Market Outlook Live! (Jun 24, 2026)

DT takes a quick look at what the markets are doing today.  Feel free to post questions and comments in the YouTube chat.  Super Chats are always appreciated and are more likely to get a response.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to another edition of Market Outlook Live. Hope everyone is having a lovely day today as the market really kind of does not much of anything. Although right now the market is rallying most of the overnight session, most of the morning session, the ES, the NQ, the RTY, so you know your major market indices, they just were not moving at all. I kept having to tap my monitor to see if my trading platform was broken because it seemed like the numbers were not moving. Although, here in the last few minutes or so, I switch over to the trading platform. We are now solidly in the green here in the ES, the NQ, the RTY. We pull up the chart here. The ES, the SP 500 futures, are up 55 points, trading at 74.92. That is a three-quarters of a percent up move. That's a nice daily gain. The NQ is also up three-quarters of a percent now, up 220 points, trading at 29,879. The RTY futures, your Russell 2000 futures, they're up one and a quarter percent. So the small caps are very strong today, uh, up 38 points. A big move in the Russell, uh, trading at 3,036. So uh if to complete the picture, obviously, we need to take a look at the VIX futures or volatility futures here. The VXN6 contract is trading at $18.93 down 58 cents. That's a 3% decline in volatility in one day. Of course, we had a little bit of a rise in volatility yesterday on the big down move in the market. Today, market uh going back up, volatility contracting, kind of standard operating procedure there for volatility when the market is up. Volatility typically is contracting. It's not 100% of the time, but that's most of the time. Some of the futures moving around today that are not the index futures, uh, the big movers to the downside, silver once again. Silver was down like 5% yesterday, silver's down another 5% today. The SIU 6 contract is trading at $59.40. That's a more than $3 drop in silver. And man, this position in silver is getting ugly. I've got all my shares, the shares I've got not doing great. The short put I've got also not doing great, although I just take assignment on the short put, so I'm never gonna realize a loss on that as far as the options. Um, I've got some calls. I mean, sold two calls yesterday because I needed to. Yesterday's big down move. I went ahead and added two short calls, and they're already almost at 50% max profit in one day. I've already got a 50% uh profit order in. And if it gets triggered, those will come off in one day. Hopefully, we get a green day tomorrow. And then maybe I'll sell some calls at better prices. I don't know. I also went ahead and added a one-week hedge, so uh 8 DTE, which is really next uh Friday's expiration. So it's not this Friday, but next Friday's expiration. I put on a put butterfly. I bought it for 28 cents a contract. I bought three of them. Uh they're two dollar wide wings, so if I pay 28 cents, two dollars minus 28 cents is 172 max profit per contract. That's uh times three. Oh, my math's not great, but I'm 500 500 and something dollars max profit. Realistically, kind of a cheap little hedge because I paid less than a buck for all three contracts. If I take two or three bucks out of that, that would be great because that's two or three hundred dollars that will help offset some of the losses going on on the shares and the short put. So got a mixture of some long and short positions here because I need it right now. I've got to hedge my bets a little bit because silver has really been the one ticker that has just kicked my butt all year and continues to. It is relentless, right? It just will not let up. GC, the gold futures, also had a big down day yesterday, having a big down day today, down another 3% today. GC Q6 is trading at 4,020. Copper is also having a big down day, down 3%. Also had a big down day yesterday. So the last two days in the metals, it's been brutal. Uh HG is trading at 6.028. Uh, other things that are moving down that are not the metals, crude oil down almost 5% today. Right now, the CL contract, uh, Q6 contract, CL is now trading under $70 a barrel. It's trading at $69.82. That's the lowest that CL has been since really back here in like the first of March. I mean, that was before the war really started. So, yeah, the CL is played out, right? The oil trade is done as far as the uh risks to the upside, oil exploding, the market's already priced in that they don't care about the Middle East. Even if bombs started dropping again tomorrow, I don't think the market's going to react like it did earlier in the year. I think that event is over, no matter what happens from here, as far as the US and Iran, everything's kind of been priced in to oil. For those following the Brent Futures, BZ, take a look at Rent