The close

Wholesale inflation accelerated. Crude went up 6.9%. And gold fell 1.7% anyway.

Read that second sentence again, because if you own gold for exactly this scenario, today was the day it was supposed to do its job, and it didn’t. Stocks closed lower for the fourth session running. That’s the tape. The gold print is the part we’d sit with tonight.

One note before the numbers, because two sets of closes are going around today and they don’t agree. The closing quotes we’re using put the S&P at 7,592.80, down 43.56. The wire’s unofficial close is 7,590.44, down 45.92. That’s 2.36 points between them, about three hundredths of one percent. Same thing on the ten-year: 4.953% in our tables, 4.93% on the wire. We’re using the first set for every index level and every yield in this letter, straight through, so nothing here is spliced together from both. Where we quote the wire, its numbers stay inside its own quotation marks and we don’t reconcile them against ours.

Wholesale Inflation Accelerated, And So Did Crude

The macro headline, from the wire, as it ran:

“US WHOLESALE INFLATION ACCELERATES TO 5.4% IN AUGUST, WHILE FED RATE-HIKE ODDS RISE TO 72% AND THE 10-YEAR TREASURY YIELD CLIMBS TO 4.93%, NEAR ITS HIGHEST SINCE 2023.”

And the market’s response, also from the wire:

“WALL STREET FALLS FOR A FOURTH STRAIGHT SESSION AS BRENT CRUDE TOPS $105 AND US CRUDE EXCEEDS $100 ... AMID RISING INFLATION FEARS.”

Today is producer prices. Tomorrow is CPI, and the weekend letter had that calendar right. We’re not going to guess at the print, and anybody who tells you they know it is guessing too.

September 10 close. Natural gas has a percentage but no point change in front of us, so that cell reads n/a rather than a guess.

Brent finished at 108.07, up 6.8%. WTI closed 102.70, up 6.9%. Tuesday’s letter ended with Brent at 98.85 and the line “That story has not finished.” It hasn’t. We didn’t publish Wednesday, so don’t subtract those two numbers and call it a day’s work; that’s two sessions of ground.

Gold is the odd one out and it’s the reason this letter exists. On a day wholesale inflation accelerated, rate-hike odds went to 72% and crude ran almost seven percent, the metal people buy for inflation closed down 75.78 at 4,324.45. GLD, the fund, was down 1.73%, which lines up. Tuesday’s letter had gold at 4,357.60 and called it the more interesting of the two metals-and-oil facts. It’s lower again now.

We’re not going to give you a tidy reason. The honest version is that gold has spent this week going down on days that should have suited it, and the dollar and the bond market both had something to say about that.

The Dollar Was Firm And Bitcoin Wasn’t Spared

The dollar gained on all three of these. The yen weakened half a percent, the euro gave up two tenths, sterling three. Bitcoin fell 1,168.98 to 77,134.91, down 1.5%, and IBIT was down 1.42%, which is close enough to the same thing.

So the two assets people reach for when they don’t trust paper money both went down on the day paper money looked worse. That’s not a prediction, it’s just what happened, and it’s the second time this week we’ve printed it.

The Missiles

This ran on the wire today and we’re reporting it exactly as reported:

“YEMENI ARMED FORCES LAUNCH MISSILE ATTACK ON SOUTHERN SAUDI ARABIA”

Saudi civil defence put out an emergency alert for Khamis Mushait and Abha, and later said the danger had passed.

That’s the whole of what we know. We’re putting it in the same letter as a seven percent day in crude because both things happened today and you should see them both. We are not telling you one caused the other, we’re not forecasting what comes next, and we’re not going to price a war we can’t see. Anyone doing that on your timeline this afternoon is selling something.

The Scorecard

Four indices, all red, and the growth end took the most. The Nasdaq 100 lost 1.1% and the Russell 1.0%, while the S&P and the Dow both gave up six tenths. Nothing here is a rout.

The VIX is the line that moved. Up 9.4% to 18.01, the biggest percentage move on this table by a distance. Tuesday’s letter printed it at 15.63 and closed with the thought that the Gulf risk “is not priced by a 15.63 VIX.” It’s 18.01 now, and we didn’t publish Wednesday, so that’s two sessions of repricing rather than one. Even so, 18 is still inside the fourteen-to-twenty band we’d call ordinary. Awake, not alarmed.

The Sector Board

Two of the eleven finished green, Communications at six tenths and Staples at one. Technology was the worst at 1.4%, with Materials next at 1.2%, and the whole board spans exactly two points from top to bottom. That’s a narrow, orderly down day dressed up as a scary one.

Now the row worth stopping on. Energy closed down 0.6% on a day WTI rose 6.9% and Brent rose 6.8%. Level with Health Care, right in the middle of the eleven. The commodity moved and the equity didn’t follow it.

There are a few ordinary explanations, and we can’t pick between them from a single day’s percentage. What we can say is that if you were long energy shares as your inflation hedge, today paid you nothing, and if you were long gold as your inflation hedge, today cost you. Two hedges, one hot inflation print, zero help.

The Chips Took It

The six worst on this board are all chip names. Intel down 5.60%, Micron 4.91%, Sandisk 4.08%, Marvell 3.42%, AMD 3.35%, NVIDIA 2.37%. Then the board goes quiet: nothing else on it fell more than 1.73%.

