Boy did I stop out hard today.

Unexpected news can bite ya hard with options trading. Tesla (TSLA) was already a curious trade today since it is unclear whether tariffs are good or bad for the company. Then Politico broke a story about Musk on his way out of the administration and Tesla bulls loved that. Those with TSLA puts did not love that. Then an alpaca out of fucking nowhere and Amazon (AMZN) apparently has a bid to buy TikTok?

I went into the session expecting a lot of sideways trading and tug-of-war due to the looming tariffs announcements after the close, but instead two completely unexpected news stories sunk my battleship.

After closing the terminal I have been reflecting on some comments I heard by one analyst talking about how a lot of the volatility was priced in a couple weeks ago, which makes me wonder if my strategy is now outdated and needs to be re-assessed.

Log

• Queued up orders for AAPL, SMCI, NVDA, TSLA, AVGO, and AMD.
• Foolishly bought Amazon (AMZN) and didn't exit soon enough thinking the worm would turn.
• Good plays off Tesla (TSLA), started to trade sideways after the open with low volume, so stepped back from it.
• Holding SMCI long puts longer than I typically would because I've seen this pattern of the first hour spiking and then deteriorating.
• Big spike down at 11am, interesting.
• Kept burning myself on Tesla (TSLA), hard to predict the swings there.
• Exited SMCI eventually with profit, so that was nice. Probably could have held a little longer successfully.
• Tossing in some call options here and there to pick up on upswings.
• NVDA has a fair bit of volume, the competition there is interesting to observe. Trading similarly to SMCI. Not sure which is leading whicsh.
• AAPL and AMZN are riding together it looks like.
• New York Times story about Amazon (AMZN) trying to buy Tiktok broke after I had placed a long put on them, oof!
• Unexpected optimism torpedoed all my put positions. Damn.