Crude. It is trading at $73.50, also the lowest it's been since um back here in yeah, the first of March, second of March. So yeah, oil, I think, has I I think I don't know if it's found a bottom. You know, I think it's gonna keep dropping. I don't know how far it will drop. I mean, before all the uh run-up to the war that kind of spooked the markets, we were trading down here in the $65 range in BZ. That's only $8 from where we're at. CL uh trading at $70 a barrel. And where was it trading before the the markets really pumped the price? It was trading around $64. Yeah, we don't have far to go before we're back in that kind of normal range where we were trading before all of this happened. BTC, the Bitcoin futures, also down big today, down 2.5%. The BTC futures trading just above 61,000. Ethereum futures are also off by uh 1.3 percent. The Ethereum futures currently trading at 1,645. All of the currency futures are pretty much lower today. The 6E, the Euro futures off by 0.3%. You can see the last five candles in the Euro have been red and pretty big red candles. So uh the euro has been dropping like a rock in the last week. But if you really look at the last month, the euro has been kind of in a decline for pretty much the last month. The British pound also off by a similar amount today, 0.3% down. Also, last five days in it have looked pretty ugly. The Aussie dollar off by a quarter of a percent. The Canadian dollar off by 0.16 percent. The Canadian chart is really interesting because you don't see charts like this very often. You've got about uh probably 30 candles here that are pretty much 30 straight red candles. I know there's a couple of green candles in here, but they're green, really small green candles that a lot of times are gapped lower, and then they rose a little bit, but they were still technically it's a green candle, but they were down on the day. This chart looks pretty brutal there on the Canadian dollar. And uh, for those paying attention to the Japanese yen, it has a very similar looking chart. The Japanese yen, lots of red candles, lots of red candles. The last uh I would say two months in the Japanese yen have been pretty brutal. But actually, if you zoom out for the last you know few months in the Japanese yen, it's uh really if you've been a bull in the Japanese yen, you've been getting run over. Some of the future is moving higher today because there are some things other than the indexes, which are higher, but uh there's some other products higher too. Netty gas up 1.7%. Yeah, netty gas currently trading at 3.238. For those playing the agricultural products, corn, wheat, soybeans, uh wheat is up 1.3% on the day. Corn is up 0.18% on the day, very small move there, and soybeans basically unchanged, up 0.1% on the day. Bonds are up big. The ZB, the 30-year bond. You don't get moves like this very often. It's up uh a full point. It's actually up more than a full point, it's up 1.08 ticks, so trading now above 114. The ZB trading at 114.02. That is a 1.1% increase in the bonds in one day. The bonds, very low volatility kind of product, so you don't get big moves very often. You know, a 1% move. Oh pretty nice move. The ZN, the 10-year note, also up big, up half a percent. This is up 17.5 ticks, trading at 109.29 and a half. So the bonds and the notes going in the right direction. I think the market obviously wants yields lower, which means bonds need to go higher. There's an inverse relationship between yield and bonds. So, yeah. Right now, this is a market that you know, everything looks fine as far as you know, we're getting oil lower, which is what we want. We're getting bonds higher, which is what we want. Right now, the major market indexes are all slightly higher, but for the most part, I would say this market looks like it is waiting for something. And what is this market waiting on? I think it's waiting for the big event after the bill today. MU, Micron, reports earnings after the bill today. Micron, now a trillion-dollar company, and it's certainly one of the leaders as far as one of these high-flying AI-related stocks. It is what is helping push these uh indexes, especially the SP 500 and the NASDAQ 100. It is part of what is pushing all of this higher. In many cases, this market is being propped up mainly by tech and especially the AI names. It's the AI names that are keeping the market afloat. Um, when you look at the sector uh breakdown for the year, it's really been two sectors, right? It's been tech and energy that have been very strong this year. Energy largely due to the rise in oil prices due to the war. You know, the energy sector just did outstanding, especially in the early part of 2026. Tech, you know, tech's been doing great since the beginning of 2023 when the AI boom really kicked off, and it's been you know, all signs point to go on all the AI names ever since then. Right now, though, I don't have a lot to do in my portfolio. If I switch over to my platform here, I've