What’s Goin on Everybody?

Somebody's finally coming after your phone bill, and AT&T took a beating before the bell.

SpaceX announced it's buying 800 MHz-band spectrum, and Verizon took the same side of the swell. That was the big idea on I'd Trade That this morning.

I also walked through a bond trade for next week and a beaten-up name where I'd sell a put spread with an 89% probability of profit.

Watch the video below or read the wrap up afterwards.

Fridays are VWAP days. VWAP is volume-weighted average price, the average price everybody paid today, weighted by how much they bought.

Think of it like bowling with the bumpers up. You draw a line above and a line below, you trade between them, and you know where you're wrong before you get in.

Setup takes two minutes on TradingView (it's free) or Thinkorswim.

Pull up a one-minute chart, add Volume-Weighted Average Price and turn on all three band multipliers. Then add Anchored VWAP (the same line, started from a moment you pick, like an earnings release or yesterday's open).

I Only Say Nice Things

I anchored SpaceX (SPCX) to yesterday's 9:30 open. It traded at 166.53 when I first pointed it out, then faded to 165. If it tagged the bottom bumper around 164, I wanted a snap back toward VWAP.

A little after the open, it tapped 164. If you're bidding, you're bidding in there with a tight stop. Above 166.14 you've got a continuation, and a rollover takes it back to yesterday's level.

You don't even need options. The Tradr 2X Long SpaceX Daily ETF (SPCM) gives you double the daily move up, and its twin, SPCG, gives you double the move down. I nicknamed SPCM "Spaceman," so the chat spent five minutes renaming SPCG before we landed on Space Gecko.

So who loses? The incumbents. Verizon and AT&T carry a lot of debt, and they've got to refinance it at today's rates.

I don't like T-Mobile, AT&T or Verizon here. My contempt for Verizon simmers inside me each day.

They sold me internet where they don't have reliable service, buried the fiber where every animal can dig it up and eat it, then put me on hold for six hours. But I'm not going to go on a rant. I only say nice things.

I'm past my midlife point now, and before I put money into a company, I ask whether I actually like it. My grandmother lived on her own in Baltimore at 14, with an outhouse. I couldn't walk for a month and a half when I was 33, and I'm indebted to companies like AbbVie (ABBV).

So why am I paying Verizon when WhatsApp does it for free? That's why I like SpaceX. Somebody has to ask why this is the status quo, and I just bought Starlink as my backup so I can take the dogs to the middle of a field and broadcast from there.

The Line Outside the Bank

There are just too many borrowers right now. SpaceX is lining up $40 billion, which is bigger than the market cap of 232 companies in the S&P 500. A chipmaker wants to borrow $50 billion.

Small companies, governments and home buyers pay for the AI boom indirectly, because all that demand pushes borrowing rates up everywhere. The 30-year mortgage sits at 7.2%. Either home prices come down or rates do, and the 10-year Treasury is tracking hyperscaler credit right now.

The iShares 7-10 Year Treasury Bond ETF (IEF) sits right on its eight-day moving average. If it holds above 89.34, I like buying the 89 call and selling the 90 call for next week. That runs about 42 cents, so you need IEF above 89.42 to break even.

It's as good a bet as anything, but you'd have to be willing to cut it quick. I won't speculate on the iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT) until it gets back above its eight-day at 77.81. This market just isn't behaving.

Then there's Riot Platforms (RIOT). It owns its land, its power hookups and a lot of Bitcoin, and the whole group got destroyed yesterday. Capital-hungry names are on the wrong side of this borrowing story.

Pay attention to the math here. The short float (the share of stock sold short) sits at 14.7%. Every time RSI and MFI (two gauges of whether a stock's oversold, and MFI adds volume) both hit oversold together, Riot has bounced.

I like it for the long term, so I'd sell the November 20 13/11 put spread. Sell the $13 put around 37 cents, buy the $11 put around 15 cents, and you collect about 22 cents that you keep if Riot stays above $13. My platform shows an 89% probability of profit and a 12.5% return, or 105% annualized.

Want more juice? Use that credit to buy a cheap out-of-the-money call, something like the $20, and look for a squeeze. I might wait until Monday on it.

Norwegian Cruise Line (NCLH) also made my list. It just flashed a positive 8/20 crossover on the weekly, so I'd buy around 15 and look for 16.50, maybe 18.

The Speech Four People Wrote About

Gold's at 4,200 and it's a mess. Real yields and a firm dollar work against it, even with $12.8 billion of European gold inflows last quarter. If it breaks 4,100, the next line is 3,950, and the real downside sits around 3,540.

I'm still willing to buy gold at 4,000. Last week, the head of the Bank for International Settlements (the central bank of central banks) gave a speech that went largely off the radar. Reuters was one of four outlets that wrote it up.

He said central banks need their new tools in place for the day these bonds go sour and the hedge fund sector starts to implode. Read Wednesday's Fed minutes and you'll see members want emergency plans in place for the Treasury market too. They're all starting to talk.

This isn't about the regional banks or JPMorgan. Large hedge funds own the marginal buy in the bond market, and if that unwinds, it spills into other places.

So if this keeps souring, they're going to print money. They fear deflation more than anything else, and they'll jawbone until it becomes inescapable. I'm breaking down the whole speech on my podcast this weekend.

When Tim Colby jumped on at the end, his point was that the level of a yield matters a lot less than how it got there, because a fast move shows you who had too much leverage on.

I'll be back Monday at 9:20 a.m. to walk you through the markets and the opportunities…

See you there,

Garrett