Dear Trader,
This morning on the State of the Market at 10 AM ET, Mark and XXX unveil the names the Option Pit crew love and the names they want nothing to do with this week.
Tap this link to jump to the State of the Market live room.
This link adds State of the Market to your calendar.
Then at 10:30 AM ET on the Ticker Highlight Show, they hand you the high-probability option play built around their picks.
Here's a taste of what each editor has been chewing on:
Hans found a mega-cap tech name with cash flow he can't ignore, and another one he thinks is running on fumes.
Licia loves an EV story the crowd hates, and she hates an AI darling the crowd loves.
Mark sees a beaten-down chip name finally setting up, and a department store he wouldn't touch with your money.
Andrew is eyeing a semi giant with a fresh setup, and a med-device name he says is priced for perfection.
Tune in at 10 AM ET for the reveals.
Join the Ticker Highlight Show at this link to get the trade at 10:30.
Miss Friday’s State of the Market? Check out the summary below.
What You Missed on Friday
The old playbook keeps breaking in new places. Friday's State of the Market made that obvious in three different setups.
Start with Apple (AAPL). Earnings crushed it: Mac sales jumped, iPhone moved everywhere, and the stock is bumping up against an all-time high.
Mark's take is that Tim Cook was a phenomenal financial engineer, but a caretaker, not an innovator. The new CEO is a hardware guy. If he decides to actually build something again, Apple gets interesting.
If not, it stays a store of wealth while Google walks past it. Mark thinks Google ends up the most valuable company in the world, and he's been saying that for a year.
Then oil. Exxon (XOM) and Chevron (CVX) earnings dipped because Middle East disruptions cost more than the price spike helped. Mark sees a buying opportunity, and he's not buying shares.
He's buying LEAPS. One tenth the cost of 100 shares of Exxon, with the same upside if the stock runs.
Hans has put on 26 LEAPS trades inside Turbo Income in the last year. He's 26 for 26. That's the Market Temperature Indicator picking the entries and LEAPS amplifying the outcome.
Now bonds. The 60/40 portfolio is dead. Bonds and stocks sold off together in March, and stocks ripped through April while bonds sat there.
The cushion is gone. Tim Colby keeps his bond money in short duration as cash equivalent, and the rest goes to trading because trading is uncorrelated to investing.
When stocks struggle, trading picks up. That is the new 40.
Last one is the tease. Mark's hedge fund buddy got offered Anthropic at a 20 percent markup, plus JP Morgan keeps half the IPO profits.
OpenAI was offered with zero conditions because nobody wants it. Anthropic is going to IPO into a top-five market cap immediately, and Tim and Mark already have a small company that holds a meaningful stake in it.
They're trading it inside Special Situations in the next couple weeks.
Different markets, same lesson: the defaults are not defending you anymore.
SNEAKER: Bitcoin just punched through 80,000 dollars for the first time since January. The token briefly cracked 80,500 overnight before settling back into the high 79s, but the read is the same: crypto is the only risk asset that did not flinch during the Iran war.
Bitcoin is up roughly 17 percent in the last month while gold has bled out. ETF inflows hit 630 million on the first day of May alone, and the Clarity Act is finally moving toward the Senate floor.
When the asset class everyone called speculative starts outperforming the asset class everyone called safe, that is a sneaker worth watching.
SIGN: GameStop just offered 56 billion dollars to buy eBay, a company four times its size. Ryan Cohen's pitch is 125 dollars a share, half cash and half GameStop (GME) stock, with a 20 billion debt commitment from TD Bank to make the math sort of work.
GameStop is worth around 12 billion. eBay (EBAY) is worth 46 billion. That is not a merger, that is a meme stock CEO running a leveraged buyout out of the same playbook he hinted at in January when he said the deal would be "transformational."
eBay popped 8 percent on the news. GameStop dropped. The market is telling you who it thinks gets the better end of this trade.
SIREN: Gold is fading again, down to around 4,575 dollars an ounce after a second straight weekly decline. The war is still on, the Strait of Hormuz is still a mess, and bullion is still bleeding. That is the part that should make you pause.
Gold has lost roughly 12 percent since the Iran war started in late February, and the latest leg down came on Trump's plan to start escorting non-aligned ships through Hormuz plus chatter on a peace deal.
The siren is not the price drop, it is what the price drop is telling you: the market is pricing in a ceasefire even while the shooting has not actually stopped.