Market Outlook
Market Outlook is a weekly podcast created by Derek Taylor ("dtoptions" on YouTube). This podcast discusses the market's performance last week as well as looking ahead to next week's opportunities, including potential options trades to take.
Market Outlook
Market Outlook Live! (Jul 7, 2026)
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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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And we are live. Welcome to another Market Outlook Live. I hope everybody is having a lovely day. Took me a couple of extra minutes to get the stream started today because uh YouTube was actually having a little bit of an issue there. I don't know what was going on with their servers, but hitting the go live button was not working there for a minute. So hopefully you guys can hear me. Hopefully I'm live on the YouTubes. I'm not actually previewing the stream right now. If you can see me, and especially can you hear me? Give me a yay or an A on the audio for those hanging out in the YouTube chat. And while I wait for those responses, let's pull up the trading platform here and take a look at what the market is doing. The market is uh not looking great today. Um big down day in the market, especially in the Nasdaq. Let's start with the ES, though, the SP 500 down 51 points today, down about 0.7% on the day. The ES trading at 7540, the Nasdaq down about 650 points. That's a 2.2% drop in the NASDAQ. A pretty ugly move, actually. So the tech sector, you know, having a day, right? Having one of those kinds of days. The NASDAQ trading at 29,295. That's the NQ futures. That's the NQU contract. The RTY contract, uh U contract, is the Russell 2000, of course, down 26 points. Pretty good down move in the Russell as well, down 0.9% on the day. RTY trading just at 3,000. So hovering around that nice round number. Yeah, thank you guys in the chat for uh you guys can see and hear me. Appreciate that. So with the indexes down pretty big today, you would expect volatility to be expanding, and it is. If we take a look at VX, which is the VIX futures, they're up uh 50 cents on the uh VXN contract, trading at $17.75. So uh volatility though has been contracting for a while. So I don't know if the market is necessarily all that worried today, but you know, I'm growing a little concerned here because of some of the weakness, especially in the Nasdaq. If I go back to that Nasdaq chart here, let's pull up the NQ. You know, we had the big run-up here earlier in the year, you know, after the market meltdown and then it was off to the races, and then it seems like we hit a ceiling back uh at the first of June, right? So the last month, right? Because we're now the middle of July, but the last month or so, we have kind of been stuck in the mud. We've had some really big ranges on these candles, but we haven't gone anywhere in a month on the NASDAQ. And yeah, I don't know what's going on. We're chopping around, we got a lot of volatility, and you're seeing a lot of rotation in and out of the memory names. So obviously, on the big run up, you had Micron. Micron was what everybody was talking about. Micron today is now almost $70, trading at $916 a share. But you can see the last week, especially um week and a half, more like two weeks. Yeah, now uh Micron has trended lower, right? In the last two weeks, it has gone from twelve hundred and fifty dollars a share, and that was the earnings day, I believe, and now down to just above nine hundred dollars a share today. It's a pretty nasty move, honestly. Now, now I know Micron because of the volatility, we're used to this thing moving up and down 100, in some cases, 200 points in a day. But, you know, I I don't love that for what is now a trillion dollar company. And of course, you see a rotation out of all those memory names. So sand disk down 200 uh around 200 points today, trading at 1546. That's an 11% drop in sand disk today. And you're seeing people rotate back into some of the software names. If I pull up IGV, which is the uh uh tech software sector ETF, you can see that in the last eight trading sessions or so, the uh software sector, so your big names in that space would be Microsoft, uh Adobe, Palantir, things like that, they've been doing well, while you know some of your semiconductors have not done well. And if we go to DRAM, which is specifically those memory names, you can see this particular ETF, once it loads, the Roundhill Memory ETF, not done well in the last couple of weeks. So I think we're seeing that rotation out of those high-flying memory names back into some of the more traditional, like your Mag 7, Mag 10 type stocks. So things that have lagged for months. So Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, you know, those things just have been trending lower for months now because people naturally, you know, money is finite. People had to sell all of that stuff so they could go and invest in Micron and Sand Disk and all of that. Um, and now people maybe some of these people are taking profits on your micron trades, or maybe you're just worried that the micron trade is played out, so they're dumping their micron. Now they have all this money. Where are they going back to? They're gonna go back into the mag 7, mag 10 type stocks. Matter of fact, let's pull up the mag 7. If I pull up M A G S, which is the Mag 7 ETF here, yeah, the Mag 7. Look at that in the last week and a