Market Outlook Live! (Jul 1, 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_00 0:06

And we are live.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome to another edition of Market Outlook Live. Hope everyone is doing well today. Bit of a mixed bag in the market. Um, the ES right now up slightly. The Russell is also up very slightly, but basically unchanged in the ES and the RTY futures. The Nasdaq though down a little more than 1%. So tech is a little heavy today. For those of you in the YouTube channel already, give me a yay or a nay on the audio. Hopefully, you guys are able to hear me. Let's go ahead and jump into the trading platform here and take a look at what the market is doing today. So, right now, if we take a look at the ES, the ES is up five points. That's basically an unchanged market. The RTY, the Russell futures, up five points. That's a 0.2% increase in the Russell and the NQ down. 322 points. That's a 1% down move in uh the very tech heavy Nasdaq, right? The NASDAQ 100. You know, about 65-70% of the companies in the Nasdaq 100 are tech related, so you can pretty much guarantee that tech as a sector pretty weak today. We take a look at the volatility of the market here. Let's pull up the /vx futures, the VIX futures, trading at $18.10. So volatility up 14 cents today. That's not really much of a ball expansion there. So the market's basically telling you it's not really concern, right? On a day where the market's kind of weak, you know, but volatility is not really going anywhere either. This is telling you the market pretty much is uh smooth selling ahead right now, right? Nobody is worried about anything at the moment. Going through some of the futures that are moving around today, if I sort by change percentage here and let's look at the futures moving down today, crudal moving down, the CL futures, your West Texas crude here, um trading at $68.23 down a buck 30. That is nearly a 2% decrease in CL. If we take a look at BZ, your Brent crude futures here, trading at $71.29 a barrel, down a buck 66. That's another uh 2.2% decrease there. So yeah, oil is definitely trending lower. It's continues the trend lower, right? These have been trending lower really for a couple of months now. Netty gas is down today, right now. The NGQ6 contract trading at 3.203, down.072 uh on the day. That's a 2% decrease in netty gas. The metals have been kind of weak this morning, although there has been a bit of a rally. Uh but copper, which was down oh, more than 2% earlier, is now only down 1.1% on the day. Gold, which was down slightly when I got up this morning, is actually up 1.6% now. So big reversal in gold. Silver, which you guys know, I've got a pretty big silver position that's been really my nemesis all year. Been fighting uh back a loss in silver for a while. Uh, silver was down earlier this morning. Now it's up one and a half percent. So a good turnaround there in gold and silver. Uh the ZB futures down a little bit today. So ZB right now down 24 ticks. Earlier it was down more than a point, right? Big move actually in the 30-year bond. Uh the bonds are typically not very volatile instruments. So when you get a move of more than one point in the ZB, you know, it's more than a 1% move, uh, you don't get that very often, although that has since reversed a little bit. Now only down 24 ticks there. Now that's 24 30 seconds, right, in the ZB. Uh down two-thirds of a percent. Some of the currencies are moving lower today, so the euro down 0.27%. The Aussie dollar is down a similar amount. Um, and most of the other currencies are slightly lower, but on a lesser percentage basis. The the Kiwi dollar down 0.2%, the Canadian dollar basically unchanged on the day. The Japanese yen ticking ever so slightly higher, up 0.1%, but the Japanese yen obviously is a very strange currency. You look at a chart of this thing, this just looks like it's death, right? It just goes down every day. Um, I'm not a big currency trader. I don't typically trade these currency futures, but it is interesting to look at to give you a broad macro kind of view of what's going on in the markets. Some of the futures trading higher today, and the list is much smaller, other than the precious metals we talked about. Uh, Bitcoin is higher. So crypto, which has been very weak, having an update today, up 1.7% here in the BTC futures, BTC trading just under 59,900. Ethereum is also up, a similar percentage, up 1.87%. The Ethereum futures trading at 1611. For those trading the ag futures, they are also moving. Wheat is up 2.2% on the day. Corn is up 0.72% on the day, and soybeans up 0.3% on the day. Some of the stocks moving around today, and we did have some big movers, even though you know the market itself, the broad market's not really making any crazy moves. We did have a huge move today in Meta. Meta is up $64 today. You can see the big