Last week a lot of people in the print and news media kept using this annoying euphemism: "economic softening." Endless commentary on how the "data shows some softening", "there is some softening in the jobs numbers", and so on. over the weekend President Trump was needled by reporters about the prospect of a recession and suddenly everybody is using the R-word this week.

On top of that, I am seeing more and more people claim that the AI trade is dead.

With a major sell-off after the fizzle of the open, the questions about recession are not altogether surprising. I am writing this as we head into the lunch hour in New York and the day started to look like a V shape. Sell-off to start, hitting a new low, and then climbing back up as dip buying occurs. Without positive news I doubt a substantial recovery to the levels of the open will happen. Last week Trump had to delay tariffs before the recovery happened.

Based on how aggressively things have sold off today I could have made more profit by holding longer, but as is so often the case, there are other demands on my time.

All things said, a souring in sentiment not fundamentals is driving the numbers down today.

Log

• Looked at my phone before the open and saw that everything was kind of lousy. Not sure how much lower things could possibly go in order to make my put strategy work today.
• Queued up orders to be ready for Snowflake (SNOW), Amazon (AMZN), SMCI, Tesla (TSLA), and Nvidia (NVDAZ). Ended up abandoning the SNOW order, which is progress since I didn't try to force anything to happen.
• Picked up the morning spike on some of these equities to purchase some puts, which I offloaded in relatively short order. The market did dip further, but there's always a risk of the options going out of the money as the day progresses, especially given the V-shaped days over the past week or so.
• Exited green and closed the workstation to focus on other things after the opening part of the session. Kept watching the news until the market bottomed out started a recovery before selling renewed covered calls.

Portfolio