Another wild ride today on the "will-they won't-they" tariff roller coaster. I could not make heads or tails of which way things were going to go before the open, which is never a good sign. I was not expecting NVDA to fall the way they did, but was able to catch some momentum there, since I believe more financial publications are going to be beating the bad-news-drum on AI hardware:

As US chip darlings struggle, some bet on software as next big AI play

Which is basically what I was saying in The AI Trade Is Dead, while I do believe the software differentiator is going to be where investment and value is going to flow next, I'm not quite sure we're there yet.

I tried something different today in that I game into the open with a game-plan of the symbols I was going to trade, where I have seen the most volatility and value in the past few days, and I queued up some orders with prices way off of the close from yesterday. The plan was to edit these orders as momentum started to swing one way or the other, which worked but I found an unexpected psychological downside.

Having the orders queued up made me want to trade the symbol even if the momentum didn't look right, or the entry was wrong. As a consequence, I ended up scuttling my early gains by trying to force something to happen with Broadcom (AVGO).

I did hit my mental stop and then had to put in an actual stop because the momentum kept swinging the wrong direction. Much to my chagrin those options would have gone green later in the session, but that's kind of irrelevant if the momentum swings such that it breaks my own rules of engagement.

I stemmed the losses by trading longer than I otherwise would have, finding good momentum plays throughout the day, despite some largely horizontal trading. I am seeing a pretty consistent rally into the close regardless of the day for many of these equities which means I should be packing it in before the three o'clock hour.

Log

• Checked the symbols right after waking up to see that Tesla (TSLA), Nvidia (NVDA), Broadcom (AVGO), and a few other symbols I track had fallen quite a bit. Went looking for news about reciprocal tariffs or something like that, nothing. Haven't found the reason why the rally into the close yesterday seems to have disappeared for some of these equities.
• Best I can tell is that Marvell Technologies reporting disappointing outlook is implicated but not necessarily the cause here. Maybe others are realizing the AI trade is dead.
• I intended to buy puts on MongoDB (MDB) previously, and have them on my watch list today but they're starting the day down 20% from close yesterday; not sure if there's more room to drop there. On top of the, the options interest looks to be lousy, some strike prices have no open interest. Probably not enough volume there to work either way.
• Queuing up a bunch of orders on my watch list with purchase prices well below the current option price.. It's easier for me to quickly modify orders than to create them. Hoping this helps catch things today.
• Another good reminder to set my stops in place. Took a bigger loss than I should have because I set a "mental stop" rather than a hard stop, and didn't catch the plunge.
• Noticing that Thursdays are tricky to pick the options expiration 8 or 15 days out. In some cases the 15 day options simply don't move with enough momentum.
• The options price action on SMCI stopped being interesting around noon, despite some minor fluctuations. The volatility in TSLA and NVDA still providing a lot of interesting movement.
• Misjudged the trend because I was distracted this morning with AVGO, put myself in the red for the day and spent the rest of the day fighting my way back. Options activity for AVGO isn't too busy despite the high premiums.