gap up. About an hour before the market opened this morning, Meta all of a sudden just shot up like 45 points in one minute. I was actually watching the markets at that time uh this morning, and I was like, wow, what in the hell just happened? Well, now it's even higher, right? Now it's up $64. Apparently, Meta is doing some kind of cloud computing thing where they're gonna sell some of their uh cloud computing stuff services to you know other companies that need uh that kind of compute for AI. And apparently the market likes that business decision because Meta is up huge. Microsoft is also up uh $12.69. That's a big move and a very big company, up nearly 3.5% in Microsoft. Microsoft kind of lives in that same kind of cloud world that Meta does. I don't know if that's some kind of sympathy move because Meta's so strong, it's gonna carry some of those other cloud providers up. Google, of course, another uh big player in that space. Google is up four dollars today. Uh, another big player, obviously, in the cloud space, Amazon, also up a little bit today. Some of the big movers to the downside, uh, obviously, you know, we've got this weird rotation where it seems like when the uh mag 7 stocks are strong, your memory stocks, your microns, the sand disk, and all of that more speculative kind of stuff, is down. And when they're up, the mag 7 is down, right? You've always got that little bit of rotation going on, at least here in the last few weeks. And as the mag 7 stocks are up, micron's down today, right? It's like people have to sell out of one to go buy the other because you know everybody is bullish in this market, everybody's already jumped in with all their money. So now if you want to play something, you got to sell something else so you can go buy you know what you want to play. Micron down nearly 100 points today, down $96.50, trading at 1057. So that is an eight and a half percent decline there in Micron today, of course. Still hanging out here at the upper end of its recent range. Intel down big today. Intel down ten dollars and twenty-five cents. That's a big move, down 7.4 percent on the day. I do have a short put position in Intel, which obviously a big down move hurts. Now I was up on this position, and this has been kind of the story with Intel. Really wide swings every day. Uh, like these this kind of move is a normal move for Intel here in the last few trading sessions. So even though you know I'm in a short put, I'm not necessarily getting killed on that short put because volatility is sky high. I got a huge premium for selling that short put. But, you know, uh because of the good two-sided action. Had you sold an out-of-the-money put, you're doing okay. Had you sold an out-of-the-money call, you're doing okay. If you had sold an out-of-the-money strangle, both the put and the call, you're doing okay. Because right now, it does seem like Intel kind of stuck in this, you know, kind of wide range, but it is certainly to me, looks a little range bound right now. SpaceX is down $11 today, trading at $159.42. So this is a 6.5% down move here in SpaceX. Although SpaceX traded all the way down to 150 three trading sessions ago. So now trading just under 160. I do have a SpaceX position as well. I have a put credit spread that is underwater a little bit. I was able to roll this. I was in the July cycle, which only had yesterday, it had uh what, 17 days left to go, and I needed to roll. And I was able to roll and pay a 20 cent debit for the roll. Um, and I think when I was on with you guys yesterday, that roll was going to cost me 40 cents, and I refused to pay 40 cents, but I put in an order for 20 cents because that was the max I was going to pay as far as a debit to roll that trade. And late in the day, I was able to actually get that roll done. So we're good on SpaceX. Now I've got another month to wait for that put credit spread to come back to me. AMD down 30 points today, another one of the tech stocks that's having a down day today. Down uh 5%. So you can see a lot of your you know uh service providers, cloud uh providers, uh software names, a lot of that stuff is up. Your chip-related names are down. If I pull up the semiconductor ETF SMH here, yeah, it's down 4.6% on the day. Big move, right? But this is another one, these semiconductors, like your Intels, AMDs, microns, you know, all of that stuff, they're they're very volatile stocks. So this ETF is actually quite volatile. Yeah, this sees swings up and down, you know, 30 points up, 30 points down on a regular basis here recently. So just be prepared for that if you're gonna play it. Um, because it's a high price stock, right? Though, or ETF in this case, SMH trading at $625 a share, uh, can be a little too big for selling naked options. Also, the bidass spreads can get a little wide on things that have moved so far up so fast. So if you play this, I'd