What's Up With Exchanges?

Nasdaq in a bear market, but the stock is only 5 percent off the all-time high. Commodities are doing well and derivatives trading going wild, but CBOE and CME both weak. CME is potentially on the cusp of a major collapse.

ICE is a counterpoint:

Moody's and MSCI are getting into the overbought zone.

All My Positions

I have short positions of varying size on all of these. In terms of number of options, XLP is by far the largest position. By dollar size, CME, APPL, MCD, SHW are relatively large. If I group together all my energy positions XLE, COP and USO, that would be larger than everything, but some of these are weekly puts that I may take off early next week if crude doesn't dip quickly. XLP puts are cheaper though, and thus I anticipate they could be my largest position at the conclusion.

Update: I forgot to list BITI calls, a short position on BTC.

This Might Finally Be It

Caveat for this post: above 3820 I'm wrong and I'm out.

I posted a ringing bell post about an hour ago. High yield bond ETF HYG reached resistance versus long-term treasury bond ETF TLT. Tells me credit risk might be ready to surge. Context was provided by utilities, real estate, mortgage REITs and Canadian banks getting wrecked today. The market is behaving as if the credit risk phase of this bear market is getting started.

How big of a move could this be? Probably a minimum of 10 percent on the S&P 500 Index. Good targets will fall much more. How bad could it get? Here is CME, derivatives and futures. The measured move off the H&S top is around $100, or 40 percent lower. I don't think that will all come in the next month. More likely the bottom is next year. Yet. It isn't impossible. That's the scale of what I think is coming. We're finally going to see some real panic in the markets.

Kill List

I started going through a screen list and then just started looking at high-priced stocks. The same pattern keeps appearing because the whole market looks ready to plummet.

If The Market Is Going Down

CME Group looks like a short. A move below $160 would complete the pattern. A correction could take it to around $150, a bear market would open the blue horizontal at $75, but this isn't even a correction yet...