The problem with my own trade

Here's what my reputation actually costs me on my highest winning trade.

Half the year, I'm sitting on my hands.

You know me as the chaos guy. Vol spikes, everyone's hiding under their desk, I'm collecting premium from panicked institutions. I earned that. But the Xmas Tree is built for loud markets, and when the market goes quiet, it waits. I wait. The trade sits in the drawer while I watch a market that isn't paying me to do anything.

100% of my published Xmas Tree trades have closed profitable so far.

Every one of them placed when the market was loud enough to let me.

Look, I've been doing this since the late 90s. Dot-com, 2008, COVID, The Tariff Tantrum. I know what to do when it gets ugly.

The quiet stretches are the ones that cost people money.

Nobody talks about it because there's no story in it. Nothing crashes. You just sit there getting bored.

And bored traders don't sit there long.

You take the setup that's almost there. You size up on the one that's fine. You force something because doing nothing feels like losing, and by the time the market gets loud again you've given back what the good months made you.

That's not a market problem. That's a strategy that only works in one weather.

So I fixed it.

I reworked the entry rules so the same structure works when the market's calm. Same trade. Same mechanics you already know if you've traded it with me. Different rules for getting in.

Thursday at 1pm ET I'm walking through both versions, back to back. Here's how I place it when vol is running. Here's what I changed so I can place it when nothing's happening. Then I'm building a brand new one live, on Thursday's tape, in front of you.

Not a recorded example from last quarter. Not a chart from a trade I did in April. A real trade, on the market as it sits Thursday afternoon, and you're watching me do it.

I don't know what the market's going to do this fall. Could be a tweet, could be geopolitical, could be the AI bubble finally admitting what it is.

What I know is I'm done needing it to cooperate.

Get The New Entry Rules — Live Thursday 1pm ET 

Thursday, July 16. 1:00 PM ET. Live.

To your success,
Don Kaufman