Every morning I read the macro tape — jobs, CPI, PPI, the Fed — and translate it into trades where the worst case is a number you agree to in advance. No margin calls, no blowups, no position you can't explain to your spouse.
The print, the revision, and the one number underneath the headline that changed the picture. Not the cable-news version of it.
If the market had it priced before the release, the move you're reacting to already happened. This is the step most people skip.
Max loss, the day it expires, and the share of the account it represents — written down before anything about the upside.
Usually a spread. Usually boring. If the idea can't survive step three, it doesn't get written up.
The four things I wish someone had handed me before my first spread. It's free, it takes about twenty minutes, and it'll keep you out of the two mistakes that end most retail options accounts.
No cost, no card. You'll get the daily macro note with it — leave any time, one click.
Headline payrolls came in above consensus, which is the number every feed led with. But the prior two months got revised down by more than this month beat by, so on a three-month view the labor market is softer this morning than it was yesterday, not firmer.
Rates futures figured that out about nine minutes in, which is why the initial pop faded. If you were reacting to the headline you were trading against the people reading the revision table.
Here's how I'd frame a defined-risk position around it, and here's the max loss before I say another word about the upside…
The daily note is the front door. Behind it is the work it's built on — the valuation tearsheets, the supply-bottleneck map, and the BLS monitor I check before writing anything. All of it is free and none of it is gated.
Single-name intrinsic-value tearsheets. Each one states a base case, a scenario range, and the one number the whole thesis rests on.
30 tearsheetsWhere AI data centers, defense, chip fabs, and electrification compete for the same finite physical inputs — power, copper, magnets, water.
10 sectors · 61 namesJobs, CPI and PPI with the revision tables next to the headline print, plus JOLTS flows and 24-month trend charts.
Updated on release daysI'm a grad student and an Army Reserve soldier in South Jersey who got into markets the long way around. The name isn't a marketing phrase — it's how a mission brief is actually built. You walk the worst case first, out loud, and if the worst case isn't survivable you don't go. Markets are the same, and almost nobody teaches them that way.
I publish every weekday. I show the losing trades too, because a track record that only contains winners isn't a track record.