probably play it with a uh credit spread. If you're bullish, and I would be bullish in this, obviously, looking at the stock chart and SMH, you've got to be bullish on semiconductors. I would probably stick to selling put credit spreads in this. I think uh selling naked puts could be a little dangerous. I certainly would never put on a bearish trade in this, at least not right now, uh, unless you're just asking to get run over. ARM is down $18 on the day. ARM down 5%, trading at $336.50. Yeah, ARM actually, if you take a look at the last week in ARM, it's kind of an ugly down move in ARM. Traded as high as $452, now trading at $336, and that is a hundred and twenty dollar decrease there. That is interesting. Uh, I don't know, you know, if this is just a temporary little correction here, but it is something worth paying attention to. Uh, if it takes uh a little bit more of a haircut, it might be worth nibbling a little bit on the long side there. But uh right now, uh, I would say still trending higher. It's just the last uh seven candles look a little rough. Nvidia's down on the day as well with the rest of the semiconductors. Nvidia down four dollars and twenty-four cents, trading at one hundred and ninety-five dollars and ninety-one cents, down two percent on the day. Broadcom, also another semiconductor, right? Down two percent on the day, trading at three seventy fifty-seven. Anything else making a move of no Palantir. Palantir is actually up ten dollars and sixty cents today. That's a big move, too. That's a nine percent up day in Palantir, and Palantir has been uh very weak. Looking at the chart, it's been in a clear downtrend for a while. So, yeah, this is the best day Palantir has had on the upside in a while. Coinbase also up $14.5. Now, Bitcoin and Ethereum, you know, crypto was up today, but they weren't up huge. Coinbase is up huge, that's a 10% move in Coinbase. Yeah, we're seeing again for a market that really wasn't moving around all that much as far as your indexes, some of the individual names within this market are making some pretty wild moves. Yeah, so be careful out there when you're trading. Trade small, make sure you're comfortable with your position sizes, make sure you're always comfortable taking the max loss, especially like on your defined risk spreads. Like if your spread has a max loss of, say, fifteen hundred dollars, and you're like, Well, damn, that's too big of a loss. I could never take that. Well, you shouldn't put on that trade. Brand new to options trading, one of the big things that can really hurt you initially when you first start out, a lot of people gravitate to spreads like credit spreads and debit spreads and iron condors, which are defined risks. You think, well, I'm protecting myself with those defined risk trades. Well, you are, as long as you size them appropriately. Always pay attention to what the max possible loss on the trade is. And if you're not comfortable taking that loss, because you're gonna have to eat some of those max losses occasionally, if you're not comfortable taking the max loss on a trade, absolutely do not put on that trade. That's one of those lessons that you you're gonna learn early in trading after you take a few really big losses, right? You you start sizing things a little different. It seems like most people, when they start trading, tend to oversize more than to undersize, right? Most people put on trades that are way too big rather than way too small. You put on trades that are way too small, it's not a big deal because you can always size up, but when you start too big, sometimes it can be harder to size back down, especially once you're already stuck in a trade. All right, you guys in the YouTube chat, if you got questions or comments or anything you want to discuss, feel free. For me, I'm just taking a look at my portfolio now that I've gone through the market recap here, looking at my MES positions, got a lot of put ratio spreads here. Put on a brand new one with my Discord group this morning, uh, members of the DT Options Discord and put on this new 4x2 put ratio spread in MES. Typically do these at 90 days. I sell the 10 Delta short puts and then buy a put somewhere above, you know, depending on how wide I want to make the uh debit spread component of that ratio spread. In this case, I did it 200 points wide, so gives me quite a bit of downside protection in a slow grind down kind of market, but it doesn't make the long puts so expensive that they eat away all the profit of the short puts. So for me, you know, that's what was a nice size ratio spread. I ended up selling four of the 6625s and buying two of the 6825s. And then of course I've got the ratio spreads I've already been in. So I put this one on at 90 DTE. It's now only 78 DTE, and it's already made 32% of the credit on the trade. This one I put on 22 days ago. It's already