Full Transcript: The OPEX Effect – May 2026

Inside the Behind the Scenes Options Flows Driving the Market

Jack: So Brent, can we say we’re in melt-up mode now? I mean, I feel like we almost can.

Brent: I mean, if you look at the biblical returns over the last month since we last talked, it’s been just amazing. So I think full melt-up, CapEx spasms, whatever you want to call this — it’s really been something else.

Jack: Yeah. And I like your title “CapEx Greater Than Crude,” because that is kind of the deal here, right? The market is sort of looking through whatever’s going on in the short term and saying, “We’ve got this huge thing coming in the future. Who cares about this?”

Brent: Yeah. And we always review what we did — or what I said — because I got it wrong, so I don’t want to bucket you in this.

Jack: I’ll take accountability for it, Brent. I’ll take it along with you.

Brent: I was like, “This is a concern — this Iran situation — for a bunch of different reasons,” and the market literally doesn’t care, and it went up and up. So we’re gonna cover that. But it’s really been wild, not just the CapEx expansion obviously, but just the fact that it was sort of looking back past this lurking risk. It’s really been quite an environment here the last month.

Jack: It’s funny because if you follow a lot of the macro guys right now, they’re kind of saying, “Listen, if this strait’s closed anymore, it’s gonna be a catastrophe.” But we’ve been saying that for a while now. And it might be — it might take a while for it to come — but it’s just interesting. It keeps staying closed, and the market keeps going up.

Brent: Yeah. And every day is a new alleged peace deal that doesn’t seem to come to fruition, and you keep thinking that stuff will wear thin. But even when oil spiked to 115, the market actually didn’t care at all. I had thought there would be this point where the market suddenly cares and vol would really start to expand — meaning like VIX would spike — and it just never happened. And in that context, we got just these — I’m gonna use the word biblical again — earnings. I mean, Jim Cramer at one point said, “I think the Google earnings were the best earnings he’s ever seen in his life.” I may have misquoted that, but say what you will about Jim Cramer, that was quite a statement.

Jack: That doesn’t bode well for future Google earnings though, right? Given the inverse indicator there.

Brent: Yeah. But it was actually interesting — I was at the OCC conference this past couple of days, which is a real options insider — well, not insider, but just in the weeds. And even on those panels, every conversation is just about AI, AI, AI. And you are probably like me where it’s all we talk about. So there is this major transition, and the transition to CapEx and the related AI industries is really changing things. But on that point, a lot of AI needs energy, and energy keeps getting more expensive. There are helium shortages, all these tail risks — and again, those continue to be largely ignored. So it is what it is. You can’t complain about it. You just have to adjust for it.

Jack: Yeah. It’s one of the funny things I’ve learned over my career — the market has this way of seeing through things and looking at the long-term future maybe when you don’t see it in the present.

Brent: Yeah.

Jack: And I just have to think part of this is the market is just starting to realize — and Mythos, I think, was a big turning point for this, when the semis started rallying and all that — the market is continuing to realize how world-changing AI is. To some extent, I guess, it’s willing to look through a lot of the short-term stuff. And I guess the question is how much short-term stuff is it really willing to look through? Because that’s a mistake I’ve made a million times in my career — looking at this huge thing going on in the short term, being like, “Wow, this is a huge problem,” and the market’s like, “Forget about that. Earnings over the next ten years are gonna be massive.”

Brent: Yeah. And it’s kind of funny because it was, I guess, two months ago now that we were talking about software stocks. And Citrini had put out this big piece that made global headlines — it was one of those things where your mom calls, and you’re like, “Holy cow.”

Jack: Yeah, exactly.

Brent: And software stocks actually have bounced pretty strongly. I know Team put out some earnings recently, and it’s like, okay, the death of software, at least for the moment, seems to be a little premature. So there are also these moments that are strange — and we always talk about COVID, right? — where in February 2020 everyone’s like, “Why doesn’t the market care?” And then it cared. So I struggle with those things. And the other thing I would put in that bucket is the change here is so rapid that it’s so hard to forecast what’s happening. Obviously Claude releases a new connection or a new model every other day, and that seems to change the path of all these industries.

Jack: Yeah, yeah.

Brent: And then you get a DeepSeek model that suddenly is just like, “Oh, we don’t need all this memory or TPUs anymore. It’s this other thing that we need.” So these things can shift. It’s such a dynamic industry. And on that point, Jack — we usually start off with some witty banter here. Did you see the Department of War just released a bunch of UFO files in the last ten minutes?

Jack: Oh, I didn’t see that. That’s a Conspiracy Corner thing, right?

Brent: Yeah.

Jack: Can we work with that?

Brent: I may have an alien partner presenting for me — AI or actual alien. We don’t know.

Jack: No, it could be.

Brent: Department of War says there are UFOs now, so we can digest that over the next month as well.

Jack: Yeah. And I think people want to hear us analyze that, Brent. I think we’re the first people people want to go to for analysis of that.

Brent: We could put up a Polymarket, Jack — an actual signed Iran deal or an alien. Which one comes first?

Jack: Yeah. I guess the alien is the answer, right?

Brent: Aliens are the answer. Half the people on this call would be like, “I might take the aliens.”

Jack: My concern, Brent, is Claude is just gonna announce they’re launching an options podcast pretty soon, and that’s gonna be the end of the road for us. We might as well go out with a bang.

Brent: Well, they’ve nerfed 4.7, so it could be as dumb as we are, and then people will watch it.

Jack: So you’ve actually given us a little — by the way, before we get into the real presentation — you’ve given us a little bonus slide here this time.

Brent: I realized we want to start off with a little bit of data, a little preview of just what’s going on. I just thought — everybody knows the market has just rallied viciously since the end of the month. And March 31st is always this interesting JP Morgan trade. We covered that into April OPEX, now we’re into May. But you just look at this chart of how bid the market has been. It’s been a real stock-up, vol-up environment. The rate of returns to that upside is what’s so interesting. We’ve had these very, very minor down days. But what’s so fascinating about this is that we have these situations where there’s an attack in Iran and they send missiles, but that’s below the peace threshold, and you’re like, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this.” But the market just has absolutely not cared. And that’s been in the context of these earnings results, which have just gotten amazing responses — so many of these stocks up 20% after being up 20% the prior week. The magnitude of these positive returns has just been really pretty shocking.

Jack: Yeah. It’s funny — to your point about what’s going on with the macro stuff — it seems like we launched a couple of attacks recently, and it’s like, “Well, has the war started? No, the war has actually not started.” Those were like non-war attacks or something. So everything is being framed in this view that’s just looking for the positive in the situation.

