The six trackers that matter for this book (the three indices, the semiconductors, and since 31 October the two sectors in confirmed uptrends: energy and health care), what dealers' option hedging is doing around them, the macro drivers underneath, and the trades the screens currently rank highest.
| Index tracker | Last | 1d | 5d | 1m | 3m | 6m | 12m | YTD | 5y | Dealer gamma |
|---|
Hourly bars for 5d, daily to 12m, weekly for 5y. Orange dashed: dealer call wall, put wall and gamma flip from CBOE open interest (all expiries), drawn when inside the visible range. Blue candles closed up, red closed down.
The set-up. October ended with the AI complex in a drawdown and the rest of the market higher: the Nasdaq lost 5% in the month and the S&P 500 0.9%, Friday alone erased more than a trillion dollars of market value (the semiconductor ETF −9%, AMD −11%, Nvidia −4%) after Amazon became the third hyperscaler to report negative free cash flow, Alphabet fell 12.6% on Thursday (its worst day on record) and Intel guided light; by one count 47 AI and chip stocks lost about $5 trillion while the other 625 large US stocks gained $1.3 trillion. Seven of eleven sectors rose on the week, health care and staples led, and energy sits at a 52-week high with oil above $100 and Hormuz effectively shut in the ninth month of the war. Sunday night the futures bounced (S&P +0.2%, Nasdaq-100 +0.4%) into a week with the midterm election, 138 S&P 500 reports including Apple, AMD, Palantir, Qualcomm and Arm, and the October jobs report. BTIG's Jonathan Krinsky has the S&P 500 testing its 200-day average at 7,306, 5% below Thursday's close; the Stock Trader's Almanac has November as the Nasdaq's best month in midterm years (+3.5% on average). Both can be right in the same week.
| When | Event | Why it matters for this book |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 2 Nov 10:00 | ISM manufacturing (Oct); prior 54.5, prices paid 77.9 | The inflation input the Fed's hawks cite; a December hike is 73–85% priced. |
| Mon after close | Apple (EPS $1.98 exp., first report under John Ternus) · Palantir ($0.33) · Vertex | Apple is 8% of QQQ and the second-largest holding on the QQQ page; BofA removed it from its best-ideas list on iPhone margins. Palantir tops the put screen with its report inside the premium. |
| Tue 3 Nov before open | Marathon Petroleum (EPS $25.7 exp., call 11:00) · Shopify · Pfizer | The refining read-through: margin per barrel vs Valero's $39.24, capture against $290m of turnarounds, the fourth-quarter guide. The MPC page sells the December $390 put on Wednesday with this known; Valero moves with it. |
| Tue all day | US midterm elections | Diesel-price politics (the export-ban threat, the Russian waiver) ease after the vote; historically the Dow gains 2.8% in the eight sessions around midterms. |
| Tue 10:00 | JOLTS (Sep; prior 7.1m) · factory and durable orders · RBA decision (hike to 4.85% expected) | Labour-market cooling vs a hawkish global cycle: Australia and the UK hiking this week is the context for December. |
| Tue after close | AMD (EPS $1.68 exp., call 17:00) · Arista ($0.99, 16:30) · Astera Labs ($0.83, 16:30) · Super Micro · Amgen | The book's night. AMD is SMH's third-largest weight and fell 11% on Friday; the open Arista put ($185 strike, report priced about ±9.5%) is held through the print unless the numbers change; the ALAB page sells its December $230 put on Wednesday morning at the strike the reaction sets. |
| Wed 4 Nov 08:15–10:00 | ADP (Oct; prior 90k) · trade balance · ISM services (prior 54.9) · ~Treasury quarterly refunding · six Fed speakers | Refunding sizes and the services prices index move the long end; the ten-year is back under 5%. |
| Wed before open | CVS Health (EPS $1.62 exp.) · Datadog · Uber · Novo Nordisk | CVS is the health-care pick on the put screen (December $86 put): sell it Thursday at the strike the report sets, or half before. |
| Wed after close | Qualcomm (EPS $1.46) · Arm ($0.22) · Coherent · McKesson | Arm's report is priced about ±11% on the ARM page; Coherent and Qualcomm are the optics and handset reads for the chips. |
| Wed 10:30 | EIA weekly inventories | Distillate stocks 10% below the five-year average (East Coast −32%): the refining cycle's weekly scorecard. |
| Thu 5 Nov 08:30 / 12:00 UK | Jobless claims · Q3 productivity and unit labour costs · Bank of England (hike to 4.00%, 98% priced) | Unit labour costs are the other hawkish input; the BoE hike confirms the global tightening the Fed's dissenters want. |
| Thu after close | Cloudflare (NET) · Lumentum (LITE) · ConocoPhillips before open | Cloudflare is second on the put screen with 84% implied volatility; Lumentum is the Marvell deal counterparty. |
