Market Outlook Live! (Jul 13, 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 0:01

And we are live. Welcome to another Market Outlook Live. I hope everyone is having a lovely Monday morning. So this week in the market is going to be interesting because the new earnings season really kicks off this week. We actually have several big banks report earnings tomorrow morning. We're going to have JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs all report earnings tomorrow morning. And it will be interesting if the banks have good earnings or bad earnings, how it will move the market around a little bit. Right now, this morning, we're coming in with the market being down a little bit. The ES is down 20 points. That is a quarter of a percent down move in the ES. The NQ down 290 points. That is a 1% drop in the NASDAQ. The RTY, the Russell 2000 futures, is down 11 points. That's a one-third percent drop in the RTY. And of course, to complete the picture, let's take a look at the volatility futures, the VX futures. Currently up 25 cents on the day, trading at $17.20. And I would say that's kind of the normal range, right? Kind of volatility has been contracting for a while in this market. And with volatility at $17.20, I would say this market is telling you it's not really all that concerned about much. Obviously, what is going on in the Middle East does affect some markets, though. If we actually take a look at the futures that are moving lower today, let's start with the biggest movers to the downside. Silver, my old nemesis, down 2.85% on the day. The SI futures trading at $58.43. Of course, I have my SLV position, which is deep underwater. We take a look at this pretty much every day, right? And this is going to be one I'm probably going to have to fight for weeks, if not months, to get back on my shares of SLV, the silver ETF, down a little bit today. Obviously, on a big down day, my short put, which is deep in the money already. I'm five and a half dollars in the money on this short put. So I'm already down about $700, mainly because of the intrinsic value, the in-the-money portion of that option. Do have a couple of call options as well, some short calls as well, helping offset some of the losses that are going on with that short put. But silver continues to be a thorn in my side. Gold is not doing much better today. Gold is down two and a quarter percent on the day. Right now, the GC futures are trading at 4,021. Netty gas is down 2.5% today. The uh NG futures, if you take a look at the last really three candles, Natty Gas has been sliding pretty sharply in the last three trading sessions. Right now, Netty Gas trading at 2.865. The BTC futures, Bitcoin down 1200 points on the day, BTC trading at 62,845. This is the same story. Uh, pretty much every time we get some of these fears with what's going on with the Middle East, what's going on with inflation, it always stems from crude oil for the most part. Right now, crude oil up three dollars. So the CLQ6 contract trading just around 74.50, uh up four and a quarter percent on the day. So a lot of times when the market is you know going the wrong way, and in this case, you know, the index futures are all down, oil is up, gold and silver down, Bitcoin down, and usually that would also mean bonds are down. Right? This is the story of this market. These are uh the correlations with a lot of these products. And obviously, ideally, we want all of this to go back up. We want bonds to go up, not continue to slide the way they've been doing the last uh week and a half or so. We would like precious metals to find a floor and start going back up. We would like Bitcoin to find a floor and start going back up, and we would like oil to obviously come back down as well. All of that is putting pressure on this market. It does, it there's some serious inflation concerns, especially with rising oil prices. And right now, those inflation concerns really kind of spook the market a little bit. Although, when you take a look at the volatility futures, the VX futures, remember a reading of $17 and change is pretty normal range for the VIX. If we take a look at VIX, the actual VIX index, not the futures, that's trading at $16.22. So this is not a very high volatility reading at all. Of course, VIX is the volatility of the SP 500. So it's a market that, for the most part, I would say all signs had a point to go on, even though you know we've kind of been chopping around a little bit, especially here in the last month or so. We take a look at some of the tech stocks moving around because today the big sell-off, of course, is the Nasdaq down uh uh today, but the NASDAQ is very tech heavy. The NASDAQ 100, you know, somewhere around 65, 70 of those 100 companies are tech. So a lot of times it is the tech sector that leads the way down in the NASDAQ. So if I pull up XLK, the tech sector ETF, and you see tech is down one and a quarter percent, very similar to what the NASDAQ is now. If