The stock market has continued to make new all-time highs, accompanied by strong internal indicators. Eventually, overbought conditions may become confirmed sell signals, but so far that x hasn't been the case.
$SPX has support at 6150 (the previous highs), 6020-6060 (the highest open gap on the chart), and 5920. If it were to fall below 5920 then the $SPX chart would no longer be bullish, but we are not looking for that to happen.
The stock market, has continued to rise, registering new all-time highs repeatedly. It appears that the current breakout to new all-time highs is stronger than the failed one of last February. There is support at 6150 (the old highs), 6020 (the highest circled gap on the accompanying $SPX chart in Figure 1), and 5920. A pullback below 5920 would negate the current upside breakout, but I don't expect that to happen.
Apple ($AAPL) has just triggered a buy signal based on our weighted put-call ratio, one of our more reliable sentiment-based indicators for this stock. Historically, these signals have generally preceded intermediate-term rallies in $AAPL, and the current setup looks promising.
Periodically we publish the chart below, which shows the $VIX composite from 1989 through some more current date – 12/31/24 in this case. We usually update this chart annually, because it is meant to give some insight as to where $VIX goes at what time of the year.
$LYFT has been a classic underperformer since its IPO, trending steadily lower for years. But recently, it gave bulls a reason to pay attention: a weekly MVB Buy signal.
While the long-term downtrend hasn’t fully reversed, there are signs of accumulation under the surface. On the weekly chart (above), you’ll see the recent MVB Buy signal suggesting the tide may be starting to shift.
$RDDT issued its first weekly McMillan Volatility Band (MVB) Buy signal (chart above) this week since being listed—an encouraging development for bullish traders watching the stock's momentum.
On the daily chart (below), $RDDT broke out above the key resistance area near 130, successfully retested that breakout level, and has since resumed its move higher. This kind of confirmation—weekly and daily alignment—is what makes the MVB indicator so valuable.
Stocks sold off on the Israel-Iran conflict, but only modestly as it appeared that traders were most worried about the U.S. directly entering the conflict which hasn't happened. Moreover, there has not been any particular disruption in the flow of oil.
YieldMax has a number of ETFs, in which they are generally long synthetic stock (long call, short put with the same terms) and then they sell call credit spreads, out-of-the-money against that synthetic stock. Credit balances are invested in T-Bills (or equivalent) and dividends are paid monthly. We looked at MSTY, CONY, NVDY, and TSLY, which have as their underlyings MSTR, COIN, NVDA, and TSLA, respectively. Our conclusion was that these are attractive approaches to a taxable income stream as long as you have faith in the underlying – which is Bitcoin in the cases of MSTR and COIN.
A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to students in the UCLA MQE program on the topic of Understanding and Trading Volatility Derivatives. It was a data-driven, practical lecture covering the VIX, volatility ETNs, and trading strategies tied to volatility structures.
After the session, I assigned a set of homework questions to reinforce key concepts — the kind of material that goes beyond theory and gets at how volatility products behave in real-world markets.
