The only thing I am expecting to be liberated tomorrow is capital from the markets. The refrain from a bunch of people I have seen commenting on the "tariff risk" is not actually the tariffs that are the risk: it's the constantly changing rules. If the overhead is 20% but you are confident that it will be 20% then you can price around it, but the risks are in total uncertainty as the White House changes direction on a daily basis.

These are not serious people.

As a consequence there is tremendous thrash in the markets for a couple reasons:

• Nobody knows where things are going. What is going to stick, where the rules are going to change, what the reaction from other economies is going to be.
• Dip buyers eager to get great deals on depressed prices.
• Skeptics who believe prices are over-inflated.

In order to not make the same mistakes as yesterday I traded the open where there was some more predictable volatility and then left for the day.

Right before the close yesterday I observed a really wild imbalance spike across a lot of equities which I attributed to the JP Morgan Hedged Equity Fund (JHEQX) activty.

During today's session I had some long put positions in SMCI which I was watching like a hawk to determine when I could close it and I saw increbile shifts in bid/ask prices on SMCI which looked like my terminal was glitching out. Spreading between about 2.00 and 2.50 on my options price view the stock shifted wildly at about the 10:00 am mark in the chart below.

The volume didn't appear to be that significantly different from the candles prior but I have had my suspicions that SMCI trades like a meme stock and so there may have been a large number of retail traders acting on resistance at the 34.50 mark. Surely there was some high-frequency trading activity too.

I don't typically see wild market anomalies but to observe two in as many days feels somehow special and interesting.

Log

• Popped awake ready to rock and roll this morning, the AMD long put I sold right at the close yesterday motivated me awake and into the morning news cycle.
• A number of semiconductors nose-dived in pre-market, this will usually recover in the first couple minutes of the open, so not something I want to play.
• Didn't do anything too stupid on the open had a number of successful trades.
• Cut some losses on positions with Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) which weren't turning south fast enough. Eventually they did, but I wouldn't have made out much there. Better to reallocate the capital elsewhere.
• Correctly identified a bottom on Amazon (AMZN) and was able to trade off of a call option, which is not something I typically do.
• While trading volatility on SMCI I saw spreads go absolutely nuts for about a minute as either retail traders or high-frequency traders blasted the exchange with bids.
• Decided the volatility was becoming unpredictable for me and left the terminal after a bit into the open.