I pull up SMH, which is the semiconductor ETF, it's down 2.5% on the day. So uh semiconductors are sliding. Of course, it's the semiconductor stocks that are kind of the hot stocks right now in the market, and they're all having a bad day. So let's start with some of the semiconductors having a bad day. ARM is down 6.5%, trading at 302.50. So that's down uh 21 points on the day. MU is down 40 points, trading at 939. Uh that's a 4% drop in MU. MU is very volatile, so it does move around. Intel, which I have a position on in Intel. Uh a short put and a short call. I've actually turned a short put into a strangle as a defense of the short put. Right now, though, Intel, which I'd like to go up, is down four and a half dollars on the day, trading at 105 and change. That's a 4% drop on the day in Intel. If I take a look at my Intel position, yeah, I have the 31 delta put, the 95 put, and I have a 10 delta call, which is the 165 call. Of course, that forms a strangle. Um, and right now it's okay on the day, right? I'm down a little bit PL on the day. I'm down a little bit PL since open, but I'm not terribly concerned about that position just yet. No need for me to try to roll or defend or do anything. I'm just gonna let that be for today. Uh, other things making a move lower that are not um necessarily chip names or memory names. SpaceX is down almost $6 on the day. That's a pretty big move, right? So SpaceX definitely has been trending lower here recently. Remember, last week I had a put credit spread on in SPX that was pretty badly underwater. I went ahead and close that for a $2 loss. The max loss in the trade would have been $350. I didn't want to take a $350 loss, so I took a $200 loss. So went ahead and closed that early uh because my short put on that put credit spread was already $20 in the money. I just didn't have much faith that that position was going to come back to me. And if I'd held, I'd now be more than $30 in the money on that short put. So I guess it was uh a good timing to go ahead and get out of that trade, uh, as it turns out. Tesla, uh obviously in conjunction with SpaceX, right? Uh Tesla is down ten dollars on the day. That's a two and a half percent drop in Tesla. AMD down 11 points, down about 2% on the day, although AMD still hanging out in its range up here near its all-time highs, right? It's been chopping around up here, but it's uh it's remained pretty resilient here. AMD right now trading at $574.34. Nvidia having a down day down three and a half dollars. That's a 1.7% drop in NVIDIA trading at 207 and change. Meta is down eight bucks on the day, Qualcomm is down two bucks on the day, and Google down 69 cents. Not much of a move in Google. There are any tech stocks making higher moves today? Not really. That's pretty slim pickings. Apple is up one percent, that's a pretty good move. Uh one percent move there. And Apple, of course, is a very high market cap company, so it does help uh, you know, keep the market afloat a little bit here. Microsoft also, another very big company, is green on the day, up five dollars. That's a one and a quarter percent move in Microsoft. Amazon is up about four bucks, up around one and a half percent on the day. Palantir up two dollars, IBM up six dollars, and Netflix is up a buck sixty-nine, although Netflix still has been trending lower for what seems like more than a year now. Had a a little bit of a bounce in the early part of 26, uh 2026, where we had a gap up. I that might have been an earnings event. No, that was the news event of the merger that they uh went ahead and canceled that deal, and the market was excited about it, had a temporary pop, but has since resumed, just heading straight down. So pretty ugly looking chart right now. Taking a look at some of my positions, what do I have going on? I've got some MES stuff here. So my positions in the micro ES are mostly uh ratio spreads. That's kind of my go-to trade on that. Some of my core strategies right now, it's mostly 90-day put ratio spreads. That's my go-to trade, and I've got this four by two uh put ratio spread I put on right before close on Friday. So brand new trade, it's uh 95 DTE. I sold four of the 10 Delta puts, and then I bought two puts 200 points above, forming the ratio spread. I already had one four by two put ratio spread on that I had uh put on about two weeks earlier. It's now a 79 DTE trade. I typically ladder into these about every two to three weeks. Uh I also have a four by two call ratio spread. Now, I don't do these very often, but when I do these, a call ratio, um, you you could get hurt to the upside, so I don't like doing these at 90 DTE because a 90 DTE trade, that positive drift of the market can really work against you on something that is really kind of a bearish trade. So with this 4x2 call ratio, I only did this at a 32 DTE trade when I put it on. So I put this on seven days ago, only has 25 days. I don't like going past 30 days on bearish trades in the SP 500 