got a you know a few positions that aren't doing well. We mentioned the silver trade, which you know at this point uh I'm in what I'm in, and I'm just waiting for um things to play out here. At this point, I'm really kind of in a covered strangle here where I'm using options, and if I get assigned, I'm I'm fine with assignment. If I get long shares, I'm gonna turn around, sell cover calls until my long shares get called away. I'm just gonna run the wheel on SLV. Other than that, I do have some shares of TQQQ bought back into this position. I got out of it yesterday. I bought back into it today because the market really went nowhere yesterday. The NQ was down 3% yesterday. So I got out of my shares of TQQQ because they were down huge. And I thought the Nasdaq would sell off further. It did not. The Nasdaq really didn't go anywhere from that point yesterday. So I actually got back in the shares basically exactly where I got out. So, and since I got back in this morning, and I got back in uh like in the AM hours, um, you know, overnight session. Hasn't gone anywhere. Like the Nasdaq is in that wait and see mode. I think the Nasdaq, I think just investors in general, nobody wants to take a chance today, and nobody wants to put on any kind of risk until they see what goes on with Micron and how it affects the broader market, which is interesting because Micron is not a stock that I would suspect would capture the market's attention like that. Usually it would be your Mag 7 stock, you know, like an Nvidia would certainly be something people pay attention to, you know, Google and Amazon. But now Micron has elevated itself into that same kind of status. So uh we did have some earnings from yesterday for those that were interested, or maybe you played these, FedEx reported FedEx is not the sexiest of stocks, not the most liquid option markets stinking it. It's not something I typically trade. But FedEx um down six dollars. So the earnings event was kind of a non-event because the expected move in FedEx was around $30 and only moved $6. So if you did any out-of-the-money short options kind of play. So if you sold a put, sold a call, sold a strangle, sold a put credit spread, sold a call credit spread, sold an iron condor, all those trades worked out beautifully because it didn't move enough and volatility is gonna contract. So those short option plays should have been great in FedEx. KBH also reported yesterday, uh KBH, KB Home, one of the big home builders, up. Wow, wow, pre-market when I looked at this thing, it was up about two bucks. Now it is up eight dollars and eighty one cents. That is a huge move. Uh, it's only a $61 stock, so up 16.7 percent on the day. I'm sure that's probably well outside the expected move on that. This is not a stock that uh, you know, it's gonna have liquid option markets. This is not something I typically trade. A lot of people do hold this stock because I believe it is a dividend-paying stock, like it pays, yeah, a 25 cent dividend, like a 2% dividend. It is again one of the big home builders, so something to pay attention to if you're paying attention to the home building sector. But that was yesterday's earnings. Nothing very interesting there. Micron, today's earnings event. That's the one everybody's waiting on. What would I do in Micron? Well, I'm kind of already playing it because I'm holding shares of the triple levered NASDAQ ETF. Micron's gonna move it. And if it moves in a big way up or down, it's gonna move this in a big way. So I'm kind of already in it. I've got some other like tech-related names as well. If you're trading uh the semiconductor ETF, SMH, you know, the semiconductors are gonna move with micron. Everything's gonna move in sympathy with micron. So if you've got an SMH position, it's going to move. Uh, but if you need a trade in micron, maybe you don't have any uh micron positions, you don't have any kind of sympathy plays like an SMH or you know, QQQ or whatever, what would you do? Well, I mean, they're gonna report good earnings. We know that the numbers are 100% gonna be good. Everybody knows that. It's already priced in. And the reason the numbers are gonna be good is because we know Micron sells everything they make. Right now, everything they make is out the door as soon as they get it. So um now you never know how the market's gonna react to an earnings report. Just because you know the numbers are gonna be good doesn't mean the market's going to be higher for sure on Micron earnings. Many times you get earnings reports where a company reports the best earnings they've ever had, the best quarter in the history of the company, and the stock falls. Sometimes I've seen companies report the worst earnings ever and the stock goes up. You never know what the stock market is going to do because just because numbers are good or bad, that doesn't necessarily mean that people are gonna buy or sell on that news because everybody is doing their own thing. You don't know