| Fri 6 Nov 08:30 | October jobs report: consensus +55,000, unemployment 4.2%, earnings +0.1% (September was +29,000) | The week's headline. A weak print cuts the December hike odds and helps the long end; a strong one with hot earnings does the opposite. |
| Fri before open | Humana · Moderna · Vistra · Berkshire Hathaway (date unconfirmed) | Humana and Moderna are on the put screen's health-care list with reports inside the expiry. |
| Week of 9 Nov | Anthropic IPO roadshow (reported; an amended S-1 with the price range would come first) · first Russian diesel cargo under the waiver reaches the US East Coast (~9 Nov) | The S-1 page's supply phase for the AI complex begins; the diesel cargo is the refiners' headline risk made physical. |
Monday 2 November, before the US open. Sunday-night futures are up 0.2–0.4% after a week in which the AI complex lost a trillion dollars on Friday alone and the rest of the market went up; oil opened 4% lower at $99.9 on Iranian negotiators arriving in Qatar with a reopening proposal, the ten-year is 4.93%, Bitcoin is down 5%. The dealer books are unchanged in shape (SPY and QQQ short $12 billion and $7.8 billion per 1%, SMH short $391 million with the put wall now $500 and the flip $558; energy and health care long gamma) and carry Thursday's open interest until the Monday roll completes. The week's events, news and what they mean for the book are in the week ahead above; the dated notes below are kept for the record.
Market note, 30 October 2026, written before the US open on Thursday's close. Thursday was two markets. Alphabet fell 12.6%, its largest post-earnings drop ever, on its first double miss since 2022 (−$9.1 billion of free cash flow, a 2027 capex guide "significantly" above 2026, an $8.2 billion SpaceX mark through the earnings line), and took communication services −1.9%, technology −1.2% and the SOX −1.4% with it; Marvell lost 13% on reported talks to buy Lumentum, CoreWeave and Nebius 5–6% on Microsoft's capex restraint, Caterpillar 9% on light construction sales. Underneath, 390 of the S&P 500 rose: the equal-weight index +1.2%, the Russell 2000 +1.0%, healthcare +2.4%, real estate +2.2%, staples +1.5%. So the indices only slipped (SPY $769.36, −0.4%; QQQ $715.34, −1.4%; SMH $561.67, −1.1%, after holding the $555 put cluster to within fifty cents at the low). Bonds ignored hot data: GDP grew 3.4% in the third quarter, September PCE rose 0.5% on the month (3.6% on the year, core 3.1%), claims fell to 194,000, and the ten-year still fell six basis points to 4.99% with the December hike repriced from 84% to 78%; the dollar eased, oil (WTI $102) and gold ($4,032) slipped, Bitcoin fell through $80,000. Then the evening: Amazon printed the best AWS quarter in five years, +39% to $46 billion at a 38.7% margin, with growth guided above 40% for both 2027 and 2028, and the stock fell 7% because the quarter's capex was $75.9 billion (free cash flow −$33.5 billion, −$42.4 billion over twelve months), advertising grew 11% and missed by $1.2 billion, the fourth-quarter operating-income guide ($28.5–33.5 billion) sits $2 billion under consensus, and the headline EPS "miss" ($1.89 against $1.97) is last year's $9.5 billion Anthropic gain not recurring, as flagged here yesterday. Intel beat and guided the fourth quarter to $15–16 billion against $17 billion (PC weakness, data-centre supply constraints, a plant disruption in Israel, heavy 2027 capital needs), −26% pre-market. Pre-market: Nasdaq-100 futures −2.3%, S&P −1%; AMD −8%, Micron −5%, Broadcom −4%, Nvidia −3%; SMH indicated $536 (−4.6%), QQQ $697 (−2.6%, under its $700–705 shelf), SPY $761.5. Dealer positioning with Thursday's open interest (preliminary; the final revision lands around 14:30 CET), re-priced at those levels: SMH −$0.55 billion per 1% with the flip at $562.8, the put wall at $530 and the nearest call gamma at $580; QQQ −$10.8 billion (flip $721, put wall $690, call wall $725); SPY −$14.2 billion (flip $773, put wall $750). The read: the AI-capex reporting season has become a negative catalyst even when demand is confirmed (Alphabet's Cloud +103%, AWS +39%), because equity holders are now pricing that the spending cannot continue, and that spending is the chip sector's revenue. SMH reopens the $536–540 shelf it reclaimed on Monday with the dealers short gamma all the way down; a close back above $538 keeps the failed-breakdown reading alive, a close under it puts $530 and the 22 October low ($520.53) in play. Today the employment-cost index and the Bank of Japan; Apple on