The week is off to an optimistic step, as allegedly tariffs may be more targeted. I cannot underscore allegedly because reading the tea leaves from Washington D.C. is not a reliable source of market information. The pre-market continued some of the rally from Friday in the tech and semiconductor space.

My strategy wasn't terribly different than usual with the optimism in the market. Most of what I was searching for was over-eager bidding up of some equities in the frenzy of optimism.

There were some challenging trades in today's session with SMCI, which was downgraded by Goldman Sachs this morning. I have mentioned before my skepticism of SMCI's books, practices, and general market viability. As such, I tend to take bearish/pessimistic trades out when the opportunity presents itself. I was expecting it to take a down-turn, but the downturn wasn't as sustained as I expected, leading my positions to go into a scary red territory before coming back into the money. Because the market is really uncertain what to do with SMCI, there were plenty of opportunities throughout the day to carry out some long puts.

The tech rally has put me in a less-than-ideal position with the covered call options I have sold on Datadog (DDOG), AMD, and Shopify (SHOP). I'm pretty far out of the money today, but ti remains to be seen how the week evolves with what one commenter referred to "policy volatility" when it comes to the Trump White House.

Worst case scenario I may have to take a loss on Friday to avoid these covered calls getting exercised, but it is too early to worry about that.

I heard on Bloomberg this morning that Tesla (TSLA) retail investors have poured over 8 billion into buying the stock over the past couple weeks. I don't think this buying was driven by the comments from the Commerce Secretary or necessarily the White House Auto Mall advertisement, as I discussed over the weekend. I think retail investors are more savvy and organized than media outlets tend to give credit and are largely looking for quick gains off of buying the dip.

Similar to my stance on SMCI, I believe TSLA is over-valued and generally lousy as a company. This morning there was news about the Chinese EV maker BYD with massive sales numbers. In any just and sane world, investors would look at Tesla in comparison and start selling off. The under-performance by Tesla is just incredible. Last week Cybertrucks were recalled, paltry deliveries reported, and still today the stock went up.

Despite my beliefs about the company, my approach to Tesla is to treat it as a technology stock with strong volatility that is ideal for momentum trading. As such, I was still able to trade long puts successfully on the fluctuations today.

Emotionally I might want to see the company crash and burn, but hope is not a strategy.

Log

• Saw SMCI dropping in pre-market because of analyst ratings changes, decided to focus heavily on them.
• AMD and other semiconductors rose quite a bit on alleged exemptions, was able to turn that volatility into something promising.
• Didn't hold on some NVDA options as long as I should have, ended up with a small loss instead of a medium gain. Darn.
• General market rally has Shopify (SHOP) up quite a bit! My covered calls are likely to get exercised this week, which is okay.
• Target rich environment today, doing lots more volume than I was last week.
• Experimenting with setting up some stop (STP) orders on some options so I can set it and forget it to a certain extent.