whether their position is some kind of weird hedge. Uh yeah, you just don't know how people are gonna react. We're emotional creatures, right? We don't always act rationally just because you think uh the stock has to go up doesn't mean it will. So I I think a neutral trade is prudent, a defined risk neutral trade. Maybe go to the two-day cycle and maybe do something like an iron butterfly. You know, go you know, somewhere around at the money. Uh, I'll pick a nice round number, the 1050. And maybe I go, well, let's see, how wide do I want to go? Let's go 75 points wide. I'll go down to the 975 put and buy that. Then I'll go up to the 1125 call and buy that. And then the center was the 1050 straddle. That forms our iron butterfly. If I go into the curve and analysis, this is your standard iron butterfly. It's a credit trade because it's two credit spreads, right? One put credit spread, one call credit spread. Overall, I'm gonna get a $59.85 credit. So I'm gonna get basically a $6,000 credit. The max loss is $1,500. And uh the max loss $1,500 if I finish outside the long wings at expiration on Friday. Um but if I finish inside the spread, then I have the chance to make a little money. The only way I make the max profit is if I pin the two short strikes exactly at expiration. I would never hold this to expiration because if you hold this to expiration and you're inside this spread, you're gonna end up with potentially an exercise or assignment situation. So I wouldn't do that because you're gonna be in a weird situation where you're inside, you know, the long or the long and short put on the put credit spread, or the long or short uh call on the call credit spread. So be careful. Don't hold to expiration, get out at least a few minutes before expiration on Friday. But yeah, this could be a nice way for a neutral trade. It's a defined risk trade. You need to make sure you're comfortable potentially losing the $1,500 max loss because there's a decent probability that that will happen. It's a low probability trade, only 31% pop. Um, but you know, for something like this, typically I would put this trade on and it's got a $6,000 potential max profit. I would never hold for that. For me, if you know, I I wake up tomorrow morning and MU didn't move much and it's somewhere inside the spread and I'm up a thousand dollars. I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna close that trade and move on, right? Because you you can't hold for six thousand dollars. Six thousand dollars is like a a one in a million kind of shot. You know, a home run here. If I make a thousand, certainly fifteen hundred uh in a day, yeah, close it, move on with life at that point. Uh if you hold it all the way to Friday, it's your best chance to get a bigger profit. But of course, holding all the way to Friday, micron is a very volatile stock. It can move around on you, but if you got the balls to hold on to it until late on Friday and you're hanging around those short strikes, then that thing could be potentially $3,000, $4,000 kind of winner. For me, though, uh, as soon as I get a reasonable profit, you know, somewhere around 20% of max profit for sure. I'm just gonna get out of the trade because that's a fantastic trade. Don't wait and try to hold on and be greedy. Typically, if you're gonna try to be greedy on a trade like that, that's a very low probability trade anyway. The little bit of profit you could have taken, you're gonna end up giving that back. Plus, now you're also gonna take the max loss. So be prepared to take profits when you can. Getting me a little bit of a drink of water there. I've been talking all morning. Obviously, uh, for those of you that are new to the channel, I hold a uh live Discord voice chat with my patron members every morning. We start at 8:15 Central Standard Time, 15 minutes before the stock market opens. And I uh had a call with those guys. We went, oh, well over an hour this morning uh with the markets with some trade suggestions. We had several members that were asking questions about potential new trades, some members that you know had problem trades, how to manage, you know, well, questions about uh take profit orders and things like that. And I uh for those that are interested, I do have a Patreon. We have the DT Options Patreon. If you sign up and become a subscriber on that, you're granted access to my members-only Discord channel where I hold those daily live voice chats. Every day the stock market is open. And it's not terribly dissimilar from some of what you're getting here, where I share my screen as far as my trading platform. You guys get to see all the trades I'm in. Uh, the difference is in that it's much more instead of this being more of a news event where I share with you what's going on in the market right now, it's mostly uh me covering my trades. We go through my positions and the members' positions that are having problems, and you guys get to see the trades I'm in, what's working, what's