half. Tells the story, right? Mag 10, MGTN, which is the Mag 10 index. Last week and a half, the same story, right? We take a look at Microsoft. Let's pull up a chart of Microsoft last week and a half, the same story. You see, it was just look like death. The chart was just ugly. Just I've, you know, was this thing ever gonna find a bottom? Well, about a week and a half ago, it found a bottom and has been higher ever since. On a day where the Nasdaq at one point was down 700 points, right now it's only down 630, still down a lot. Microsoft's up today. Microsoft is up six dollars and sixty cents. That's a 1.7% up day on a day where the NASDAQ looks bad. Meta, same story. Go back about a week and a half ago. Found a bottom after you know months of just languishing. Found a bottom, and the last uh seven candles or so have all been pretty much green candles. I know you know there's a couple of red candles here, but we included some pretty big gap ups too. So I would say overall, definitely trending higher. Meta today is up $5.40. So again, another one of those stocks that's been badly beaten up, but today it's green on a day where the NASDAQ is down big. Palantir. Now you see the the repeating pattern here on all of these charts. The last seven or eight charts I pulled up about a week and a half ago. You know, Palantir badly beaten up for months. Now, about a week and a half ago, it looks like it found a bottom. And you know, what, seven or eight straight green candles? I know there's one red candle here, but that's a gap up. Technically, you know, it gapped up and then went lower from there, but that was an upday. So eight straight up days in Palantir. So there you go. That's the rotation that's happening right now. That rotation, you know, is causing some volatility in the market and especially in the NASDAQ. Uh, I don't currently have shares of TQQQ. I had shares that I bought into yesterday. I had 100 shares that I never closed. I came into today holding those shares, and the the NQ was down uh more than 1% this morning when the market opened. And as soon as the market opened, I dumped those shares because the NQ looked weak. And I'm glad I did because now it's down 2%. So I definitely didn't want to hold shares of a triple levered Nasdaq ETF if I thought the market was looking weak. And you know, it was the right thing to do. I would have, you know, lost a few hundred dollars holding those shares today. Taking a look at the one-minute chart here in the Nasdaq, you can see when the market opened back here, yeah, it was just a steady sell-off for the first couple of hours of trading today, right? We've been trading, well, about an hour and 40 minutes now. So might have found a bottom uh a few minutes ago, right? It looks like maybe it wants to uh rally a little bit. I don't think we're not coming back from a uh at one point a $700 drop in the NQ. That would be a pretty wild move if we did. ES still down 48 RTY, now down only 20. The RTY at one point was down more than 30. So the Russell uh also staging a little bit of a comeback. I don't know if we'll get back into positive territory in any of those indices today. Taking a look at my portfolio today, got some ratio spreads going on in MES. I've got a call ratio spread, which I put on yesterday, so brand new trade. It's only been on one day, hasn't had time to do much yet. But on a down day, we're fine on this. It's slightly a bearish trade. So um it's doesn't have a whole lot of directionality to it, but I definitely don't want the market to just you know scream higher. That would be bad because there's some naked calls, uh, short calls, part of that ratio spread, a four by two call ratio spread. Then I have two different uh four by two put ratios here and here. And these put ratios I always do at 90 DTE, and I do the shorts at 10 deltas. The call ratio, I do a little higher delta, and typically the shorts are going to be probably somewhere closer to 15 deltas on those, and I only do these at 30 DTE. And the reason is because it's more of a bearish kind of trade. You don't want to put a whole lot of time on a bearish trade in an index product because the market has a positive drift. You're just asking to get beat bearish trades. I typically typically do those 30 days or less in the uh ES or MES bullish trades, typically 60 to 90 days. I mean, I'll put some time on those to get that positive drift, hopefully working in my favor on those trades. Uh then I put on a brand new trade yesterday in my uh members only Discord. We put on a iron condor and RTY, the uh Russell 2000 in uh futures here. So this iron condor, I've got a let's start with the center, so the strangle here, the short strangle. I've got a 12 delta put and a seven delta call. So yeah, really wide on that. So really far out of the money, and then I bought uh 50 point wings, and that was the smallest I could actually make that on the call side. Um, there were only 50 uh point wide uh strikes available, so kind of a big trade. You know, and this might not be a trade you could do if you're trading with a really small account because a 50 point wide uh wings on an iron condor, the multiplier and RTY is 50, not 100. This is the futures, you know, have their own unique multipliers. So if everything is times 50 in RTY, then that 50 point widespread is really uh like a $2,500 widespread. So it's a $2,500 kind of trade. Um I got somewhere around uh well, I got a $7 credit times $50. I