1/x The window we have been targeting for 2 months has officially opened... i Can not imagine a more textbook display of the power of Vanna at expiration as we saw on Friday. The capital building was overrun by an insurrection, but all that that meant was a bigger late day rally.

2/x that ended at ATH on the close. Between Gary the 🦍 & his RVol suppression & his hand off to late day Ivol compression & the Vanna index bid, the 🐻’s never had a chance... but Gary’s getting tired after 2 months battling complacency & Vanna’s 2 week vacation, 1 of her only
3/x 2 week departures of the year (a 5 week OpEx) is quickly approaching on 1/15 morning. That means she’ll be increasingly absent as she prepares for her trip. W/ a $59 1 week straddle & $50 1 day range on Friday, & another $30 overnight drop, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t
4/x want to take a chance on a little long gamma at this juncture. Especially given the obvious warning signs coming from the steepening of the yield curve, underperformance of the Growth complex, complacency in sentiment & positioning, anecdotal signs of bubbles in BTC & TSLA,
5/x NTM the growing exuberance surrounding a fiscal stimulus deal near $2 Trillion. The wall of worry of 3 months ago is gone. The vaccine is being deployed, the election is resolved, fiscal stimulus was passed & w/2 Georgia 🍑 🍑, ever moar 🚁💰is on the way. But what happened
6/x to antitrust fears, tax fears, & the fear of higher rates? 🦗 🦗 🦗... ‘The best lack conviction, while the worst R full of passionate intensity’ right now...Intraday Rvol is increasing as we break, The Generals are fading, & the market is increasingly kicking & trying to
7/x break free of what seems an impossible battle w/Gary the 🦍. Yet there is no fear... It almost always seems like the party will never end at the end. But I have exited from the back door. It’s never easy. It takes conviction and a willingness to miss the last hour of fun.
8/x But no one wants to be there when the 👮‍♀️ 👮‍♀️ show up. As we drag along a well defined floor in the VIX & approach an important inflection point. The Risk Reward is unmistakable. It is time to pull back on those incredibly successful dispersion trades & concentrate on the
9/x indices . It is time to opportunistically take a shot on a decline in the market at our levels...Our long held 3811 🎯has been met & though it’s possible for us to still see 3837 ***as the market attempts to shake the grip of IVol amidst a pain trade. Tremendous idiosyncratic
10/x risk sits around the corner, increasingly w/out the structural support it once enjoyed... A Classic correction this week would involve stair steps down with regular charm support flows struggling to underpin the increasingly negative flows. By Friday EOD, if we are to see
11/x anything more than a correction in time, we should at a minimum see a close below the 20 day. & by 1/22 we should see a close below the 1std dev of the 20 day, if we can’t manage a move at least close to this by then, the window will begin to close... look for narratives
12/x surrounding more domestic political unrest, potential geopolitical challenges in Asia, & the Middle East amidst political transition to percolate as the market inexplicably trembles. Keep an 👁 on p/c equity ratios on any rally, as well as NDX, TSLA & BTC weakness. Rising
13/13 Fixed strike vols, in the back will also be a canary in the coal mine. Vanna flows’ll continue to be concentrated around 1-3pm CST & increasingly in the mornings until 9am. It won’t be easy... Scalp from the short side & Take profits @ levels along the way. Good luck! 🍀

More from Cem Karsan 🥐

1/x As we’ve been calling for since Nov, today we finally got our 2 ‘Georgia Peaches’🍑 precisely on schedule, as we’ve called for since Aug, & the underlying rotation has confirmed now for months, this matters. This is a historic turning point. It matters not only https://t.co/BFxKGrI1Oo


2/x for this year, but for the economic trajectory of America & likely the macroeconomic regime of the developed world for the coming decade. That said, contrary to popular belief, the market does not move based on news in the short term if the positioning doesn’t allow it to.

3/x & our old friend Gary the 🦍 & his sidekick Vanna are positioned to have this market pinned through 1/11. So, as explained ad nauseam, the election news, though fundamentally important, won’t matter to the index itself in the ST. As predicted, the largest moves from the GA

4/x runoff INITIALLY have come from factor rotation. This should continue to be the case, as the street is oversupplied IVol & the index is pinned. This not only allows for idiosyncratic risk moves in constituents, but it actually FORCES extreme noncorrelation & rotation, as we

5/x have witnessed now for the past 2 days. This Vol compression will be increasingly difficult to break free from until 1/11-1/15, but the window of weakness is coming...soon the final hedges from the ‘election hump’ in Nov will expire with the Jan monthly options. Once the

More from Business

The American business community is speaking with a unified voice - NAM called to invoke the 25th Amendment; the Business Roundtable and Chambers of Commerce urge a peaceful transition of power; all have denounced last week's violence. What might this mean? A few implications:
1/

This isn't just PR - bad politics is bad for business. Here, the Harvard Business Review makes the business case for democracy (leading essay by

Historically, business has been a crucial ally for democracy. Mark Mizruchi shows how business helped secure democracy after WII, through organizations like the Committee for Economic Development (see also his @NiskanenCenter paper:
https://t.co/xoqUUN1nCD)

3/

My book examines how business groups formed to lobby against patronage and corruption, and in favor of institutional reform, in the 19th c. (https://t.co/FnNhZUupBG)

For a summary of business’s role in American democracy over the 20th century, see

Today, corporations are cutting off PAC $$ — Wall St banks (JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, CitiGroup), big tech (Microsoft, Facebook). Many more corps have suspended donations to members of Congress who contested the certification of election results last week
5/
The Mother of All Squeezes

How Volkswagen went from being on the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world in two days

/THREAD/


1/ At the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, Volkswagen was considered a very likely candidate for bankruptcy.

Heavily indebted and already financially struggling before 2008, with car sales expected to plummet due to the ongoing global crisis.


2/ With GM and Chrysler filing for bankruptcy in 2009, shorting the VW stock would seem a safe bet.

If you are not familiar with stock shorts and short squeezes check my thread


3/ On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced it had increased its stake at VW from 30% to 74%.

This was a surprise to many who were led to believe that Porsche wasn't planning a takeover of VW, based on the company's announcements.


4/ Before the announcement, the short interest was approximately 13% of the outstanding shares, a number considered relatively low.

Porsche had a 30% stake, the Lower Saxony government fund held 20% of the shares, and another 5% was held by index funds.

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