not, how I adjust it, any roles I have to make. And there is a lot of roles to make this week because this week is 21 DTE on. Friday. So this is the week where a lot of your monthly options trades do reach 21 DTE on Friday. And if you're one of those people that roll at 21 DTE, this is the week. So be prepared for that. Today is 23 DTE. And you can roll early. Sometimes people do ask about rolling. Hey, if I have a rule that I put on a trade at 60 DTE and I'm going to roll it or close it at 21 DTE, what if it's at 23 DTE and I want to roll it now? Yeah. The difference between a couple of days doesn't really matter. You know, you want to be a mechanical trader. That's why it's a good idea to have rules. But, you know, things sometimes happen. You know, sometimes you miss a trade. Oh, I forgot to roll last Friday that was 21 DTE. You come back the next Monday. Well, it's 18 DTE. Should I roll it now? Yeah, go ahead and roll it now. Or, hey, I'm not going to be here tomorrow. Tomorrow's 21 DTE. Can I roll it a day early at 22 DTE? Yeah, you can do that, right? And it really doesn't change things too much. The main thing, again, when you're trading, the reason we have these rules is mainly just to force ourselves to be disciplined. So we're not constantly just doing random things. So we're not wild ass guessing on everything. Because, you know, you just want to be a disciplined trader. That way, when things go against you, you're not questioning yourself. Hey, should I have done this? Should I have done that? If you know you have a set of rules that kind of work, stick to the rules as best you can, and it will keep you much more sane as a trader. Getting back into the markets, uh, markets now selling all. Well, the NASDAQ sold off a little bit. Now the Nasdaq, which was up three-quarters of a percent when we jumped on, is now only up 0.4%. Uh, but that's just a little bit of a pullback. In the end, this is a market again that does not know what it wants to do today. I think again, we're waiting for those earnings. If I go into my uh ETF's watch list here, I'm gonna sort alphabetically, see what some of the major market sectors are doing today. Obviously, uh tech is probably not doing much today because of what's going on with the uh earnings. Yeah, you can see the tech up a quarter of a percent. Basically, this is wait-and-see mode. But just because tech is waiting for micron doesn't mean the other sectors are not moving around. Biotech, which is a the industry uh ETF XBI here, is up 2.6% on the day. And if you look at the last week in biotech, wow, crazy move. Uh, the home builders, because of that move in KBH, the home building uh ETF here, XHB, up 7.24% on the day. Really big move in that. Uh the industrial sector ETF, XLI, is up almost 2% on the day. So industrials are moving. XLY consumer discretionary up almost 3% on the day. So, you know, these are not sectors I play around in. That's why you know I'm kind of surprised a little bit when I go to these charts and look at them because I don't trade consumer staples, I don't trade consumer discretionary that often. I'm not typically trading industrials and utilities. I trade a lot of the tech. And right now, you know, the tech is the highest weighted sector of the market, obviously. So that's what I pay attention to. I knew tech wasn't moving today. But for those that do hang out in some of these other sectors, they are moving. XL Lead, the energy sector, down 2.2% on the day. That's a big move. And a lot of that's probably just the drop in. Hey, getting uh back to the YouTube chat. Hey DT, I'm on Tasty Trade. Wonder why some orders take a while to fill while others fill right away. Sold a put on SLV earlier. Not sure if time of day is a factor. On some products, time of day can be a factor, but uh it's not necessarily the case. Uh a lot of times it's just is the product liquid?

SPEAKER_00 26:05

For SLV, SLV is very liquid. Um, it can also be um the bid ass spreads could be wide, you could be asking for a price, it's just not likely to get filled.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

Was it a SLV uh specific trade or was it a different ticker? Because if it's SLV, SLV is very liquid, very tight markets. You may have to tick it down, tick it up or down, you know, depending on whether you're buying or selling option. If it's a complicated order, too, like if it's a weird multi-leg order, you know, something that's more complicated than say, like a vertical spread or a calendar, you know, like your butterflies, uh, your iron condors got four legs. Sometimes those are a little trickier to get filled. But naked options, especially, if you're just selling uh naked short puts, naked short calls, and naked short strangles, put credit spreads, call credit spreads. Those are are usually gonna get filled pretty quickly if you're trading the liquid products.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

We can go into SLV if that's the ticker.

