There you go.

I wrote that headline to save you the trouble of turning on your TV or following your favorite fear mongerer online. You're welcome.

Unless you've been lost in the wilderness for the last two weeks (not a bad place to have been, btw), then you no doubt know the bulls are currently in trouble.

The fake-out breakout in the Russell 2000 $IWM has turned into a full-blown route, the S&P 500 is testing levels last seen at the end of September and early October, and $VIX has printed the highest levels of the year. There's not a lot to be optimistic about right now -- especially if you're holding a bunch of long positions that are at or near stop-out levels like I am.

I got stopped out of a bunch of positions last week, two today (a long call spread in $STX and a short strangle in $XLK), and a couple more might get exited tomorrow if things don't stabilize here.

Into this maelstrom, we've been dialing back putting on new positions. During last week's holiday-shortened trading week, we only put one new position on -- and that may have been one too many ;)

While the US Stock Market has pulled back a bit this week, we've seen $VIX pop its head back up above 23 and print its highest levels in a month. And this isn't entirely surprising given that the highly watched Russell 2000 $IWM has been struggling to hold on to its yearlong support level of around 210.

But has the "all-clear" signal for the bears fired? Is it time to pile in short? We're not convinced yet.

Meanwhile, we've seen some pullbacks in semiconductors stocks we own ($NVDA and $MU most notably) that may get us stopped out soon. But when we zoom out to the bigger picture, as seen via the $SMH Semiconductors ETF, we see that we've been in a range for quite some time now. And even if we'd lose the support of this recent consolidation range at around 290, we can expect the 270-275 zone to offer a new level of support:

The V-Bottom is back! (At least as of the time of this writing). What a bounce stocks have seen off Monday's nadir.

Have we stuck the landing and its back to new all-time highs for the broader indexes soon?

Time will tell. But the short term bet we're making today is that Monday's low will hold at least for a couple weeks. And today's trade in a leading stock in a leading sector reflects this stance. When in doubt, stick with the strongest names in the strongest sectors, right?

So that's brings us to Nvidia $NVDA.

On days and weeks like this, I love to look for opportunities to sell premium into the elevated implied volatilities we're seeing rising across the board. With $VIX back up above 20, you'd think there's been plenty to pick from.

Problem is, I haven't found any delta-neutral setups that look good today. Too many busted charts on the most liquid ETFs makes finding support levels that both make sense and offer enough premium to make it worthwhile from a safety standpoint hard to find.

So, as always, I reached out to my team from some other ideas.

We've been asking the question: "how bad can things be if we're seeing this kind of relative and absolute strength in the banking and financial sectors?"

Steve Strazza served up an interesting bullish play that is either a gift of a pullback, or we're buying the top. If you're market the bullish, then you gotta believe this idea has merit.

Well well well, what do we have here?

The first two days of this week completed a nearly text book Santa Claus rally. Then on Wednesday, it appears the Fed may have stolen his Sleigh and now his reindeer have no idea which way to steer!

This indecision has played out in the options market by raising the risk premiums being asked across a wide sector of index ETFs.

At times like this, I like to go hunting for premium-selling opportunities. And I've got one teed up so lets get to it!

If this blog post was served up to you when you were searching for the latest scare porn on the omicron covid pandemic, I'm sorry to disappoint. But if you'd like to draw a correlation between the rising omicron cases and rising share prices of Micron technology stock --- you wouldn't be the first person to commit a #ChartCrime in service of a good story.

Micron Technology $MU is a stock that's been on my radar since the team published the Under the Hood report around Christmas highlighting the setup.

Here's what they had to say:

The All Star Charts team put a report out about the Metals sector end of last week, highlighting undercurrents investors should be keeping an eye on. Not everything is sending "all-clear" signals yet. But there is one particular name that definitely has my attention and is offering a good reward-to-risk opportunity to get involved.

I'll spare you any further preamble and we'll get right into the money quote that has me interested:

I'll spare you the suspense -- we're getting long Marathon Petroleum $MPC here.

The title of today's post is not a trite pun. We are indeed positioning for a bullish move, but it may take a little bit to develop the way we want it to.

Thankfully, the beauty of options trading is that we can craft a strategy that takes advantage of a slow-developing play. So let's get right to it.

Well, we're on Day 1 of the Santa Rally and so far the fat man is delivering bigly!

Speaking of deliveries, it's likely your 2021 Holiday Season featured the services of our trade today.

Let's get right to it!

What a difference a few days makes, eh?

On Monday morning, if you were on twitter or watching the teevee you'd have assumed the stock market was about to get cut in half and the pitchforks were going to be lining up outside the Federal Reserve building in Washington, D.C.

Then, the market did what the market does and now here we are with the S&P 500 looking like it wants to make another run at all-time highs.

Forget about market volatility --- how about trader's emotional volatility?!

With this in mind, there is still some nice options premium being priced into individual names that offer us some unique tactical opportunities for some quick gains.

One nice thing about recent stock market volatility is that there are some bullish setups we can take advantage of with some clearly defined nearby risk levels, which give us entries with solid reward-to-risk scenarios.

And of course, in a theme we've been repeating over the past week, this volatility is also helping us more easily find where the hidden relative strength is.

So let's dive right into an idea that was surfaced in the recent Hall of Famers report.

The wild ride in the stock markets this week is nothing if not revealing to us where the relative strength is hidden!

There's always a silver lining to volatility. The vulnerable stocks get exposed, the weak hands get shaken out, and what we're often left with is a pretty clear picture of where the strength is and which names are likely to lead us higher when things calm back down.

With this in mind, today's trade comes from the latest Under the Hood Report.