at 61 DTE, and I'm at 50%. I'm at 50% of the credit received on the trade. My rules on these, I'm a little less concerned about taking profits right away on put ratio spreads because they do have downside protection because of that built-in put debit spread component, especially if they're really wide. Really becomes more of a bearish play than a bullish play, anyway. So if instead of taking 50% profit, I want to take 75% or even 100% of the credit received. I just want to let it go to expiration. You know, I this kind of trade is a little less risky than if it was just straight naked short puts. Straight naked shortputs can be very dangerous, right? Uh, because I've got that downside hedge kind of built into the trade. Downside moves here are a little less risky. There's still some risk to it, but this is a trade. I can be a little more aggressive taking profits. I don't necessarily have to close right when I get to 50%. I could let it go a little while, maybe take 75% profit. Or again, you know, if you're, you know, don't mind the risk, you could certainly just let them go to expiration. When I back test these things, I actually back test them as uh trades that are not managed. They just go to expiration. And with these parameters, 90 DTE, selling the 10 delta puts as part of the ratio spread, those things typically win, I want to say 97% of the time, 98% of the time, if you let them just go to expiration. So that's with no management. So managing early, uh, really it's not gonna help you too much because if you're already going to win 97, 98% of the time anyway, uh typically the reason you manage early is to lock in more wins, you know, that would otherwise go against you. But in this case, because it's such a high probability trade, I'm not sure if managing early is going to do all that much for you. Uh again, as long as you're comfortable with what could be some potentially really wide PL swings, especially if you get into a crazy kind of bear market. You could take a little bit of heat on those. But even though you're gonna take a little bit of heat on those, most of them still come back to you as winners eventually, because again, in the back tests, those have an insanely high win rate. GDX, the gold miners ETF here. I'm looking at, um, got a strangle on, been kind of defending, really started life as a short put that went badly against me. Had to sell calls against it. All right, rolled it five times. I've been down quite a bit more than what I'm currently down on the position today. I'm getting an up move, which is okay. I've got four short deltas now on this trade. So I'm actually leaning a little bearish because I was pretty aggressive with the calls. I've got a 30 delta call versus a 26 delta put. So hence the four short deltas, right? So an up move is not necessarily what I want. What I want at this point, because it's essentially a delta neutral kind of trade. I just want this thing to chop around, have some up days, have some down days, but not really go anywhere. Let a week or two pass. Uh, some theta will come out of this, you know, the time value of these options will decrease, and maybe I'll eat away at this loss. And then, of course, if enough time passes, we'll get to the point where I need to roll from August out to September. And at that point, because I'll get some extra credits for adding additional time to the trade, I can move this strangle back out to whatever it is I really want the trade to be, because this is not the trade that I wanted to be in uh originally. This ended up as a defensive kind of maneuver. Uh Intel, we've already looked at that put that's underwater. Uh most of this stuff is just losers, max losers that are just gonna come off at some point, still got a lot of time on these trades, but they're all max losers. This was an earnings play that got put on 29 days ago. Uh that was GitLab. Microsoft uh was a uh play upside shot 30 days ago, where Microsoft was trading at its highs at the time I put this thing on and has come crashing down. Microsoft's been very ugly. Bullish trade called debit spread. Already a max loser. Nothing to do there. Just leave it on for the next 16 days and let that come off. No reason to pay commissions to close trades that are already the max losers. So there's only good things can happen to a max loser because you can't lose anymore, right? But it's possible I could get some of this loss back if some kind of crazy move happens. So we'll just let those be. SEHD up 21 cents today. It's a pretty good size move in that particular uh ETF. That's the Schwab dividend ETF there. SLV winning a little bit on the shares, having a good day there. We've got the short put that was badly underwater. It's like down $800 on this put. But since rolling, recovered a little bit on the put, so that's nice. Then I've added two short calls because I needed some negative