Brent: It was below the ceasefire threshold, is what it was called.

Jack: Okay. Yeah. Whatever. What is the ceasefire threshold? I don’t even know what that is.

Brent: I don’t know. But we’ve earned a bunch of comments though, Jack.

Jack: Yeah, exactly. It’s like you could have up to two attacks below the ceasefire threshold, but once it’s past three, then we’re resumed or something like that. Who knows?

Brent: You said the term “Liberation Day” in the past — in the comments related to our last episode — just you uttering that phrase was pretty interesting.

Jack: Yes. So anyway, what people want to hear from us is not any of this. What people want to hear from us is the options stuff. And this first slide gets to this idea that more and more people are using options, and so they become more and more important to people like me — the average investor — because of the flows they create.

Brent: Yeah. And I need to update this slide on options volumes because they continue to grow — zero DTE driven, et cetera. At this options conference I was just at, they were really excited about the growth in the options market. A lot of new products coming out. I know I’ve been highlighting these Monday, Wednesday, Friday expirations, but more is also coming out — obviously more names with more expirations. And then the other thing is the pattern day trader reduction, Jack. Right now, if you day trade a lot — and I know you trade once every ten years in the value space —

Jack: Yeah, exactly. I’m the opposite of a pattern day trader.

Brent: And I’m the polar opposite — where I’ll trade every five minutes, just sling it out there. But the pattern day trader rule is basically that you need $25,000 in your account to day trade as much as you want. And so that’s being removed, and a lot of the brokers are obviously quite excited about that. That could be another shot in the arm for the options market here — particularly the intra-day zero DTE space, I think it’ll be quite a boon for volumes. I believe it rolls off in the beginning of July. So just another thing that’s likely to bring more options volume into the market.

Jack: So before, if you had less than $25,000, you had a limit as to how much you could trade? Is that the —

Brent: Yeah, you could only do so many trades intra-day. Buy in the morning, sell in the afternoon counts as a day trade. So you had a limited number — I believe it was only three trades a day, something like that. And so what people were doing — and I never realized this — is if you only have $10,000 to invest, you’ll have like $1,000 at Robinhood and $1,000 at E-Trade, and then do your day trades between those accounts. I can’t believe people go to that much work and effort, but they would. So overall, the brokers really like this idea and the market makers are quite excited about it as well.

Jack: Good to know. If I decide to abandon the long-term investing and turn into a pattern day trader, now I know I can do it.

Brent: Yeah. And there’s the other thing that came up — which is a total curveball — but the idea of IPOs, right? And I think we’ll be talking about this, and the amount of liquidity that’s needed for these IPOs that are coming up: SpaceX, maybe Anthropic, OpenAI. Before it was like, “Can retail get access to participate in these IPOs?” And I think now you have this interesting moment where it’s going to be, “No, we need retail in order to get these IPOs out,” because we need all the liquidity we can get. So I think there are gonna be a lot of changes in just the sort of plumbing of the retail trading environment over the next couple of months.

Jack: This is just a tangent to a tangent, because that’s what we do on this podcast. But this whole SpaceX IPO is really interesting. Dave Nadig’s been writing about it recently, and these indexes are falling over themselves to try to violate every index rule to get this thing in there right away. Like all of them are trying to figure out how to get it into the index immediately when it comes out — whatever rules have to be thrown out the window are getting thrown out the window.

Brent: Yeah. To the point of how fast things are changing — you’re gonna have these trillion-dollar-plus IPOs coming out. And we’re gonna talk about Tesla for a second here at the end of this. There are so many changes in terms of acquisitions and things happening behind the scenes. Who’s to say exactly how this is all gonna play out? I think the one thing we can count on is we’re gonna start hearing about the SpaceX roadshow here in the next couple of months, and then we’ll be able to anchor to a date. And I think that date is actually important even for what we do, because you can imagine — and we’ve talked about it before — the energy that SpaceX is just going to drive, because there’s the AI component related to it and the space industry and just the size of it and the excitement. And I just think it’s gonna be a really fascinating moment here with an administration that is very pro-stock market, obviously. So the overall idea that the next few months feel very bullish — even though I’m gonna lay out maybe some consolidation coming up — you can sort of just feel the energy, the excitement when you look at the options industry just generally speaking, and then just the attention that this whole thing is gonna get, both on the size of the IPO but also what it represents in terms of the growth industries coming up. It’s gonna be a really interesting couple of months.

Jack: Yeah. Just one more thing before we get into the presentation on that —

Brent: Don’t forget, hold on — aliens.

Jack: Go ahead.

Brent: We have aliens.

Jack: That’s right. Yeah, we gotta make sure the aliens get in there. I’ll use that in the YouTube title somehow. But I would assume — you know, we talk about NVIDIA and Tesla all the time, and they seem to kind of alternate between being the king of the options market.

Brent: Yeah.

Jack: I would bet there’s an argument that SpaceX will become that for a period of time when it comes out. What do you think? I would think there’d be massive options volume in that.

Brent: Yeah. NVIDIA and Tesla just trade in their own ecosphere in terms of options size. If you ever look at the breakdown, SPX and SPY will trade a couple million contracts a day. Tesla and NVIDIA trade a couple million contracts a day. And then there’s this big gap between the other ones. I mean, obviously I include the Qs in there as a big complex. But if you look at the next single stock between NVIDIA and Tesla, huge options volume for any other name — even a Google or Microsoft — will be a million contracts a day, and they generally can’t sustain that. It’ll be like, okay, Micron is the big name, it’ll generate maybe a million contracts a day. So there is this different ecosystem among those two names, which generates a bunch of really interesting flows. But the idea that Tesla and SpaceX are two different entities also seems like it may not persist. So the complexion of the volume I think will really change to your point, Jack. And there’s a lot of mechanics I think are gonna be adjusted — dispersion, high-frequency trading flows, how all that’s gonna work. A lot of stuff is just gonna shift over the next three to six months.

Jack: Yeah, and there are a lot of tech insiders, by the way, that would agree with you on that — that think eventually this is just gonna be one entity. Like Tesla and SpaceX are gonna be combined. Who knows how that works or when it happens, but it seems like that’s the inevitable outcome.

Brent: Yeah. And I guess just in this age of expecting the unexpected — with the way that AI changes things and wars don’t matter and this and that — who’s to say, other than I think we are going to see a lot of change. Expect some change. Which probably means there won’t be change. So at that, we should just shut the podcast off.

