Schadenfreude is not explicitly my trading strategy but today I knew at the open that I was going to be in a good position to make big downside bets. The announcements that I mentioned yesterday from Alibaba and the White House were exacerbated in the afternoon by President Trump announcing auto tariffs happening sooner, or more aggressively, or something unexpected? Honestly it's hard to follow what the current score on economic sabotage from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave is at any given point in time.

I digress.

Microsoft abandoned data center projects which I was certain would continue to drag on the semiconductor space, which tends to drag all of tech down. AMD was also downgraded.

Over the past few weeks I have been queueing up stub trades on put options before the open so that I can more rapidly act when I see momentum. Today was slightly different in that I was expecting stocks to move bigly and I wanted to capitalize on the opportunity. My normal option for AMD for example might be two weeks out, a single put option, and a strike price at $1.00. Instead I set up a bigger deal size and pre-filled a price close to where I expected them to open.

The other orders I queued up also were pre-filled larger than my default of 1.

My open was highly aggressive but once I felt comfortably closing out my positions in the green, I packed up for the day. Down days are risky because there can be sudden and surprising reversals of momentum as dip buyers or algorithmic trades. I have burned myself being overaggressive on downward momentum in the past, so that's progress! To support that judgement, I can return to the price of Tesla (TSLA), which as I write this is noticeably higher than where I profitably exited my put options.

Get in, get the money, get out.

Log

• There was more negative news yesterday on potential data center oversupply as Microsoft abandoned data center projects.
• I woke up to news of analyst downgrades of AMD which I knew were going to push the stock price lower right off the bell. They had already fallen a couple of dollars in the overnight trading.
• Aggressively got all the trades I felt like putting through as quickly as possible, probably turned everything around in the first 10 minutes of the session.
• My covered calls are all looking positive today, which is good but also not good because the stocks I am long on are taking a dip.
• Popped back online a bit later and found some smaller opportunities with Amazon (AMZN) and Tesla (TSLA).