deltas to offset all the long deltas I've got. And then a put butterfly that expires at expiration this week, tomorrow. Remember, Friday is a stock market holiday, so this week's expiration is a Thursday, tomorrow. So I've got one day left on this put butterfly. Right now, it doesn't look like I'm gonna win on that put butterfly, but it's more of a hedge, a downside hedge in case silver kept trending lower, which is what it looked like it was gonna do when I put this on a week ago. You know, silver looked kind of ugly, still kind of looks ugly, but it didn't go any. Lower. You know, that was the lowest point it's been. If I pull up the chart, which is good for me, right? I put it on back here. Silver might have found a floor because I mean it's ever so gradually going up. Obviously, I would like it to go up in a much bigger way, but at least it's not going down because obviously we're underwater. I'm pretty big on that position. But I'm comfortable holding the shares, and I'm also comfortable taking more shares should I get a sign on the put. So I'm gonna run the wheel. Essentially, that's what I'm doing anyway. Right? I'm basically in a wheel trade right now. You can consider all of this a covered strangle, the shares, the short put, the two short calls. We could consider that a covered strangle. And then the put butterfly is more of just a little downside hedge just for this week. Shares of TQQQ. Um, I was down three or four hundred dollars on this earlier in the day, and now I'm only down eighty-nine dollars. Uh, what happened here? Yeah, the NQ, which was down uh more than 300 points when we got on this stream a minute ago. It's now only down 190. Big rally there in the NQ. The ES, which was unchanged on the day, is now up 25. And the Russell, which was basically unchanged on the day, is up 20. That's a big move in the Russell. That's a good size move. So it does look like this market wants to rally, which I will not complain since I've got mostly long deltas. Uh, the financial sector ETF, XLF here. I guess the banks are having a good day, up 109, which is a big move in a $54 ETF. So now I've got two long calls out in 79 days, so that's the September cycle. So I put this on two weeks ago. Basically, it was like a three-month trade, put on like a 90-day trade where I bought some at-the-money calls, a couple of them. Just because I thought the financial sector was poised to potentially rally a little bit. It kind of had been underperforming part of the year, but here lately, looks like some of the banks want to move around. JP Morgan, take a look at it. Yeah, up 1.8% on the day. Citigroup up 91 cents, up 0.65% on the day. Some other big financial stocks. Goldman Sachs is up. How about your visas and MasterCards Visa up 2.1%? Oh, what about Wells Fargo? We'll keep with the banks. 3.2% update. Yeah, pretty much all your financial stocks having a good day today. So that's helping that position. Then XSP. My butterflies, we've got all these broken wing put butterflies, one that expires tomorrow, one that expires next Friday, and then one other one that expires two Fridays from now, and then a call butterfly that expires two Fridays from now. And this call butterfly is already in the money. Thanks to this up move that we just got. I just put this trade on five days ago, and it's already inside this call butterfly that expires 16 days from now. I could go ahead and close this thing for a hundred dollars profit. That's kind of crazy to be that profitable on this trade. A lot of times butterflies take a long time. I'm tempted to go ahead and take that. I'm tempted to go ahead and take that and put on uh another butterfly, maybe something with some iron strikes. I think I'm I'm gonna put in a closing order for a buck just to see if I get filled. If I get filled for a buck, I will gladly take it, especially as quick as that trade worked out. I would be really, really surprised that that trade worked out the way it did. Of course, I'm gonna again I'm gonna kinda take the profits from that, and those profits I will pay for the new call butterfly. I'm just gonna go put on another one, a little bit higher to play for the gradual drift of the market. Um, let's talk about earnings from yesterday. There was a couple of stocks that did report earnings. Nike was the most interesting of the group. Nike is up $1.84 on the day, trading at $42.88. That's a 4.5% up day in Nike. For those that are uh members of my Patreon, or for those of you that are members of the YouTube membership, you guys have uh access to my members-only videos, my Way the Options series that I do every Tuesday and Thursday. One of the trades we did on yesterday's Way the Options was a uh Nike earnings play. I did a 17-day um in the July cycle, the July monthly cycle. I did 17-day stringle. I uh let's see what the trade was. If I go to the activity orders, let's see.

