The market is in free-fall. Or, it was. Is it still in free-fall? Is this a bounce to buy or a bounce to sell?
All of these questions are going through the minds of every trader right now. And that’s with good reason – the market is giving mixed signals and those can be hard to read. Right now, there’s a lot of noise in the market, and with lots of noise and uncertainty, comes an increased cost to options. The less certain the next move, the more the universe of traders has to pay to get defined risk and leverage.
So, how do I navigate the current market? Just like last week, I look for some potential bullish setups and some potential bearish setups. Then, I look at the options structures that would fit best with those particular setups.
For the bearish market participant, I have bad news – I’m only going to discuss the bull case today. If you want to see some bearish ideas, check out my Outlier Watch List and you’ll see some ideas I had coming into this week to generate some explosive returns on the bear side of the market.
To understand why I want to focus on the bull side, I’ll walk through a few key market elements. First, let’s look at SPY for an overall market picture:
As you can see, Monday was a disaster and Tuesday not only bounced back, but almost completely negated that move. As the broad market tests the 100-Day Moving Average, I now also have confidence in the market that it’s treating Monday as the washout for the market seller and that we’d gone too far too fast, as also seen by the low RSI on Monday.
In addition, I look at the market uncertainty for the next month, by viewing the chart of the VIX:
Spiking aggressively on Monday was expected, but this move was also a spike to levels not seen since the initial outbreak of COVID. There was a lot of fear in this market break, and now, the VIX is below Friday’s levels, as it appears the market is saying that traders that needed insurance against a collapse now have it and no longer need to buy aggressively.
And with that, I look back to a leading sector of the rotation into small caps, and that’s the regional banks, with ETF KRE:
The recovery isn’t quite as aggressive as in the broad market because the selloff wasn’t nearly as bad. KRE stayed above the 50-Day Moving Average for the most part and seems primed for a move back toward the prior highs, about 10% higher.
With that, I’ll pick one favored name from the sector, and that’s KEY:
KEY and KRE are very similar charts, but KEY upside to the prior highs would account for about a 14% move. And I know from my options analytics that KEY’s upside is providing cheaper leverage than what I see in KRE. So, with that, I can structure a better risk/reward profile for an options trade in KEY than I can in KRE.
If you’d like to get a list of ideas and setups just like this that could be of interest for trading opportunities, take a look at my Outlier Watch List.
And as always, please go to http://optionhotline.com to review how I traditionally apply technical signals, volatility analysis, and probability analysis to my options trades. And if you have any questions, never hesitate to reach out.
Keith Harwood
Keith@optionhotline.com
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