SPEAKER_01 27:16

Because I trade this all the time. Obviously, we talk about this every day, all my my problems with silver, but I got a lot of trades going on in silver. But you can check and you can immediately spot if things are liquid. Uh, how do I determine if things are liquid? Well, I'm gonna pull up the options chain here for SLV. First thing I would do is how many shares have traded? 15.2 million shares have traded this morning. That's not a terribly large amount of shares, uh, but it's got a lot of uh assets under management because a lot of people are holding long-term positions in this. So, no, a lot of times though, like if I'm judging like a tech stock, like, well, let me just pick something random. Roku. It's not the most liquid thing. Roku only traded 1.66 million shares. So already I know the stock doesn't trade much. If the stock doesn't trade much, I guarantee you the options don't trade much. So if I go into the August monthly cycle for the options, yeah, the bid ass spreads are a mile wide. You could drive a Mac truck through these bid ass spreads 81 cents by 204, 161 by $3. Um, it's untradable. So, you know, check the stock volume, then check the bid ass spreads on the options. And if I go back to SLV, you'll see you know much better numbers. 15 million shares have traded. If I go in the August cycle, uh, you know, the bid ass spreads are reasonable 20 cents wide, 30 cents wide. 64 strike here, 1125 by 11.55, pretty tight, you know, 1210 by 1235, 1305 by 1340, uh 1490 by 1510. You know, pretty much all the strikes are 20 to 35 cent wide bid ass spreads, which are very reasonable on uh you know $53 ETF at this moment. And then you know, if the share volume looks good, the bid ass spreads look good, check out open interest. You got open interest as a column here, you know, the 65 strike right here. The puts have 9,000 open interest. That means there's 9,000 uh open positions right now on that 65 strike put. The call at the 65 has 15.7k open interest, right? That's a lot of open interest. When you see thousands in some cases tens of thousands of open interest on a strike, that's that's something that really trades. Those those are good option markets because if I go to something much more mediocre, how about I don't know, I haven't pulled up this in a while, PayPal. Traded only 5.73 million shares. That's not great. The bid ass spreads reasonable, 10 cent wide, 12 cent wide, open interest, whoo, 90, 926, 663, right? We're not getting into the thousands, we're certainly not getting into the tens of thousands. This may be something that's a little harder to get filled in. Uh, and a lot of times you're gonna have to give up some money. You might have to take the the price down a little bit, a couple of cents. Give up a couple of cents to get in. You might probably gonna have to give up a couple of cents to get out. No, that's slippage. Great thing about trading liquid products is there's less slippage, and that's why we typically trade liquid products, right? And stick to the liquid products. If it's something that's got really wide bid ass spreads, do not trade it. Because you're gonna give up a ton of money as an options trader. For example, if I'm trading something and the bid ass spread on, let's say I'm gonna sell a put, and the bid ass spread on that put is 50 cents by one dollar. It's 50 cents wide bid ass spread. Really wide, right? 50 cents by a dollar, it's a big difference. What's the fair price for that put? I have no idea. The broker and my platform is gonna put in a mid price of 75 cents, but I can't swear to you that's the fair price because there's the markets are so illiquid, you know, somebody's wanting to buy it for 50 cents, somebody's wanting to sell it for a dollar. The true price is somewhere in between, but we don't know where. And when I get filled, you know, I may get really screwed on that price because I may have to tick that thing down. I may, I may have to even come down all the way to 50 cents to sell that put. But here's the thing: when I turn back around and want to close that put, I'm not gonna be able to get out of it for 50 cents because now I have to buy it. And the ass price was a dollar. I could give up $50 in five minutes by selling a put and buying it right back. You can't make money doing that, so be careful trading illiquid products. Alright, guys, any questions or comments from you guys and hanging out in the YouTube chat as we uh basically just wait for this afternoon's earnings uh event in MU right now.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

The ES up 52.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

Let me pull back up my futures watch list here. The NQ up 125, the Russell up 39. That's a good move in the Russell.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

The Russell up 1.3% on the day. Alright, guys, well, I'm gonna go ahead and jump off, and I will be back with you guys tomorrow morning. Have fun trading.