got $350 credit for selling this iron condor. If I got a $350 credit on a $2,500 spread, that means my risk is $2,150. So I'm risking $2,150 to make $350 on that trade. But very high probability trade. The probability of the pop on that trade being so wide on those shorts is probably somewhere around 80% plus the P50 number, if I manage at 50%, which I always manage iron condors at 50%. The the P50 number is probably north of 90% on that trade. So pretty high probability trade. GDX, the gold miners. This is ugly. The gold uh gold miners down. Now gold itself was up this morning. It may have reversed. It did reverse, it's down ever so slightly, basically an unchanged day in the gold futures, but the gold mining sector, these gold companies, down big, down $2.35 today. That's a 3% drop. And I've been getting beat up on this trade, and I've been getting beat up to the downside. So I I needed an upday. I didn't need a down day. Uh although I right now I'm pretty much uh I'm protected a little bit because I have two short puts plus two short calls. I'm in a strangle, but the puts have higher deltas than the calls, meaning the risk on this trade is to the downside, right? I I much prefer an up move because I make money on an up move than a down move. So it's a strangle, but it's a skewed strangle because I've got some positive deltas. Right now I've got 15 positive deltas per contract. I've got two contracts. So yeah, definitely I need an update in the gold miners, but right now I'm not going to do anything with the trade. I'm just going to let today play out, and I'll come back tomorrow and see where we stand. A big move that's going on, Intel, down almost $12 right now. Uh it was down more than 13 a few minutes ago when I looked at it. It's an ugly, ugly move in Intel. That's a 10% drop in a day. Uh and I had a short put on. And as soon as I saw what was going on in it, I mean, I just immediately went to the options chain. I bought a call. You know, like it took me all the 10 seconds to just go into the options chain, went to the same cycle, and I sold a um an 11 delta call, not a really high delta call, way, way out of the money. Because I don't want to be too aggressive because I still think Intel probably has some room to run to the upside. So I didn't want to go sell like a 30 delta call or something to protect myself, just you know, uh protecting myself a little bit by uh putting 11 negative deltas on this. So if I had 30 deltas on the put, which is what I have by adding 11 short deltas, now I only have 19 total long deltas on the trade. So taking a little bit of that directional risk off the trade. And then uh Microsoft up $5. This particular trade's already a max loser, it comes off in tick 10 days. I'm not gonna win on this trade, but I'm not gonna pay the commissions to close the trade, it's already a full loser, so no reason to do anything. But Microsoft up $5.50 there. SCHD, for those playing the Schwab Dividend ETF, maybe you got a long-term passive uh account and you many of you guys are holding shares. This thing's having a good update up 32 cents. That's a big move in this thing. So that's another sign of that sector rotation where people are getting out of some of those high-flying tech names and maybe seeking refuge in some of the uh you know blue chip dividend paying stocks because that's what the uh SCHD ETF is, dividend paying stocks. It's about a it's a basket of around 100 dividend paying stocks. So that gives you another clue what's going on with the market today. Silver down 2% today. That's not good for me. You guys know I'm pretty long silver here with the hundred shares, still underwater on the shares. Now, silver has had a good week, week and a half. It's slowly been stair stepping up, but down today. This short put still in the money. I'm in the money by about $3. That's not good. Still down about $700 on that put since rolling it uh of several times. I have a couple of different short calls on. I have a short call on in the 45-day cycle and a short call on in the 73-day cycle, just to uh again add some negative deltas to you know kind of offset some of what is going on with the loss, especially on this put here. SpaceX. SpaceX, today is the first day that SpaceX is a part of the NASDAQ 100, and it's down eight dollars and seventy-four cents on that uh that event. Not great, right? That's uh part of what's holding the NASDAQ back today. The Nasdaq down more than two percent. Probably isn't good that you just added a trillion dollar company uh to your index, and the very first day it's down, you know, five and a half percent. That's that's gonna drag your index down. So that's it is what it is on that, right? So again, uh glad I dumped those shares of TQQQ. Uh LF, XLF, excuse me, the financial sector ETF. Financials are up eight cents. They were up more than 20 cents earlier in the day. So the financials are having a good day, had a good day yesterday. Got some long calls on in XLF. Because I thought financials would be something people would start rotating back to because financials underperformed much of the year. I think they've got some room to run. So we've got some long calls. Don't typically buy long calls, but they were cheap because volatility is very low in the financial sector. Uh financial stocks typically have really low IVs. So a lot of times selling options just doesn't make any sense. You don't get any credit for selling those cheap