Jack: Yeah. Now that I’ve gotten us completely off track and we’re already fifteen minutes in, we should probably talk about why we’re here — which is this idea that more and more people are using options. They’re generating flows, the dealers behind the scenes are, and this impacts all investors.

Brent: Right. And you and I have done a ton of content on this, so if you want to learn more about it, you can. But just very quickly — if all of us go in and buy AMC calls or calls on Tesla, the market makers who provide 90% of options liquidity end up short those calls, and they need to hedge. So if their hedge ratio is 50 delta — which is just a metric that shows the number of shares you need to buy to hedge — you can see if we rapid-fire buy 100,000 calls, that’s 5 million shares of AMC, and they may have to buy those shares very quickly. So that’s just the transmission mechanism of how the options flow makes its way into the stock market.

And then those positions have to be constantly adjusted. This is the delta we just described. Well, if the stock goes up or down, the delta changes — so the hedge ratio changes. What does that mean? They have to adjust their hedge. We measure this with a metric called gamma. That’s why we focus so much on gamma: gamma tells us how many shares of stock have to be bought or sold for a given underlying move. But the hedge ratio also changes as implied vol changes. If the VIX goes up or down, that’s signaling that dealers have to change their hedge ratio. And then lastly is time. If the stock doesn’t move and vol doesn’t change, time is always advancing. Time passing means the hedge ratios change, and that really matters when we look at something like OPEX, even if the market is quiet. And so that’s a nice segue into some of the things we’re gonna look at here in a few slides.

Jack: Yeah. For people who want a simple example — I always use GameStop as a simple example of how this whole thing works. That huge increase in GameStop, options dealers were playing a huge role in that, and they had to keep buying more and more and more as it went up and up and up.

Brent: That’s exactly right, and it becomes reflexive. And so just inside the past couple of weeks, we had Avis, right? Avis went from being an $80 stock up to nearly a $1,000 stock in the course of just a couple of weeks. And there was all this option activity around it.

Jack: Is it bankrupt or anything? Because I remember there was a bankrupt car rental place at one point that went crazy.

Brent: Hertz, I think, was one of those. And what’s so funny about this is what they do now is squeeze these stocks. And Avis actually didn’t sell any stock, to my knowledge, but you get this gamma squeeze going. AMC did this of note, and GameStop as well — you get these gamma squeezes going, people start buying the stock, it helps with the options complex, and then the company issues shares. So had Avis been able to sell a bunch of shares, they could’ve gotten a couple billion dollars of cash by issuing new shares, and that really would’ve helped the business. They couldn’t get the stock off — or didn’t, for one reason or another. But the point is the same: you get these squeezes where the options flow going, the notional values of the options complex get so big that you really just sort of turbocharge things. It’s like you have an engine in a car — well, you slap a turbocharger on it, and then you get a bunch more speed out of the whole thing.

Jack: Yeah. And to your point, it’s important to note that some people say, “Well, these stocks go up a ton and they come right back down — doesn’t really matter.” But it does matter, and one of the reasons is because of what you said. These companies are issuing shares when the stock goes up. So a lot of these companies have potentially been saved — their existence has been saved by these squeezes — because they were able to use them to raise cash.

Brent: Yeah. And as a small company, why not have in your back pocket the right to issue a bunch of shares when you sort of deem fit because of these moments? And one of the things that’s happening right now is we have Ryan Cohen, who was behind the Bed Bath & Beyond squeeze. He’s working on eBay right now, trying to seemingly squeeze that in a takeover play. And that’s kind of the interesting thing brewing right now. I like to watch those. Ryan Cohen’s been involved in so many of these dynamics — he’s CEO of GameStop right now. So you watch a name like that, and okay — what happens if eBay gets that momentum and starts to squeeze, and how does eBay react as a company? And what does Ryan Cohen do if he gets the price going and says, “Oh, I’m not gonna be able to take this company over”? Does he suddenly sell his contracts or shares? GameStop has some sort of a flex or over-the-counter options position, which is why I’ve been thinking about that.

Jack: Yeah, I didn’t watch it, but apparently he was screaming and yelling on CNBC the other day.

Brent: It was one of the most interesting interviews I’ve ever seen in the finance media, at least. It’s all over X, so you can go check that out.

Jack: So anyway — the reason we’re talking now is because we’re a week ahead of the options expiration, and options expiration can sometimes be turning points for the market. So here you’ve got the whole options cycle spelled out.

Brent: Yeah. The positions build up into the third Friday of the month typically. You see positions build up, the hedges associated with those positions build up, and then on expiration — boom — these positions expire, and the flows associated with those positions, the hedging flows, goes away.

We have some stats that suggest this is a clear impact to the market. In this case, this shows you that two-thirds of the time, the market will switch its direction. What does that mean? If we’re trending up and we have expiration — VIX expiration actually occurs after OPEX, so we call this the window — what tends to happen is, if the market is rallying, we have expiration, and the market will sell off. These are generally short-term movements — a couple of days to a couple of weeks. Market will rally, then we’ll see a sell-off after OPEX. Or market will decline, and then we’ll rally after OPEX.

And this also works in terms of volatility, which I think is key for what we’re talking about here, Jack. If we have a quiet period into expiration — what we call low realized vol — that vol will get really contracted, super squeezed, into expiration. And then after expiration, the volatility will expand. It’s sort of like, Jack, if they try to put you in a straitjacket, and then you just go Incredible Hulk and break out at expiration. That jacket gets tighter and tighter until you sort of break out.

And that’s the general idea. I think that matters here because I really think that implied vol is gonna contract pretty sharply now over the next week. And then we have a really interesting lineup around May 19 to 20 — VIX expiration and NVIDIA expiration — where I think we may finally get some consolidation. That’s kinda what I’m looking at.

Jack: So on this next slide, we’re looking at predicted volatility versus gamma.

Brent: Yeah. The idea is we measure the dealer gamma position in the SPX options, and that tells us how much volatility we should expect in the next day. There’s also evidence of this about five days out in time. The big thing is that we get these really quiet periods. We’re in something of a quiet period right now. And when can you expect that stability to end? Oftentimes it’s with expirations — because the positions that are suppressing volatility expire, and that allows the market to start to move around.

Jack: So as we get into the current expiration — my first takeaway is this is more, definitely more call-heavy than we’ve been seeing recently.