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The 37 and the 47. So I had the 37 foot and the 47 call first ringle.

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Now I received a buck fifteen credit on this trade on a buying power reduction of 455, and you see it's trading at 33 cents, and that's about where I got out. I got out at 30 cents. So I got out at a little bit better price, but about the same price. So if I sold this for 115, 115, I bought it back for 30 cents, I made 85 cents, 85 dollars on the trade in one day for one contract. Small little trade, but you know, I'm happy. I can make 85 cents in a day. Hell. I'll take that every time. That was an earnings play though. I wanted to play because you know I hadn't played very many earnings lately. Earnings are something though, I'm trying not to do as much as I used to. I'm not much of an earnings uh guy as far as you know, earnings plays. I could I could take them or leave them. You know, I I don't think I miss much by uh not trading these earnings events. I'd much prefer just trading a lot of the index uh futures, uh index like market ETFs, sector ETFs, things like that. A lot of the ETFs. You know, I don't like the single stock risk uh from earnings events because you know, most of the when I think of some of the worst trades I've ever made as far as my biggest losers, it's all been single stocks, right? It's all mostly earnings events, binary events. Of course, at the same time, when I think of some of my biggest winning trades, those were also earnings events where I've won thousands of dollars without having to put up a whole lot of money either. But in the end, I I think it just all equals out. I don't think I think you're just spinning your wheels a lot of times if all you do is trade these earnings plates. I just don't think there's a lot of edge with it. Alright, anything from you guys? Questions or comments before we jump off today's stream? Market still trending higher, ES up 29, NASDAQ now down only 180, Russell up 21. Let's see the volatility futures VX. Yeah, only up five cents now. Uh so volatility is not really moving. The VIX Futures trading at $18 even. That is a market again telling you that it is not really that concerned. Very boring kind of market, holiday week to only a four-day trading week. A lot of these uh kinds of uh short weeks, a lot of times you get less volume in the market. You see the ES, the futures, only trade 665,000 contracts today. That's pretty light. Yeah, that's not a lot of people trading today. Back to you guys in the chat. Anything from you guys before we get out of here? Appreciate you guys hanging out for those that are interested. This uh this stream, you know, I can do these live on YouTube, these 30-minute live podcasts. But this is released as an audio-only version of podcast as well. So you can actually listen to these on your um you know Apple or Spotify, wherever it is, you get your podcast. About five minutes after I shut down this stream, it will be available on those platforms. I pretty much immediately upload the audio from these broadcasts, and you know, uh just a few minutes after the stream, it is available as an audio-only podcast for those that want to listen in the car, at the gym, wherever it is that you need a audio version of this podcast. And we get actually quite a bit of downloads on the audio version of this podcast. I've actually been pleasantly surprised how many people actually do listen to the audio. And I'm one of those people. I'm somebody that works out at the gym. I go to the gym about four times a week, and I certainly appreciate audio versions of some of my favorite content as well. Alright, guys, well, I'm gonna go ahead and jump off. We'll be back tomorrow. Tomorrow again is the last day that we're gonna trade this week, so we'll have a market outlook live tomorrow morning, and then Friday we'll be off because it will be a stock market holiday.

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Have fun trading. Peace.