week. But we still have a lot of companies left to report. Um, you know, these are not the most exciting group, but still you've got plenty of stuff to play. And today I'm just gonna mention the stuff that has somewhat tradable options. So Monday before the bell, Norwegian Cruise Lines and Berkshire Hathaway both report. Now you can't play Norwegian or Berkshire if you don't already have a trade-on because they report before the bill on Monday, so you needed to already have a position on to play those. Monday after the bill, Palantir, ON Semiconductor, and Duolingo all report. Tuesday before the bill, Shopify, PayPal, and Pfizer, all report, Tuesday after the bell, AMD, SMCI, ANET, AMC, MSTR, Oxy, Devon Energy, and Upstart All Report, Wednesday before the bill, Disney, Novo Nordisk, Uber, Kraft Heinz, CVS, all report, Wednesday after the bill, Coherent, Ion Q, Axon, Arm, AppLovin, Dutch Brothers, Snap and Albemarle, All Report, Thursday before the bill, Celsius Energy Drinks, Datadog and McDonald's All Report, Thursday after the bill, Corweave, Coinbase, Affirm, Rocket Lab, DraftKings All Report, and then Friday before the bill, Wendy's reports, and then Friday after the bill, nothing really worth talking about Friday after. Now, out of that group of stocks, the ones that I think are the most important out of that list are we've got two Mag 10 type stocks. We have Palantir after the bell on Monday, AMD after the bell on Tuesday. Those are important. If they have good earnings or bad earnings, they will move the market. And for those in the crypto space, I think MSTR after the bell on Tuesday and Coinbase after the bell on Thursday have the potential to possibly move some crypto stuff around. So pay attention to those. Now let's talk about some trade ideas for this week. So this week, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna find some good strangles to sell because right now I'm very long this market. I've been putting on a lot of bullish trades, a lot of short put type trades. And you know, I think at some point. This market will level off, so I want to stop putting on so many naked shortputs and maybe do some strangles, some delta neutral trades. So let's go find some. And what I want to do is I want to find stocks with good IV because that's what you want when you sell a stringle. And I'd prefer stocks that don't have earnings. So I prefer to find stocks that have already reported earnings that still have good IV. So the first stock I'm going to pull up, I'm going to pull up DAL, which is Delta Airlines, because the airlines typically have pretty good IV rank, uh, even when they're not reporting earnings. And Delta has already reported earnings for this cycle. So for me, I'm going to go and typically for strangles, I like going to the monthly cycle closest to 60 days. I'm going to go to the 47-day cycle. IVX is 47%. And if I sell, well, let's go kind of wide. Let's go to the uh 18 delta put and do the, well, to keep it delta neutral, how about an 18 delta call? That's the 60 put, the 80 call for a 211 credit on a buying power reduction of $690. We have a pop on this trade of 70%. We have a P50 number of 86%. For me, the risk reward looks good. Uh, the pop and the P50 look good. All signs point to go on this trade. Another stock I want to take a look at is EQT, which is a energy-related company, natural gas-related company. And let's go ahead and take a look at the options chain. You can see that it doesn't have earnings anywhere because it's already reported earnings. IV rank, though, still high at 41% because of what's going on with energy and the Middle East. IVX in the 47-day cycle is 35%. So I'll do something very similar. Let's go sell the 18 delta put and let's go and sell. Well, the 14 delta call looks kind of wide. So I'll do the 21 delta call. It's got a tighter bid as spread. So 18 delta put, 21 delta call. The credit on the trade is 154. The buying power is only 580. So a great risk reward for the pop 71%. The P50 number, 85%. High probability trade, good risk versus reward. All signs point to go on that trade. And then a third example of a stock that's already reported earnings, still has good IV rank. GM General Motors has an IV rank of 33. And for me on Strangles, I like a minimum of 30 or more to sell a strangle. But uh in this case, I want a minimum of 30 and it's already reported earnings, so that's great. Uh IV X in the 47-day cycle of 36%. So let me go sell a 18 delta put and a 18 delta call. This is the 67 and a half put and the 85 call. I get a 188 credit on a buying power reduction of only $757. The pop 71%. The P50 number 86%. All three trades very, very similar as far as risk reward and pop. And they all look good. Again, all signs point to go on this trade. So that's it for this week's edition of Market Outlook. For those that are watching this on YouTube, check out my book, The Super Wheel Option Strategy. This book, you'll find a link to it in the description below. It's published on Amazon. This book is about one of my favorite option strategies, which is the wheel option strategy. Also, check out the description below for a link to the DT Options Patreon. If you subscribe to the DT Options Patreon, you get access to my members-only Discord channel where I hold a live voice chat each and every trading day. We get together and we talk about the markets. I share my trading platform. You guys get to see the any new trades I make that day, opening trades, closing trades, any roles I make. You get to bounce ideas off of me. I get to bounce ideas off of you. We've got a great little trading community there, and we'd love to have you as well. All right, guys. Peace.