Brent: It’s extremely call-heavy. This is about as call-heavy as it gets. And that shouldn’t be surprising to anybody — because why is this? We’re measuring with delta. What does delta really mean? Delta is another way of saying: what is the stock equivalent of these options positions? A lot of times what you see is Goldman, in particular, will put out notes saying “it’s ten trillion dollars of options expiration.” What they’re doing is assuming every contract is worth a hundred shares. Well, that’s not right, because you may have a call that is 300% above where the stock is trading and about to expire — that call has zero value, but Goldman marks it as fully valued. So what I do here is ask: what is the stock equivalent? And that’s about almost a trillion dollars here, which is pretty big. But it is very call-heavy. The S&P being 91% call values is a function of the fact that we’ve rallied to all-time highs. There are a lot of calls that are deep in the money — essentially worth shares of stock. And these are very extended. So when you think about those slides before, if the market tends to rally into options expirations and when we’re really loaded up on the call side and those positions expire, we’ll oftentimes get a correction. Not a full-blown collapse — but okay, we’ve made 30% gains in the last month, let’s give a few percent back, and then we’ll see what happens.

Jack: So that’s interesting, though — that point you made before. Just because we see 91% here doesn’t necessarily mean people are going crazy reaching for calls. Because the market’s gone up a lot, that’s made the calls more valuable. So the 91% doesn’t tell us that, right? A lot of this is just the market going up and the calls gaining value.

Brent: It’s definitely part of both. Typically in the S&P, what you’re seeing in that top line is mainly the growth of the value of the calls from the fact that the market’s rallied, as opposed to necessarily some chasy momentum thing where someone says, “Micron earnings are amazing, I need to buy SanDisk, SanDisk was amazing, gotta buy AMD.” I think in the single stock side, you’ll see more of that chase behavior, as opposed to purely the growth of value from stocks going up. But a lot of it is simply the fact that the market rallied, which amps these call values up. Delta is a measure of stock equivalent, so the deeper in the money an option is, the higher the delta. If you have a call at $200 in Micron and Micron goes to $600, the delta of that option grows massively, and that reflects in these stats. So a lot of it is, to your point, Jack, a function of the fact that the market has been rallying so much.

Jack: Is there anything to take from the idea that ETFs are more balanced than the other categories here, or is that kind of a random thing?

Brent: I think that’s actually interesting. One of the things of note is there are a lot of ETFs that fall in that bucket now, and those ETFs have all sorts of different designs — triple long ETFs, triple shorts, overriding ETFs. And that bucket is very small on a relative basis — it’s only about $6.4 billion of value, less than 1% of the value of the overall US options complex. So I don’t want to read too much into that. Generally, there’s just a lot going on there. A lot of ETFs that people also don’t care about right now, like XLP. Whereas EWY — which is the Korean market ETF — is included in this, and that thing has gone just insane. It’s up 30% or something. It’s literally trading like a Micron, which is really pretty shocking.

Jack: So on this next slide, we’re getting at the size of the expiration. And this is not a quarterly expiration, so we wouldn’t expect this to be a huge one, right?

Brent: Yeah. You can see here for the SPX — the S&P 500 — it’s pretty average for a monthly expiration. Maybe even a little bit big for a regular monthly expiration. But these are the quarterly expirations that are huge, and those are more the ones that could be significant turning points for the market generally. You know, if we’re crashing into a March OPEX, can that be a low — as we just saw? Whereas in this case it’s more of a shorter-term, localized market correction, so to speak. The thing that catches my eye here is the single stock side. That’s pretty good size single stock, and it shouldn’t be surprising because we’ve had these earnings, these massive market rallies, which have really built up the value of a lot of these single stock calls. So on the single stock side, this is actually a pretty significant expiration.

Jack: So on the next chart, we’re looking at the performance here, and as you note in the chart, it’s been kinda nothing but up.

Brent: Yes. We talked about the quarterly expiration just a minute ago, and you can see here’s the March OPEX — the March quarterly OPEX is where that JP Morgan position expires. We traded down through that and then back up. So this was this major turning point for the market — it was the low. And then I was looking for a correction or a pause in market movement with the April OPEX. What you see here is there is this very big rally, and then right at April OPEX, we did plane out. Now, what happened during that planing? Huge earnings results, right? Just the CapEx explosion. And on one side you go, “Well, oil made new highs after that.” I would have bet strongly — and I did bet strongly — that if oil keeps going up, this market’s gonna go down. Oil went up, market didn’t necessarily care. But then we got these really big earnings, just the best earnings ever out of Google, I guess, and so on. Super positive earnings, and that’s really helped the market to go up.

So now when you look at this window — this is super interesting to me — because next Friday, a week from today, we have May OPEX, and that’s followed by VIX expiration and NVIDIA earnings. Today, Rubio said he’s expecting the peace deal to come in. We’ve been hearing a lot about peace deals for the last month. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. Oil’s back down around $90. The idea that oil matters as much right now — I think we can all agree it doesn’t. Maybe if it goes back over 100, people will care.

But the idea here is that I would expect us to just trend sideways into that May OPEX, and we could see a real contraction of volatility into that moment. I’m really looking at this as: okay, finally we’ll get a little trend change here, a little bit of consolidation in some of these top names. And again, I’m not thinking a 5 to 10% correction. I’m thinking more like a pause — a mild correction. And I think if you’re a bull, you want that. You want a little bit of tightening, build a new foundation for another leg higher into some of these major IPOs.

Jack: Yeah. That point you made about earnings is so important. Warren Pies — I know you talked to him in a recent video as well — has been making this point. Earnings have been really, really good. And not only that, expectations of future earnings have been rising.

Brent: Yeah.

Jack: We talked earlier about people seeing through with AI for the long term, and that’s probably part of it. But another part is just that earnings are really coming in very, very strong despite everything that’s going on. That’s a huge part of what’s driving the market.

Brent: Yeah. And there’s this other idea — Nomura put forth, and some of these other research arms — that if you’re not in these names, you have to chase these names. And so there’s a lot of kind of forced buying into the space as those names gain in size. You need that exposure, or you’re underweight this stuff. So using the word reflexivity again — there is this buyback. Warren absolutely nailed this thing and the narrative is there, but the earnings have also been good.

You know, I was looking at AMD — this thing is pricing in a 20% move after being up 75% into earnings. And after so many names had already beat, they reported and the name did move about 15 to 20%, which is roughly the implied move. But you would just assume the market would already be pricing in some of these moves. And I guess what is surprising to me is that there’s still so much upside left in a stock going into an earnings report like that.

Jack: Yeah. It’s hard to underestimate the magnitude of this move. I think the semi index had its greatest 18-day return in history as part of this thing. So it’s been a ridiculous move.