options. But if the options are cheap, why not buy them? So a lot of times, you know, I tell people, if a trade doesn't make sense, like if you go and try to sell a put on something, you're like, damn, that credit, that credit sucks. I would never sell that put. Well, buy it. Buy the put, you know, if it's so cheap. If you are not directional, you know, just take the other side of the trade or go and buy a call. The calls are cheap, you know. Uh, don't be afraid to, you know, if the trade that you're thinking about just doesn't make sense, well, come up with something else. If the trade you are are wanting to put on is horrible as far as you know, risk reward or credit or debit, then chances are uh the opposite side of that trade is probably a good trade. So and don't be afraid sometimes to just uh take a trade based on price. Like if the trade makes sense, take it. Um, and then all my butterflies and XSP here, put butterflies, call butterflies, got a lot of them, staggered, uh, weekly expirations out for uh some expiring this week, some expiring next week, some expiring two Fridays from now. All of these are good. Um on a down day, the put butterflies are not gonna care, and they're put broken wing butterflies. Um, so down moves not gonna bother them at all. Got a couple of call butterflies that are directional. They need up moves, but uh one down day in the uh SP is not gonna hurt those in any serious way. As long as at least you know, by the time they expire, their 21 DTE trades when I put them on. As long as we gradually drift higher, we'll be inside those spreads and they'll they'll pay us a little money. Yeah, you guys in the chat, yeah. Appreciate you guys hanging out. Yeah, Speck will says hi. Yeah, the pastor, micron down six percent today. Yeah, yeah, getting beat up a little bit today. What do you think of a put credit spread on cat? So Caterpillar is not the most liquid stock. It can be tough to trade, but let's take a look at it. So uh typically I'd go around 60 days, 45 days is pretty close. And let's see what a 31 delta short put, and let's go ten dollars wide, see what the price on that is. And not bad, 315 versus a 685 max loss. I like the trade if you can get filled at that price. Bid as breads are about two dollars wide. Now, two dollars wide, I gotta admit, on a stock that's trading at $913 a share, two dollars wide, it's not crazy bad. But the open interest isn't great, you know. And because the stock is such a high-priced stock, it just doesn't trade all that much. You know, a lot of people just can't really trade, especially naked options in a in a stock like this. So, even the shares, I mean, only traded 1.3 million shares today. That's not very many shares at all. You know, we've got stocks that have traded tens of millions of shares already this morning in the first couple of hours of trading. Uh, so yeah, not the most liquid company, but yeah, if you're bullish and you can get filled at what you think is a fair price on a put credit spread, and yeah, I think it makes sense. IDX is 50%. And I will say, if you can get filled for at least a three dollar credit on that spread that I just put on, yeah, I don't hate it. Risk about $7 to make $3.
SPEAKER_01Sounds good to me. Back to the uh charts here.
SPEAKER_00Let's take a quick look at what some of the other tech stocks are. We've taken a look at several of them, but just to complete the picture, Apple, uh another sign of the sector rotation, right? Apple last week and a half done well up today on a day where the NASDAQ is down big. Apple's doing okay. Obviously, uh we saw micron was being sold, AMD's kind of in that basket with micron, you know, and it's you know having a down day, down 45 points. ARM is also in that same basket, like it tends to move. They all tend to move together. Your microns and sand disk and AMDs and ARMs. And you see, ARM had a really rough couple of weeks here, down $23 today. That's a 7% decline in ARM. Anything else making a sizable move? Oddly enough, IBM is up uh more than seven dollars today. IBM, if you look at this chart, really the last ten candles have been green candles in IBM. Maybe this is another one that's about to start running again to the Upside IV rank of 78 reports earnings pretty close. July 22nd, that's I mean, that's uh two weeks away. So I don't know if you'd want to put on a trade in this right now. If you don't mind putting on a trade and holding through earnings, this might be another one if you're bullish. Uh put credit spread. Maybe sell the 280 by the 275. Yeah, you get about a 150 credit. You risk 350 to make 150. You did it $10 wide, 280 and 270 on the put credit spread. 