or the NASDAQ 100. Uh, if you're doing bearish trades, try to keep them, you know, 30 days or less. That's my opinion. I think when you put too much time on a bearish trade, you give the market time to beat you on those things. Where the bullish trades, putting a lot of time on those going out in 90 days, gives the market a chance to uh to go your way most of the time. So that's my thinking on that. I put on a brand new trade in RTY, uh, had an iron condor on last week. I got to 40% profit on it, and I took it off on Friday because I had been in the trade only four days. I put the trade on early in the week last week, and then by Friday afternoon, I was already 40% max profit. So I closed the trade. It's a great trade. It's a 30-day trade that I was in four days, made 40%. Took that off, and then this morning I put on a uh a new one. So uh, and I did that uh I didn't do that with my uh Discord members because I'd actually put this trade on pre-market before I met with my Discord members for our morning chat. But I put this on because when I first put this on, the RTY was actually trading maybe a little lower than where it's trading at now. And I thought, well, you know, volatility will probably expand a little bit in the Russell today. Now's a good day to go sell an iron condor because you want to do it when IV's high, and if we get a reversal in the market today, maybe uh the Russell turns green later today. You would expect volatility to contract a little bit, and that'll help this trade. Remember, iron condors like volatility contracting, not expanding. So I wouldn't mind a reversal and having an upday. Um, ideally, an iron condor is a delta neutral trade. You really don't want it to move around much, but if it moves up, that's not necessarily the worst thing in the world because an up move usually brings a volatility contraction, where down moves usually bring volatility expansion, which is not what you want. Uh GDX, the gold miners ETF. This has been a trade that's been a problem, a serious problem for me here. Um, having a down day today, which is not what I want. The trade has been going against me to the downside. That's what has gotten me in trouble. See, I've rolled it eight times. Started life, I believe, has just a short put. Since evolved into a strangle and various uh iterations of a strangle. Now I've got two puts versus one call. The trade is fine today. I don't need to do too much. I do want to lean a little long, so that's why I've got two puts versus one call. Because I do think this thing will find a bottom and start heading back up at some point. So I didn't want to get too crazy on the call side and start having uh negative deltas overall on the trade, meaning I'm I really need the stock to go down. I want to lean long as I think the stock is going to go up. That's just my assumption. So, yeah, nothing to do there. I'm not gonna make any kind of adjustments. The intel trade is fine today. Short put, short call, strangle. Nothing to do there. Uh SCHD, the Schwab dividend ETF, is up 12 cents. I mentioned that because with all the market indices down, right? The SP, the NASDAQ, the Dow, the Russell, they're all red on the day. Now, why is this up? Well, there are some uh energy related stocks that are a part of that particular ETF, and with oil rising, you're gonna have a lot of the energy-related companies having up days, even though the market is down. So some of those energy-related companies are probably having a good day there. Uh SMH. So last week, I think Thursday last week, I sold a put credit spread in SMH. SMH is down 16 points, so this is the semiconductor ETF. Obviously, a put credit spread is a bullish trade. Don't want a down day, but I'm fine on this trade. If you know one down day is not going to hurt me, if I get two or three of these in a row, that trade could become a problem. Put credit spreads are pretty directional, right? Because you know, because you're spreading this off, unlike a naked put, where if I'm just selling a put, I can go way out of the money and get you know uh 20 deltas, 15 deltas, even 10 deltas on a put credit spread because you have to buy the extra long put to define your risk. Typically, you have to bring these in to you know around a 30 delta short put, 35 delta short put, so you don't have as much room to be wrong on direction. One down day, not gonna hurt me. Uh if tomorrow looks like this, you know, I might be a little more concerned about that position. SPX. This is a put broken wing butterfly in SPX, where I got a 205 credit, so uh I have a $205 credit possible on this position. And this is something I put on last Friday with my Discord members. So the way this trade works, let's actually go to the trade tab here. Go to the curve and analysis. This is this particular put broken wing butterfly in SPX.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

So me turn on the analysis where I can see the strikes. So yeah, I did the uh what did I do?