Brent: Yeah. It’s literally all time — there’s just no real comparison for it. And you have something like a Micron, which a year ago was trading for around $100, something like one times forward earnings, and now it’s not unreasonable to think that it’s a trillion-dollar company in the next couple of months at the rate this thing is going. I think it’s at $700. It’s really just pretty incredible — the industries and the values that are changing. You think about the fact that Avis is trying to sell some stock. What can this company do now when it has such a massive market cap and financing and attention? The industries are really shifting so rapidly here, kind of under our feet.

Jack: I think the only thing we need now is for Avis to rebrand itself as like an AI-powered car rental company or something, and then it’s gonna get another 10X out of it.

Brent: Ha! You talk about the memes — the Allbirds shoe company changing, and a lot of these Bitcoin miners I think have shifted. Some of that maybe makes a little bit more sense, but we’ve just had a lot of rebranding. That was popular in the crypto space too. I do think it can be valid as an industry growth story, but there is a lot of that meme behavior which just doesn’t ever feel like it ends great. And so you have the DeepSeek situation — if you remember, DeepSeek came out and really caused that big drawdown in NVIDIA, for example. It feels inevitable we’re gonna get that headline about a new advancement, or maybe OpenAI has a contract they reduce or something. All of this is riding on very clean and pure expectations about a very perfect future. And so what happens if you do get one of these random headlines when everything is so built up and leveraged to the upside with big call positions? You can have some pretty ugly downside reactions very quickly. But in this game of musical chairs, you don’t necessarily want to bet on that because you don’t know what will happen. I do think you want to be prepared mentally for a big right-tail reaction at some point that feels overextended, just because we’ve built up so much upside energy.

Jack: So in this next slide, you’re looking at the VIX expiration impact. What did you see there?

Brent: I wanted to highlight this because it’s in the context of the Iran war. The line on the chart — that VIX expiration line — is the exact moment that VIX expiration contracts expire. They expire at 9:30 in the morning, in this case on a Wednesday. And what you see here is the VIX came sharply down. This is during the Iran war situation, and it made this absolute low on the morning of 9:30, right when all these contracts expire. Put your conspiracy hat on if you want. The flows move the VIX down. All these calls expire worthless. And then what do you see right after this OPEX window? It’s this volatility expansion. Now, it’s not this giant VIX move to 30 or anything like that, but you can see that it produced this relative low in the VIX index, which ties with a little low in volatility. A week later, two weeks later, we have a peace deal or whatever it may be, and so we did revisit those lows. But you can see in the very short term, this is the fingerprint of these expirations.

And if you’re a longer-term trader, think about this: when the VIX is spiking, when would you think that maybe it starts to come down and when would you want to reallocate into some names you were waiting for? Oh — VIX expiration. Because that may mark a significant low in markets. Or what happens if the VIX makes its low at 10, some absurdly low number? When can you think about that changing? Well, think about it during a VIX expiration period — maybe then I’ll add some downside hedges because the move may be ending. An upside stock move may end with lows in VIX, for example. So I think it’s an important thing to point out, just to show the fingerprint of these expirations in a situation like this.

Jack: So before we look forward, we always like to look back and hold ourselves accountable for what we said — other than our macro takes, which we give ourselves a pass for. But what did we talk about last time?

Brent: A lot of this was about oil. What we did flag — in this same order — was the change in VIX and oil. Previously in March, we were talking about the correlation between oil and VIX — we were all just oil derivative traders. And that relationship really started to break down in April. Oil was still going higher, and VIX as a measure of volatility — as a measure of hedging equities — just did not care. That correlation really started to break down.

Here’s another example. We had VIX versus oil futures. Oil broke back over the $110 mark not all that long ago. And the equity market really didn’t have much of a reaction — just didn’t seem to care at all. So in April, we did see this breakdown in that relationship. Now, as a responsible investor, I was suggesting you should maintain tail risk here and be worried about this left tail — with the idea that oil would hit a level where suddenly the equity market would have that kind of COVID reaction, and we would just snap and move down.

Certainly, the very strong earnings out of these tech companies absolutely moved the market up. But I would say even irrespective of that, the market never really seemed to care. It’s just sort of this idea — well, we’ll get a deal, and if you want to call that the Trump taco or that Trump will negotiate us through this or whatever — the market really didn’t react, which was significant.

We talked about the oil curve as the reason why the market wasn’t reacting to these higher prices — simply because maybe people are saying, “Look, if oil remains this high, then we’ll have demand destruction, and so longer-dated oil will just never matter.” And so VIX coming down despite the war continued. And now when we look at it, maybe it’s right, because there hasn’t been that much engagement in war and oil is kind of in the $90 to $100 range, so it’s not that big a deal.

We saw one of the biggest drops in the VIX ever. When you’re at the 25 to 30 level, we had just an epic decline in the VIX — one of the biggest moves you’ve ever seen over the last twenty years. VIX dropping from the 25 to 20 level was the second biggest decline from that level ever. The only time before that was a Fed surprise rate cut that dropped vol.

So there are a lot of “never seen before” kinds of things happening. Market makers were short upside VIX and volatility, so vol did get spicy. We were worried about the left tail — the downside equity move. We saw realized equity vol start to peak up. And all these signs were like, “Be careful of this left tail. Be careful of this left tail.” But between the market not caring about oil and never biting on that downside equity move, we saw a right-tail equity move — 28% returns in the NASDAQ, 100-plus percent move in AMD over the last month. Just this giant move to the other side as vol collapsed. Vol collapsing helps the market to rally. And the second factor is obviously just the repricing and upside in anything related to AI and tech.

And so again, a really fascinating situation. Clearly, the idea of just going full hog into the right tail on all these tech names was not something I saw. And I think if you look back and say, “Well, what would you have to say the same things again?” Because when you’re watching this stuff and you’re saying “The market’s not pricing in this left tail — the drop in stocks — we really should be careful,” I still think that was the prudent way to go about it and to be cautious there. The fact that the market never reacted to what seemed like a pretty significant event is something I certainly was wrong on.

Jack: You know what’s been interesting — and it’s not in the presentation — but this idea that at the beginning of the year, we were seeing sort of the broadening play. The average stock was beating the big stocks. Small caps were outperforming, international was outperforming. And the moment the war started, all of that flipped. Now it’s basically right back to the tech market you’ve had all these years. And who knows if that’ll last, but it’s been an interesting change.