Monday; AMD, Arista and Astera on 3 November; Nvidia on 17 November; the Anthropic pricing week of 16 November. The SMH reversal call was closed Thursday afternoon at $8.75 (+9%) before the Amazon print; the trade log is updated. Update, 09:52 New York: Amazon opened at $232.53 (−4.6%), printed $229.36 in the first minute and was back at $239.60 (−1.7%) within twenty minutes, the dip toward its June–July shelf bought before it got there (the Amazon put recommendation is rewritten on live quotes); the chips did not get the same bid: SMH opened at $532.58 and trades $531 (−5.4%), under the $538 shelf and on the $530 put wall, QQQ $696 (−2.6%), under its $700–705 shelf. Friday's close (added Saturday 31 October): the chips did not recover. SMH closed $522.49 (−7.0%), through the 22 October low of $520.53 intraday and 15% off its 6 October high, with AMD −10.9% and Nvidia −4.2%; QQQ $690.49 (−3.5%), SPY $755.72 (−1.8%), Amazon back to $240.35 (−1.4%) after its morning recovery. Energy did the opposite: XLE +1.9% to $70.02, a new high, Exxon +2.2%, Chevron +1.8%, Marathon +2.8%, Valero +3.9%; health care +0.5%. The dashboard now tracks XLE and XLV alongside the indices and the semiconductors (both books in positive gamma, the opposite of SPY, QQQ and SMH), and two refiner deep dives are on the reports list: Marathon Petroleum (reports Tuesday) and Valero. Prices are Thursday's close and the pre-market; dealer positioning uses Thursday's preliminary open interest (see the footnotes under the charts).
| Book | Spot | Net gamma / 1% | Next 35 days | Regime | Put wall | Gamma flip | Call wall | Spot vs flip |
|---|
Dealer gamma from CBOE open interest across all expiries, recomputed with Black-Scholes at the current price; index options (SPX, NDX, RUT) in index dollars, roughly ten times their ETF. Positive: dealers sell rallies and buy dips (moves are damped and prices pin near large strikes). Negative: dealers chase the move (moves extend). The flip is the price at which the book changes sign; the walls are the strikes with the most call and put gamma. "Recent" under each book: the daily records in our gamma history, labelled by the open-interest day (a reading at the previous close can differ from today's because gamma depends on where the price sits relative to the strikes). Sign convention is the usual assumption (dealers long customers' sold calls, short customers' bought puts).
Anthropic's S-1 turns AI demand into supply (26 Oct 2026). The filing's numbers ($16.3 billion of first-half revenue, a first operating profit, an $80.7 billion loss that is 90% non-cash), the $417–795 billion compute commitment stack, the financing loop with Broadcom, Amazon and Google, the November–January IPO calendar, and what it means for Amazon, Alphabet, Broadcom, Nvidia, Marvell, Arista, the neoclouds and the ETFs, with a verdict on every position on this site.
Buy Adyen deeper in the money (29 Oct 2026). For a reader weighing a December 2030 €800 call: the business after the 28 October margin cut, why the stock has lagged (four guidance resets in fifteen months; three-quarters of the fall is multiple), the competitive position against Stripe, Checkout.com, Worldpay and the networks, the 2030 scenarios, the Euronext option's economics and why the €500–600 call or the 800/1500 spread express the same view with less premium at risk.
Buying the semiconductor reversal: one call structure, three reasons (27 Oct 2026; closed 29 Oct). The S-1 demand confirmation, the SMH scorecard at 5/10 and the dealer map tied into one long-call trade. The author's Nov 27 $600 call was bought at $8.00 on 27 October and sold at $8.75 (+9%) on Thursday afternoon before Amazon's report, ahead of a 4.6% gap down in SMH the next morning; the page keeps the dated record: the entry, the +44% day, the $555 test, the exit, and what the thesis got right and wrong.
| Name | Price | Score | Cash-secured put (30Δ) | Credit | Cushion | Yield / yr | PoP | Put credit spread (30Δ / 15Δ) | Credit | Max loss | Return | PoP |
|---|
| Name | Price | Score | Trend | Call credit spread (30Δ / 15Δ) | Credit | Collateral | Return after fees | PoP | Room | Short int. | Earnings |
|---|
Spreads only: short the ~30Δ call, long the ~15Δ call above it; collateral is the width minus the credit and is also the maximum loss. Return is the credit less round-trip fees (four fills at $0.90 per contract, the average of your own fills) over the collateral; red where fees take more than 15% of the credit; PoP the lognormal probability of finishing below break-even; room is how far the stock can rise before the short strike. Each row links to its deep dive.