The past couple days of the market have been generally positive which led me to open the terminal to keep an eye on things, since what goes up...

I hadn't expected to do much trading today but queued up a few small orders before the open that I could act on if things were looking promising. Generally speaking if the White House keeps its mouth shut, there's orderly trading around financial news, like today's headline: Consumer outlook hits lowest since 2011. When the White House uses its bully pulpit, then things get spicy. This morning the White House Press Secretary attacked Amazon (AMZN) for the reported plan to include tariff transparency in their price listings. I traded the rare call options expecting the market to dip on AMZN after the news and then rebound.

Personally I think tariff price transparency is a great idea and the only thing politically "hostile" are the tariffs themselves. Consumers deserve to understand how they could be negatively impacted by foolish economic policies. Unfortunately Amazon issued a clarification that this sort of price transparency isn't in their plans.

If there was any sense of strategy or savvy associated with these tariffs play, the idea of tariff price transparency could have been discussed with Amazon as a way to encourage more consumption of domestic goods. If your goal is to increase domestic consumption with tariffs, then highlighting where you're not paying for overseas goods would be an interesting signal to the consumer marketplace. The sword of transparency can cut both ways.

Anyways..

GM also suspended guidance and delayed their earnings call, blaming tariff uncertainty which I think is a good idea. The more these big companies engage in this unpleasant honesty around their inability to forecast the better. The "market" such that it is can only function as a useful tool when the operating environment has predictability, and I believe we will all benefit if more companies point the finger at the cause of the deterioration that started 100 days ago.

Log

• Opened the workstation for the first time in a few weeks intending to "wait and see"
• I queued up some trades, including a call on Amazon (AMZN) based on some inclination on how the market was going to react to the White House complaining about reports on tariff transparency.
• Accidentally forgot that the option was a call and bought some more as the price fluctuated. I started to get frustrated because the numbers weren't going the right direction, but then remembered that it was a call not a put. Oops! Fortunately I was able to hold onto it until it went profitable.
• Saw some opportunities for the long put strategy and returned to smaller deal sizes as I felt out the flow of things again.
• Worked some fluctuations on the semiconductor industry