Brent: Yeah, totally right. And there was a rate component to this — we saw the 20-year go over 5%, which some of the banks were saying is the Maginot Line — cross it and we’re all in trouble. But the market doesn’t care right now. CapEx is washing away a lot of these things that are a little tricky. And I’m not here to argue that’s right or wrong — you trade the market you’re given, and all that is fine. But you want to find these transition points, because if you can find the transition point and be prepared for when the market changes its direction — both from a price perspective but also a volatility perspective — that’s where a lot of money can be made.

This was also looking at how low the 0DTE prices were on a daily basis. We’ve seen some of this recently — you have an FOMC day, for example, and the market is pricing in on the 0DTE about 40 bps of movement. And you go, “Well, there is an FOMC day today,” and there’s a peace deal later, and the market is just like, “Whatever — we just don’t care.” And I think a lot of that is, well, why should we care when there are tokens to produce? So don’t argue with it. Just understand the thing you’re given.

Jack: Yeah. And on this next slide, this was something we were talking about last time — we didn’t know what the earnings were gonna be. Now we kinda know more, and they’ve been really good.

Brent: Yeah. They’ve reinforced the story. And if you’re gonna have a summary of what has happened over the last month, it’s: the tail risk to the downside from oil didn’t matter, and the tail risk to the upside from earnings 100% mattered. We still have NVIDIA coming up on the 20th, which is obviously something the market will watch closely.

Jack: So is there anything else on the previous one before we get into the current expiration?

Brent: Yeah, I just wanted to cover this because it’s our compass map. I know this is one you like, Jack. If you’re on the right side of this chart, that’s when people are leaning into calls — they want to position for upside, they’re not really worried about downside risk, they’re simply chasing. If you’re on the left side, two interesting things: puts are more bid than calls, so people want that downside. And the higher we are on the chart, the higher the implied vol is — you’re basically in a crash protection position. The second thing is all these points are pretty well concentrated on this chart. What does this mean? Across the equity space, people are in a bearish position. This was the look into April OPEX, which is pretty fascinating. I have an update on this chart, so remember what this looks like — we’re gonna see what it looks like now here in a second. You’ll see why this is a pretty interesting and amazing chart.

Jack: So as we move forward to May, you have this chart here showing dealers supporting the S&P.

Brent: Yeah. And these were the projections from last time. The vol premium was gone. What happened? The premium was gone — realized vol came in because people thought, “Okay, the peace deal is really coming.” That allows more premium to build up when the Iran thing is totally gone. The single stocks relative to the cheap index side was one thing that absolutely repriced — puts were cheap, calls got rich. That absolutely came to fruition. And then the idea that hedge protection was rolled down — it was — but we simply did not decline. So certainly a mixed bag out of the views I had from April.

But now let’s look at May. This is a gamma chart. And if you just look at this — these positive bars are supporting positions in the S&P. We’re right about here today. Short-dated options are gonna offer resistance here and support here. We call this positive gamma. It’s like the straitjacket on the market. Now, what’s interesting about this line is it’s just the summary of gamma. The curves are the sum of gamma. Where you see curves should be support and resistance lines for the S&P. Does that make sense?

Jack: Yes, it does.

Brent: Okay. So what is the dashed line? The dashed line is if you take out today’s expiration flow. And what do you note by that, Jack? We go from positive on this axis to negative on this axis if you remove today’s positions. So what happens now in the S&P is that the positioning is very transient — it’s here today, and it’s gone tomorrow. But you get these trends, right, where every day the zero-DTE people come in because they go, “The tail risk doesn’t matter. There’s no risk for today. I’m gonna sell a call, sell a put.” And then you get the unknown — a bank collapse, a war, whatever — and then the zero-DTE flow goes away. So you get this persistent short-dated call selling, and it matters up until it doesn’t. I’ll show you why on the next slide.

This is another view of the same thing. The blue on this chart is positive gamma — that means market makers are long options and have positive gamma. If they have positive gamma, they should be supporting the market. Look how deep and concentrated those positions are for zero DTE. That was the seventh. And then the next day, you can see that shade of blue gets lighter — there’s less positive gamma. So market opens today, people come in intraday and sell a bunch of calls and puts, which would make that chart for today brighter blue — more supportive of the market or more restrictive of movement.

And then what you see here is May OPEX. At May OPEX, you remove a whole bunch of gamma, and you can see the way the chart changes color. The gamma is still positive, just much less supportive of the market versus today. You can see how this changes over time — it’s very short in concentration, and the monthly OPEX also has an impact.

The other thing I just want to note is when you go farther out in time, there is this negative gamma position. What does that mean? The market is more free to move about. And the reason I think this matters is that headlines for the next ten days probably aren’t gonna matter very much unless it’s a really major headline. Unless a UFO lands, this market is in this very supportive position up until May OPEX. At May OPEX, the positions shift. Then we also have VIX expiration, and then NVIDIA earnings. And so the idea that we’re now more free — things are less restrictive — really comes into play.

Now, historically, when we’re really big into expiration and the equity market is really rallying, we’ll have that downside consolidation. But maybe NVIDIA has just the best earnings ever and it reinforces the story in the space, and then we have another major breakout. So the idea here is looking for an expansion in vol. I would assume that would bring some possibly equity market correction. But some of that weighs on what happens with NVIDIA and whether we actually get a signed piece of paper on the Iran deal. So there’s some nuance here. But the big thing is: expect contraction over the next ten days, then an expansion, and then figuring out which way to lean into that expansion — particularly around May 20.

Jack: So the idea is — as we clear the expiration and as time passes, we’re gonna be more free to move, but in both directions. And obviously, what happens with NVIDIA and all this other news is gonna determine which way we go.

Brent: That’s right. First principle: volatility will go from being contracted to expansion. Now, vol can mean a stock-up, vol-up environment, or a stock-down, VIX-spike environment. So which one will I position for? And if I’m a zero-DTE trader, I don’t want to sell all these options if I think vol is gonna expand. So I may back away, which changes the liquidity profile a little bit until it’s all clear and I’ll get back in the pool. These are the dynamics that are all kind of shifting over the next ten to fifteen days.

Jack: And on this next slide, we’re looking at gamma in single stocks.

Brent: Yes. This is a new chart we started to produce here. What I did is sum the gamma across all the top 100 stocks in the S&P. And what’s fascinating — and I don’t think a lot of people understand this — is that when you look at the gamma positioning in NVIDIA, Tesla, Apple, Amazon, et cetera, there’s a ton of dealer positive gamma. How is that generated? It’s generated from people selling calls and selling puts in these top names. And what is that flow? A lot of that flow is: people own NVIDIA, they own Apple, but they want to generate more yield. So what do they do? They systematically sell calls. And these positive gamma complexes are really big in these top names.

