OptionsJive

10/16/2026

Most option sellers never look at the number Cboe prints next to the VIX.

This week it hit 6.93.

It's COR1M, Cboe's 1-month implied correlation: how tightly S&P 500 stocks are expected to move together, on a 0 to 100 scale. 6.93 was near a 10th-percentile low.

That's how the VIX held 14.8 with earnings season underway. Most of the biggest S&P 500 companies report within a month, so their 1-month options carry the earnings gap. Inside the index, those gaps mostly cancel. Your short put on one stock keeps the whole move.

Where to look instead, every trading day:

1) COR1M and DSPX beside the VIX. Low correlation with rising dispersion means the VIX is understating single-stock risk.

2) The stock's term structure. Find the expiry with the earnings bump. A high IV Rank is often one overnight gap dressed up as 45 days of premium.

3) That stock's skew at your expiry, against its own history. Skip the SKEW Index here, it prices S&P 500 crash tails and says nothing about one company's earnings gap.

The same Cboe report shows S&P 500 skew steepening from the 9th to the 15th percentile while the VIX fell. Someone was paying up for the day these stocks start falling together.

Source: Cboe's Macro Volatility Digest, linked in the comments.

10/15/2026

Warren Buffett's now owns about 12% of . It kept buying between $75 and $81. Today, the stock trades about 15% below book value.

Copying Buffett has one catch. Berkshire can sit through a drawdown that lasts years. Most traders can't.

Interactive Brokers beat earnings last quarter. The stock fell.

It reports again after today's close. Options price that single day at 102% volatility, while November sits at 41.6%. One day costs as much as a full week.

I found a mispricing in both stocks. How I'm trading them is on Patreon.

10/12/2026

Every option expiring this Friday is hiding a second event.

Most premium sellers won't notice it until Wednesday at 8:30 a.m.

Tomorrow morning a big bank and two healthcare giants report earnings. On Wednesday we get CPI. If you sell Friday's options for the IV crush, you're also betting on inflation! That's why this week I'm NOT trading the usual IV crush.

One healthcare stock has options priced as if it moves 2.5 times faster than it has lately. I still made it my smallest position.

All names and strikes are on Patreon.

Earnings week just started. Let's squeeze the maximum out of it.

Earnings week just started, and we'll squeeze the maximum out of it. Let's start the last earnings season of this year strong with 3 simple

10/11/2026

1,000 subscribers! 🎉

Thank you. Selling volatility will never be the most popular topic on YouTube, and you subscribed anyway. This made my week.

Now I need to record more videos, and I will. You've waited long enough between uploads.

When I don't have time to record, I post my research and trade ideas in the Posts tab, so keep an eye on it between videos. Off to record the next one.

10/11/2026

A research paper published this week tested one switch on an AI options trader.

Off: +18.3%.
On: -2.7%.

The switch was the news. I could've told them that for free.

The paper comes out of Carnegie Mellon, and the AI traded SPY, NVDA, TSLA and 7 other big names from March to August 2025. Once it could read headlines, its worst drawdown more than tripled, from 9% to 31.7%. It even won more trades and still lost money.

This is why we don't trade the news at OptionsJive. I treat news feeds as noise, because by the time a headline hits your phone, the options market has already priced it in.

The 3D volatility surface shows me which expiry is rich and which wing is cheap. That's everything you need to be successful.

What's the worst trade a headline ever talked you into?

10/07/2026

tastytrade says this trade has a 33% chance of making money. The real number is closer to 70%.

Earnings season starts next week. Until stock volatility peaks, I'm trading corn.

On September 30, USDA checked America's grain bins and found 90 million bushels more corn than even the most bearish analyst expected. Corn fell 21 cents in one day.

The funds were all in. In August they held 465,500 long contracts, a record.

Friday brings the next USDA report, and a market this crowded pays a lot for protection.

I'm happy to sell it to them.

The full trade is on Patreon, along with why my broker gets the odds wrong. Link in the first comment.

10/05/2026

Every AI data center writes two checks: one to the chip makers, one to the power company.

This year chips (SMH) are up 69%, power (XLU) is down 8%.

I noticed that gap while hunting for trades outside single stocks. Earnings season starts next week, IV is already climbing into the reports, and most of my usual names are off the table for now.

Then I pulled up the chart below.

XLU: IV Rank 88
SMH: IV Rank 25

My first thought was easy. Sell XLU, skip SMH.

I was wrong about the second part. SMH options still price 38% volatility, about 25% more than the ETF really moves, and its puts cost more than its calls. IV Rank only compares IV with its own past year.

I ended up selling premium on both, as one package.

Most days these two barely move together. I also wrote up the one scenario where they fall together, and what it would cost me.

Full breakdown, as always, on Patreon.

10/02/2026

On November 1, 2018, a money manager named James Cordier published an article called "Option Selling Opportunities So Good They're Scary."

Two weeks later his 290 clients got an email titled "Catastrophic Loss Event."

He'd been selling naked calls on natural gas, and gas jumped 18% in one session. His clients lost everything, and then the broker asked them for another $35.3 million.

I just opened our classic winter gas campaign in the same market, at the same time of year, but in a less stupid way.

I spent the week in the storage data. November gas trades near 3.00 and January near 3.70, so the market wants 23% more for January gas than for November gas.

For this trade to lose, January gas has to drop below what November costs today. And I own protection behind it, which Cordier never did.

The full trade: https://www.patreon.com/OptionsJive/posts/kicking-off-our-171119497

09/30/2026

options that expire this Friday are priced at 106.9% volatility. The ones expiring five days later: 77.4%.

MU reports tonight, and nearly all of the earnings risk is packed into the Friday options. It's the biggest event of my week, because it will set the direction for a lot of semiconductor trades.

I did the research on the move itself, and it looks fairly priced:

Implied move tonight: about 8%
MU's 10-year median earnings move: 7.7%
The real move beat the implied one in 9 of the last 16 reports

Earlier this year Micron beat revenue by $3.89B and still fell 3.8% the next day, so tonight the next-quarter guide matters more than the numbers.

It's an advanced, high-risk trade. The full breakdown, including where it breaks, is on Patreon. Link in the first comment.

09/29/2026

Most options educators stop at the entry, and when a trade goes wrong, you're left alone with the hardest decision in trading.

I haven't seen anyone fix losing trades in public, with real money, before the outcome is known. We're going to.

I've shown my personal portfolio on YouTube for years now, and nobody else has done it this openly for this long. Now I'm opening a separate tastytrade account, built to repair your ugliest trades live.

It's called the Ugly Trades Public Portfolio. I'll use every trick I rely on in the audited hedge fund I co-manage, and you'll see why I make each move.

I want the first trade in the account to be yours. Details and the Discord link are in the first comment.