SPEAKER_01 16:31

I bought the 7225 and then I sold the 7285 twice, and then I bought the 73.15. Okay, so I did a $30 widespread here, the debit spread portion, and then the credit spread portion, I did a $60 widespread because it's twice as wide. So that breaks the wing. That's why this butterfly has that broken wing. So what this means is I can't lose to the upside. So the market SPX is trading up here, and if the market goes up forever, trade sideways, even comes down a little bit, I get my 205 profit, my $205 down in the skinny profit area. If it falls into the tent, I have an extra $3,000 of profit because of the $30 wide debit spread. So I could make $3,200 if I pin the short strikes and hit the top of the tent here exactly at expiration. If I fall below the bottom long protective put here, then I suffer the max loss. The max loss on the trade is $2,800. So my credits $205, the max profit potential is $3,200, the max loss $2,800. And that is your broken wing butterfly. It's definitely an interesting trade because it's it's kind of a bullish trade, and I don't mind the market going up forever and I make my $205. I'm fine with that. But it's also you don't mind the market going lower because that's where you really stand the chance to make that max profit. You just don't want the market to crash hard and you know get below the spread. Then things get a little ugly. I also have several butterflies also in XSP, the mini SPX. Put broken wing butterfly that expires on Friday, four days from now. Put broken wing butterfly that expires next Friday, 11 days from now, and then a call broken wing butterfly, also next Friday, 11 days from now, and then a call broken wing butterfly 18 days from now, three Fridays from now. So lots going on there in XSP. And we can take a look at what the uh PL graph for all those butterflies look like. That would be actually an interesting thing to do. If I hit the PL button here inside Tasty, let me turn off all my positions and let's turn on the SPX put Rogan Wing butterfly and all the XSP butterflies. And while we're at it, because they're very similar positions, the two put ratios in MES and the one call ratio in MES, because those are really butterflies, they're just missing the extra long wing. So this is kind of what's going on with those positions. The market's trading here, and you see I don't mind the market going up. I don't really mind the market going down. I just don't need the market going down a lot, like if in this case, uh they are beta weighting everything to SPY on this graph. If SPY went down to 720. So we would need the uh ES or the SPX, uh, either one to drop 350 points before I get into the kind of like this uh you could consider it this little trough. I wouldn't say this is you know necessarily all that concerning because I still have some protection below the market. Uh but then you know I can start suffering some serious losses. But at this point, this is with the spy trading at 617. If I get down here, I mean that wouldn't require the market to fall like 1200-1300 points. So but that's interesting, you know. You can turn on, and of course I can turn on all the positions. Here's what everything all together looks like. Again, making some money if the market goes up, making some money if the market goes down, just down a little. And you know, I'm I'm I'm okay with the market going down quite a bit, even in this area, because I've got some protective kind of uh bearish positions, and then at this point, at the 650 level in SPY, that's when things start heading south in a hurry. Pretty neat the PL graph in citation. I don't typically take a look at that all that often, but if you're especially new to trading and you're not sure how your overall options portfolio looks, it's an interesting tool because you should have some kind of overall PL graph in mind. It's like, what do you want? Well, ideally for me, what I want is I want to be able to make money as the market goes up. You know, a little bit of money, and I'd like to make a little bit of money if the market goes down. And even better, I would like to be able to make a lot of money at some point if the market really goes down. Because that's where people tend to get hurt, is the really big down moves. And that's where typically, if I'm like forming some kind of risk profile, that's why I do those put broken wing butterflies and those put ratio spreads, is because they have downside potential. I like not fearing the downside as much as most people probably do. Alright, you guys in the YouTube chat, thank you for hanging out. If you got questions or comments, get them in. Right now, the ES still down 27 points, down a third of a percent. NASDAQ down 330, down one point one percent, and the Russell down sixteen. That is a half percent drop in the Russell. Yeah, Kevin in the chat. Good morning from Lakeland, Florida. Good morning. I'm sure the weather down in Florida is very hot and humid. I'm in Louisiana for those that weren't aware, so I I can relate.

SPEAKER_00 22:05

It's been very hot, very muggy. Uh almost unbearable to to be outside these days.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Alright, yeah, if you guys got anything else in the chat, get it in while we're here. One thing I do want to mention, the earnings for tomorrow morning. So if you want to play the earnings, you'd need to put on a trade today. JP Morgan reports tomorrow before the bill. Uh so does Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs. Uh, the biggest company, JP Morgan, the largest bank in the U.S., uh, probably the most liquid, maybe uh I don't know. It trades at $333 this year. IV rank of only 35, and I say only 35, I mean it's reporting earnings today. IV rank of 35 is not necessarily the highest IV rank, but what really sucks is the IVX, the implied volatility itself. 