287 credit versus 713 max loss. Seems reasonable, but with the earnings coming up, you may or may not want to put on a trade right now. You may want to wait a couple of weeks and come back to that. Um see what IBM looks like after earnings. Netflix is up today. Netflix has been badly beaten up for many months now. Ugly looking chart, but it looks like it may have found a floor. It may have found a floor about a week and a half ago with Microsoft and Meta and Palantir and all of that. Although it's not in the same basket of uh stocks as far as it's not in the same space as those stocks. It's a streaming service primarily, but yeah, it's definitely oversold, right? There's no way this company deserved to go from you know $133 a share to $77 a share in six months or whatever it's been badly beaten up. Oracle is down about $5 today. Oracle's chart just looks so bad. This is one, yeah. There's no way I'd put on a bullish trade in this right now. I need to see something change in a serious way before I go and start selling selling puts in Oracle. I wouldn't do it now. Gotta wait for some green candles. Qualcomm is now six dollars today, down 3.2%. This is another high-flying stock that just stalled out and really for the last month. This kind of just really stair step lower. It's had a few green candles mixed in there along the way, but overall it's definitely trending lower. Tesla having an ugly day down $13.5. That's a 3% move down in Tesla. And of course, Tesla possibly moving a little bit in sympathy with SpaceX, which was down you know more than 5% on the day. Alright, you guys hanging out in the YouTube chat. If you've got questions or comments, trade ideas, anything you want to discuss, feel free to ask away. Right now, this market is uh yeah, just kind of stalled out here. For me, I came in the day using plenty of buying power. I don't necessarily need any new trades, although I did free up a bit of buying power by closing those shares of TQQQ. I could take some trades if I needed to. Um, but yeah, I'm fine with what I've got on. And for the most part, I don't have any real problem trades in the portfolio as far as anything that today's move. You know, the only thing I'm in that moved today in a big way against me, Intel. The Intel trade was a pretty serious event. I mean, it's down now almost 11% on the day. Having a short put on it, yeah, not great. Intel is a stock, though, I don't hate the idea of owning the shares if the trade really went against me. Of course, I'm defending it, but you know, it's a stock that if I ended up m needing to take the shares, you know, I'd be comfortable owning shares of Intel. Then I'd sell cover calls and run the wheel on it. But that's really the only thing that I'm staring at today that's a real problem. I know I got a pretty nasty PL on silver, but this is a trade I've been in for months, and you know, I'm I'm it's a big position to down $100 uh on the day, and that is not unusual at all. Everything else, though, I feel okay about.
SPEAKER_01And you guys in the chat.
SPEAKER_00Anything, questions, comments, and it's just check out what is going on here on the YouTube. I know we had some issues getting the stream started this morning.
SPEAKER_01Alright. Nothing from the chat. So a couple of things.
SPEAKER_00Let's go ahead and you know, if I was looking for some opportunity today, because some of you guys may see this down move as an opportunity, so let's actually jump back into the trading platform. If I go to one of my watch lists, like I have like DT stock watch list right here. I can go into the watch list here, and let's just uh sort by change percentage. Let's see anything that I haven't paid attention to in a while is making a move worthy of me investigating. Well, you have actually a lot of the meme type names of the quantum space. Look at them, quantum space. Ion Q here. This thing is not looking good. Ocklo. Another one I haven't paid attention to for a while, but this thing has gone from nearly $200 a share to $47 a share. I don't want to touch that thing. And you got some stuff moving around, even like a cruise line like Royal Caribbean down 3.2% on the day. Look at this drop in the last week. It's gone from 330 to under 280 here. I do know the airlines. Don't we have uh some earnings coming up with the airlines? Yeah, July 10th. That's this week. Yeah. Probably not going to do anything today, but that's one I will play this week for sure. That I'll probably put that on one of the Way The Options episodes for those that are uh members of the YouTube channel and have access to those Way The Options videos. That's probably going to be on Thursday's edition, uh Delta Airlines, because I do like playing Delta, it's uh usually got pretty good IV and decent option markets. Walmart's up today. Again, like people rotating maybe out of some of the sec uh tech sector. But this the Walmart chart does not look good. Although the last four candles, you know, you had the big gap down, maybe it found a floor. Last four candles, it's drifting higher. But I don't know if I'd love the idea of going and selling a put in Walmart just yet. It doesn't report until August 20th, but I could go sell the 25 Delta put for 177 credit volume power reduction of $1,500. Pretty high volume power requirement on that, actually, uh, compared to the credit, and especially for a strike at 105 for the strike price. I think I can find better opportunities out there elsewhere. I think that's it for me today, guys. So thank you guys for hanging out in the YouTube chat for those watching the live stream on YouTube, for those listening to the audio-only version of the podcast, because I do post these as an audio-only podcast, right? As soon as I'm done recording on YouTube, I immediately upload the audio file to my uh podcast uh host. So if you guys want to listen on an Apple or on a Spotify or on Castbox or any of those uh platforms where you can go get some of those audio podcasts, I am available on that. So if you can't be here for the live streams, you can always listen to these later in the day. Maybe if you're in the car or at the gym, you just need the audio only. It is available. All right, you guys. Yeah, have a great day. Appreciate you guys. Peace.