And I think part of the reason when you look at an Amazon earnings — which are really good — and the stock doesn’t have just a really big reaction, or Microsoft and Apple have a sort of negative reaction, and then all of a sudden the move stops and they’re just supported... it’s because of this. It’s this supportive positioning, and you can see it persists out in time.

So it’s not as big as the S&P complex, but when you look at the top stocks, this is how the market makers are positioned: “Okay, S&P — I’m gonna buy the dip and sell the rip. What about single stocks? Same thing. I’m gonna buy the dip and sell the rip, and so I’m gonna be supportive of the market.” Why doesn’t Iran matter that much? Well, the positioning really didn’t shift. Is that the whole story? No, but I think it’s a big contributor.

Now, when you look at some of the other names — AMD, Micron, SanDisk — it doesn’t look like this. They’re more red. What does red mean? That means people are buying AMD and SanDisk calls. So the dealers are short, and you get a lot more relative volatility out of those names. Short gamma, that is.

Jack: So this next one is crazy. This is SPX call volume over time, and — yeah — when you look at it this way, the spike is massive.

Brent: Yeah. Goldman just put this out two days ago. They were noting it was the biggest call volume day ever for the SPX, measured in notional value. You look at the convexity of this — it speaks to the growth in options over time. And there are a bunch of other implications a lot of people would take away from this chart. But when I show you this next chart, Jack — I know you haven’t seen it yet — I think you kind of go “Oh,” and draw back, because we spend a lot of time talking about zero DTE and what the impacts of it are, and even at the options industry conference they sort of want to downplay the impact of this stuff.

What does “largest notional ever” actually mean? That’s just a measure of total call volume. Well, how do you break that volume down? That’s what I did here, and this is the type of thing we see a lot. So this was the record day, and on that day we had an 18,000-lot call spread — huge size, zero DTE. 60% of that volume was just in the zero-DTE bucket. The second thing you can see is it was all around 1% at the money. And the point is: it’s near-term options. Zero DTE explains 60% of that chart we just saw. The other 16% to 20% is in the one-to-seven-days-to-expiration bucket.

So why does that matter? Because if most of that volume was people buying December calls, or August calls, betting that “SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, the whole story, the peace deal — I need August exposure because this thing’s gonna go crazy,” that tells a totally different story than people piling into the short-dated chase. And I would never want to short a market — or I’d be very reluctant to — if people are piling into longer-dated calls. Why? Because as those calls grow in value, dealer hedging flows have to keep buying the stocks. And if I know those positions aren’t gonna go away for a couple of months, that’s a dynamic that should remain in play. But if that dynamic is based on today to maybe tomorrow, how confident do I feel about chasing that position? Those could be transient positions that are here this second and gone the next, and that invokes a lot of local volatility.

Jack: Yeah. That’s eye-opening for me, because we’ve talked about how big zero DTE is a lot. But seeing it like this — how much of the growth is zero DTE — is pretty eye-opening for somebody outside the options space.

Brent: Yeah. And options are leverage. The more short-term options you have, you have this leverage that is here right now, gone the next. And the reason I think this is also so critical is — even if you’re a longer-term investor and you’re seeing the rate of change of a name like a Micron or an AMD or even the S&P where you go, “This is so much so fast, and a lot of it’s short-dated flow” — you don’t want to bet on that necessarily persisting. So you can still have your trend being lower left to upper right, but amongst that is this rate of change that can be really wild. And can you tactically take advantage of that? When you’re like, “All of this flow is short-dated — it probably means we’re due for a correction, a reversion to the mean — so I can sell some calls here or lighten up on this position and try to buy back some later.” Or you can use the correction — knowing that the correction is based on volume reducing and we are too far extended — as an opportunity to buy that dip with a little more confidence, if you believe the options market-induced leverage going away was the cause.

Jack: So on this next chart, we’re looking at call volume in semis, AI, and memory.

Brent: Yes. And to be honest — when I was building this chart, I would’ve expected the single stock stuff to be new highs. But what you see here is that we’re actually kind of where we were last September, last November, in terms of those call volumes in these top names. The size of certain names has changed a little bit — Intel obviously picking up a bigger piece of the pie, et cetera. But this is not... I would’ve expected really big new highs in the semi AI type space. It is indeed very high call volume. I thought we would have had a little bit more, if I’m being honest. But still, you can see there’s been a really big surge here since late May through April, kind of as you’d expect given some of these earnings. Is this sustainable? I don’t know. You can see how quickly some of these call volumes can dry up, and that is generally going to be associated with the stocks coming back in or having a correction.

Jack: So this next one — we’re looking at the vol premium. And it wasn’t too long ago we had a historic vol premium, but it still seems like it’s somewhat above average here.

Brent: Yeah. I spent a second talking about our projection from April into this month and said that the vol premium was gone. What did I mean by that? You can look at the vol premium right here. The idea is: if you have a war that people are worried about, you can’t have the VIX go to 10, or you shouldn’t. The VIX should hold a premium to wherever realized vol is trading. Realized vol is just how much has the S&P been moving — and how much it’s been moving is the best barometer for what’s going to happen tomorrow. So if realized vol on the S&P is at 15, the VIX should have a premium to that — maybe at 20.

What we had happen in April was realized vol was around 12, 13, 15, and the VIX was basically on top of it. There was no real premium, which led me to say there’s no real vol premium — because the VIX was simply pricing in the amount of movement we’d had. That doesn’t make sense if you have to worry about the Iran war.

What you can see is happening now is realized vol on the S&P is coming down. The ranges in the market are starting to tighten. I think that realized vol is going to continue to contract into expiration. If the realized vol goes to 10, 8, 6 — shouldn’t the VIX come down? And if the VIX comes down, that’s this flow we call VANA, which helps keep the market supported. So if realized vol comes down, that gives space for the VIX to come down, and that can be kind of a supportive dynamic into that May 15 to 20 period when we have VIX expiration and equity expiration.

Jack: So this next one — you mentioned earlier that this chart was going to look very, very different, and it does.

Brent: Yeah. So if you remember — all of these stocks were right here, all highly concentrated. The correlation was very high. What did that mean? If you’re worried about oil prices and the impact on credit markets, you don’t really care about owning Apple versus IWM versus Tesla, because you’re worried about whether equities are going to crash. And so in this case, what we have is dispersion. The dispersion is: I need to own whatever is related to the AI chase, or the hardware name that matters the most. I’m gonna buy that stock, chase into this very idiosyncratic corner of the equity market, and I’m only gonna do that if I believe equities writ large are very stable.