25% is really low. That for me, I don't love selling options. A lot of times I just go sell a stringle. If it's a big product, maybe an iron condor rather than a strangle just to define my risk. But it's really hard to go sell stringles and iron condors on things that have 25% implied volatility. You're just not going to get great pricing on that stuff. Even the four-day cycle, so this week's expiration, IBX of 34% the week of earnings. That's really, really, really low. So, yeah, I don't love doing something in JP Morgan. If I wanted a price like a one-standard deviation strangle, let's go sell the 15 delta put and maybe the 14 delta call. Yeah, you get a 428 credit on a buying power reduction of $3,800. I mean, it's not the worst trade in the world as far as risk reward, but I don't love it either. You know, you'd get a higher credit if this thing had higher IV. I'd expect that credit to be five, six, seven dollars, for example, if this was like a tech stock and the IVX and was you know 50-60% or something, you know. But of course, banks don't have that kind of IV. They always have much lower IV than like a tech sector. But IVX of 25% really, I would avoid JP Morgan. I'm just I'm just not gonna play it. Bank of America has an IV rank of 30, trading at $59 a share. IVX in the August monthly cycle to 27%, and it really makes these options just not very expensive, which is not what you want if you're gonna sell them. If I sell this 19 Delta put, I get a 56 credit, 56 cent credit, and a buying power reduction of $775. It's really high buying power for a 55-strike put and very low credit for a put as well. So yeah, which is horrible uh risk reward as far as the buying power seems high and the credit seems low. That just makes for a bad trade. So I may not play these banks. Citigroup, one that I often play for earnings. Typically, I just sell a strangle because these things have low IV, they typically don't move. IVX are 33% in Citigroup, makes it maybe a more attractive trade. I mean, if I sold the 18 Delta put, maybe the 14 delta call, I mean a little bullish. 252 credit on a buying power reduction of $1,400. I mean, that's definitely the best trade I've seen out of this group. So yeah, I don't hate the idea of doing a strangle in Citigroup if I absolutely needed a trade. I don't really need the trade though, so I'm not gonna take it. But yeah, Citigroup, just because of the 33% IV, I think it's the best of that bunch to trade. If you want to go sell some options, do any kind of short options, uh, play with strangles, iron condors, credit spreads. I'm already in a uh a potential earnings trade, though, because I have XLF. I have those long calls that I bought in XLF, the financial sector ETF, which I bought 26 days ago. I've got 67 days left on the trade. The trade's working out okay. If the banks have good earnings, this is gonna go up. So, you know, this is interesting because if JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, they overall have really good earnings. You know, XLF, the financial sector ETF, will pop because those are all in this particular ETF. So, in some ways, I am playing the bank earnings uh by accident because I that wasn't the purpose of this trade when I put it on 26 days ago. The purpose of this trade was I thought the financial sector hadn't it really hadn't participated in the market rally as much as I thought it should, as far as you know, on the way back up, you know, West Tech was exploding. Some of the other sectors, energy had a nice year. Um, financials kind of underperformed a little bit. I bought some long calls because they were cheap, because the volatility so low. You know, selling puts didn't make any sense, so I bought some calls, and we'll see how it goes. Uh, when I meet with you guys for tomorrow's live stream for market outlook, we'll know whether it went well or not. We'll be able to see it in the PL on that position. Yeah, right now, yeah, the NASDAQ down 330 still, Russell down 15, ES down 28. Really, that's a market that's not really going anywhere. I mean, it's a lower market, right? It's a down day, but it's a market that doesn't seem like it's in a hurry to move too far in either direction from where it's sitting at right now. Kind of a boring day. I don't have really anything I need to do with my positions. Uh put on the one new position in RTY, the iron condor. I didn't have any closing positions, I don't think, today. I didn't have any roles. Really, yeah. Kind of a nothing kind of day. Which is fine for me. I don't mind boring days. Boring days where I don't have much to do in my portfolio usually means things are working. So any last uh questions or comments, anything from you guys in the YouTube chat? I appreciate you guys hanging out with me today. I do market outlook live daily here on YouTube. I do this at 10 a.m. Central Standard Time, Monday through Friday, or every day that the stock market is open. If it's a stock market holiday, we wouldn't bother meeting. But this week, no market holidays, so we'll meet all five days this week. I'll also release this as an audio only version of podcast. So for those that want the audio version of this, typically right after I stream on YouTube, I release the audio on uh in podcast form. So if you want to grab this on your Spotify or Apple Podcasts, wherever you grab podcasts, it's usually available, oh, usually five to ten minutes after I'm done streaming because I upload the raw audio just immediately. And usually it's available on those those platforms pretty quickly. So if you want the audio version to listen to in the car, at the gym, wherever it is that you know you can't watch the video, but you'd appreciate listening to the audio. Yeah, check those out. Also, if you're listening on an Apple or Spotify, give the show a five-star rating, help us grow in the algorithms. For those watching on YouTube, give the show a thumbs up, right? Help the podcast and the video uh platform on YouTube also grow in the algorithms. Yeah, speckled us in the chat says thanks, DT. Appreciate that. All right, guys. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and jump off. Have fun trading these wild and crazy markets. Peace.