With yesterday's market action firing, potentially, another warning shot that Q4 trading will be challenging, I'm on the hunt for opportunities that may be a bit more uncorrelated to the risk I currently have on the books.

One such opportunity is presenting itself in the bond market and we're going to position ourselves to win both in the short-term or the longer-term.

My analyst team took a look up north, eh!

And what did they find? A liar standing next to a whole in the ground. (Old gold speculators joke).

While that line might be a joke, nobody will laughing at today's trade idea if this stock makes a run to anywhere near our price targets.

My Commodities desk put out a trade of the week that we're going to jump into with options as well.

No need for a long preamble. It's a bull market and we're acting accordingly.

Back on a July 15th episode of The Flow Show, Strazza and I put on a trade in Viking Therapeutics $VKNG. You can get all the trade details here.

We still like the setup, but with September options, our original position is running out of time.

And recently, the Analysts published a report that makes me think I should roll my position further out in time:

This morning, the team was discussing a notable Board of Directors insider making a sizeable $5 million purchase of stock.

While an insider's buy isn't necessarily grounds for me to get interested in getting involved, it did catch our attention and after looking at the chart and the sector, it looks like a trade we'd like to get into--carefully.

In today's Flow Show, Steve Strazza and I assess the current market environment, post- whatever the hell we're calling what happened a couple weeks ago (Volmageddon 2?, Yen YoYo? The Carry Drop?).

It feels more and more like that was merely a footnote to an otherwise pretty robust bull market. We'll see.

Regardless, we're looking for bullish setups in this tape and an online retailer out of South Korea has our attention.

Feels fitting to position ourselves in a company that is known for going fast. Because if this bull market is about to resume its normal operation, then this company is likely going to lead us higher, quickly.

It's beginning to feel more and more like last week's volatility event was just a blip on the radar of a bull market. Great!

And if that's the case, then we'll get rewarded for positioning in the next set of leaders that carry the market higher. Rotation, baby!

So with this in mind, we're going to go after a potential short-squeeze candidate today.

When the storm is upon us, it's too late to purchase hurricane insurance. Nobody will sell it to you. Of if they will, the prices will be obscene.

Last Monday, when the VIX printed a 65 -- it was too late to buy downside protection. If you did, you were asking for your face to be ripped off. And it likely was.

Now that the dust has settled a bit, volatility has abated significantly, and the relative winners and loses sorted themselves out, we're seeing some good setups to position ourselves for any additional downside action.

Additionally, it offers me a good chance to balance out some of the risks I still have on the books in my long positions.

On today's Flow Show, me at Steve Strazza talked about a good setup in Advanced Micro Devices $AMD that fits our needs.

It's fashionable in certain circles to talk about having a Canadian escape plan if shit gets too weird here in the United States.

I'm not one of those. Though I love Canada, having grown up across the border in Buffalo, NY.

There were many times in my younger days, while spending a day across the border, where I'd find myself short on cash and I'd have to hit an ATM to get some loonies! And most often, those ATMs were run by CIBC.

So maybe I should attempt to earn back some of those ATM fees (plus interest!).

A surprising outcome for some of my defined-risk long delta trades this week is that my losses weren’t as pronounced as I would’ve expected given the vicious sell-off we’ve seen in many tech names.

Why?

One thing that isn’t often discussed about being long options premium when expressing bullish or bearish bets is that owning long options (calls or puts) also means we’re long volatility.

In situations like these where we saw VIX briefly with a 65-handle, the rapid rise in options premiums put a floor in many of the calls I had long positions in. So while many bullish positions in my portfolio were losing money, the losses were rather pedestrian relative to what others who were holding long stock or futures positions were likely experiencing.

It’s not a win, but it felt like one this week.

We discuss this and a whole lot more in this week’s Options Jam Session:

The stock market likely has a couple of aftershocks left in it. But if the worst is over, I have to believe this is a great opportunity to buy the dip in some names that will be beneficiaries of the AI boom.

And there are few bigger and well-positioned names than Microsoft.

This market environment still demands that we define our risks and we're going to leverage elevated volatility in a way you might not expect to express our bet.