So this is the dispersion of the equity space — meaning I’m gonna chase all of these different names. Just to bring this back together: a slight venue change here for me. This type of dispersion only happens in very bullish equity environments. Because in order to go into an idiosyncratic idea in the stocks and chase them to very high call prices — which is what we see — you have to have a very safe feeling about the equity market writ large. And so this is what we’re seeing. This is what happens in peak bulls, is the way I would frame this. We went from incredibly bearish positioning to very bullish positioning.

Jack: And on this next one, we’re looking at oil and volatility.

Brent: Yeah. And I want to just give a final nod here. This morning, Rubio says we’re getting a peace deal. I hope we get a peace deal and that everything just goes back to normal. I also don’t want to pay five dollars in gas anymore, Jack, probably like you, when you fill up. It’s expensive. So you want oil prices to come down and peace to come. That’s great. That being said, what you see here is this kind of weird moment where we had negative correlation between the S&P and oil prices. What does that mean? Oil prices rip, S&P goes down. And you can see over time the relationship between these changes. But when you have these geopolitical situations where you really get a giant rate of change in oil, that is where you generally see the inverse correlation. So if crude goes to $115, you would expect stocks to have a pretty nasty reaction to that.

But what has happened now over the last couple of days — as you can see here — is they’ve moved to a positive correlation, which is weird, because there’s not actually a peace deal and oil is not down at $50 — we’re still in the $95 to $100 area. So we’ve actually moved to positive correlation. When oil is going up, so are stocks. And I think what’s interesting is that when you read a lot of the bank notes recently — and the theme over the last month — when oil is going up, stocks are going up. But what is the trade you want to put on right now? You want to be long energy, long semis. Because the energy tail is the Iran situation, but also — what does all of AI need? More energy. So there’s this weird barbell strategy where instead of hedging with VIX options or equity puts, you just buy oil or energy-related names as your hedge. If Iran does get worse, God forbid, what happens? Your hardware stocks are supported by the fact that you’re long this energy stuff.

Jack: So this next one is oil and the VIX, and that’s something I would expect to have nothing to do with each other unless you have some sort of crisis situation — and then they have a lot to do with each other.

Brent: Yeah. And the stats nerds are going to throw their shoe at the screen based on that regression line. Just to prevent them from taking their shoe off — generally these two are totally unrelated to each other. They have absolutely been related to each other in recent weeks and months. And the reason I show this is because the black dots are just the last ten days. The thing you see here is that the relationship has changed. It certainly pivoted and shifted around a lot. So what does this mean? Stock up, VIX up still seems to be in play. So even though the S&P equity price is now positively correlated with oil, we still see vol negatively correlated with oil. When oil goes down, VIX comes down. That is still in play, which is a very interesting dynamic. Normally you would expect when the equity market goes up, vol comes down. But here it’s this strange subtle nuance — a lot of stock up, vol up positioning right now.

And I think what’s gonna happen, as we talk about transition change, is vol is really gonna start to concentrate pretty sharply here, which may change this oil-VIX correlation as well as the equity-oil correlation — because we have this OPEX that’s really gonna suppress vol. Seems like we’re gonna have a peace deal, so maybe the rate of change in oil is gonna slow. So I think we may largely unlink from the oil complex now, and it may be something we don’t talk about much from the May to June OPEX cycle.

Jack: So this last slide — speaking of correlation — is this COR1M that we’ve talked about a lot before. And when we’ve hit this red line in the past, it hasn’t been a great thing for markets.

Brent: Yeah. And the correlation on this chart is very related to the dispersion chart we just saw. The more dispersed and to the right we get on that chart, the lower we go on this COR1M.

COR1M is a Cboe metric — anyone can look it up. It measures implied vol in single stocks relative to the index. Generally what happens is single stock calls get bid up because people are buying them and chasing, and then index vol gets sold. What we end up seeing then is COR1M really drops. And this is my favorite metric because when we get below eight, we seem to have these really ugly equity periods in the kind of two-to-three-week timeframe. Generally what happens when I see COR1M go below eight: I’ll buy one or two month S&P puts as a hedge.

If we can get sub-eight on this metric around May 19 to 20 — right into that NVIDIA earnings moment — and vol has been really concentrated, VIX makes a low, and this metric gets sub-eight, and we have NVIDIA earnings as this transition period that’s gonna change positioning... I think that is like a bat signal for wanting to own some hedge protection, putting on some downside bets, or just trying to lock up some equity gains. If we get this signal flashing below eight into that OPEX and NVIDIA earnings period — that’s what I’m really watching and paying attention to right now. We may not drift that low, which simply tells me we’re not fully overbought in the options space. But fully overbought in the options space will be signaled if COR1M goes below eight.

Jack: So as we wrap up here, you’ve got your new summary slide, which I love. It gives us the takeaways from everything we’ve talked about.

Brent: Yeah. And I want to be very clear about this stuff. COR1M below eight is the bat signal. We may or may not hit that. But if we do, I’m really looking at that. The window for vol expansion is next week — so another ten days of relative calm I think is true.

If you look at Tesla over the last couple of days, the calls are very, very cheap. The cheapest calls around. And they’ve started to move up towards the call skew — they’ve gone from put skew to call skew, and you’re seeing that name start to wake up. So what other names have lagged? Can I get exposure to those names over this next week? I don’t want to chase AMD anymore — what else has not really moved up that much that I can start to chase? I think we’re gonna start to see some of that environment. And again, IV continuing to trend lower — I think the market is gonna get less volatile here. That goes for gains as well as sells. Now, if we get an actual signed peace deal on Iran, maybe we get one more little pop. But I think the chase in the tech stuff is gonna cool off here a little bit as people await NVIDIA earnings.

Jack: So as we wrap up here, Brent, we’ve given people everything they could ask for, right? We’ve told them aliens are real, we’ve given them some bad macro takes, and we’ve even given them some well-informed options analysis along the way.

Brent: Thank you. A lot of poor macro takes, covering about half of it. Aliens covering ten percent. And then maybe some insights.

Jack: And then some options stuff in the middle.

Brent: We could have made this about thirty seconds long.

Jack: Well, hopefully the viewers stuck with us. If you did, we appreciate it, and thank you everybody for joining us. We’ll see you next time.