And Apple rose 3.57%.

That’s not a market selling everything on an inflation print. That’s money coming out of one industry and going somewhere else inside the same index. The sector board agrees with it: Technology last at 1.4%, Communications first at plus six tenths. If you only read the index number today you’d have missed the entire day.

We hold none of those chip names outright, and we’re not going to pretend to know why Intel was down 5.60%. What we do know is that the Nasdaq 100 fell 1.1% while Apple rose 3.57%, which tells you how heavy the damage was underneath the index number.

The Price Of Money

September 10 close. The change column is measured against the levels printed in Tuesday’s letter, which is two sessions back because we didn’t publish Wednesday. It is not a one-day move.

Tuesday we wrote about a thirty-year that wouldn’t budge off 5.249% through an afternoon with a shooting war in it, and said that was the version of the rates argument that should bother you. It has budged. Two sessions later it’s 5.362%.

The whole curve went up and it didn’t twist much. One year to thirty is 109 basis points today; Tuesday’s letter made that gap 111. So this isn’t the bond market pricing a recession or pricing a panic. It’s the bond market repricing the level of everything, front to back, and the biggest two-session move on the US curve sits in the five year at nearly eighteen basis points. The five year is where a rate-hike argument would show up first, and the wire has hike odds at 72%.

Every ten-year on that table went up. Japan’s went up two basis points and the other four went up fourteen to twenty-one, which is not the same event. Britain is the most expensive borrower on this list at 5.379%, and it now pays 43 basis points more than the United States, against 38 on Tuesday. America pays 145 more than Germany and 204 more than Japan for the same ten years.

Friday’s letter made this argument and Tuesday’s repeated it. Today the equity market finally acted like it heard. The ten-year at 4.953% is a real number for a real alternative, and the wire calls it near its highest since 2023.

Credit Was Fine, Duration Wasn’t

All six red, and the spread from best to worst is nine tenths of a point. Tuesday four of these six finished within three cents of unchanged. Today all of them moved, mildly.

The interesting pair is HYG against LQD. If today were a credit scare, the junk would be worse than the investment grade. It’s the other way round, 0.4% against 0.9%, and the simplest reading is that this was a rates day and LQD carries more duration. Convertibles were worst at 1.3%, which makes sense for the thing on this list with the most equity in it, on a day equities fell.

TIP down four tenths on a hot producer-price print is the one that looks backwards until you remember TIPS are still bonds. Rising real yields hurt them regardless of what the inflation number did.

Around The World

Korea fell 4.2%, the worst on this board and 1.7 points worse than the next one down. The six worst names on our single-stock table are all chip companies. We’re putting those two facts side by side and letting you do the rest.

Emerging markets lost 2.2% against developed-market EFA’s 0.8%, which is 1.4 points of daylight on a day the dollar was firm and US yields rose. That’s the old, boring emerging-market equation and it still works.

Brazil was the only green square on the board, up 1.3%, on the same afternoon crude ran almost seven percent.

Trusted Voices

Only what was actually posted today, quoted as it ran. Where a post was cut off by the page we either quote to the cut or leave it out, and today we left a couple out rather than finish somebody else’s sentence for them.

Here’s what’s interesting about today’s crop. The tape spent the session pricing inflation. Two of the three people below are arguing the demand side can’t support it.

Danielle DiMartino Booth. Three hours ago:

“Absent purchasing power, to WHOM do companies charge higher prices? (See any consumer-facing’s earnings comments…then reference their accompanying layoff announcements.)”

And four hours before that, on weekly retail spending data:

“Got inflation-adjusted? @ChicagoFed Advance Retail Trade Summary (CARTS) tracks @uscensusbureau Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MRTS) on weekly basis, providing early snapshot of national retail spending. Latest week in the red. The Consumer is Strong!”

That last line is sarcasm and it matters that you read it that way. She’s pointing at retail spending in the red and then saying the opposite of what she means. Take that sentence out of its paragraph and you’d have her arguing the exact reverse of her own post, which is why we’ve run the whole thing.

Henrik Zeberg, six hours ago, and this one reached us as a repost from DiMartino Booth rather than as her own words:

“Observe guys! Do not get fooled by the ‘inflation-coming-narrative’.”

A repost is amplification, not authorship. We’re attributing the line to Zeberg because he wrote it, and we’re not going to tell you she endorses it, because a repost doesn’t say that.

Set those against the day. Wholesale inflation accelerated to 5.4%, hike odds are 72%, the ten-year is near its highest since 2023, and stocks fell a fourth straight session on inflation fear. Zeberg says don’t be fooled by the inflation narrative. DiMartino Booth is asking who exactly is supposed to pay these higher prices when spending is going backwards and the layoff notices are stacking up.

We’re not refereeing that. Both readings can’t be right and one of them is about to be tested. Tomorrow’s number is the referee, not us.

Yuriy Matso, three hours ago, on the four-hour chart of ES futures:

“Bull Trap in place. Larger drawdowns are likely if ES drops below 7327.”

That’s a checkable level, which we like, so let’s check it. His 7327 sits about 3.5% below where the S&P closed today at 7,592.80. One caveat and it’s a real one: he’s talking about the futures contract and our tables carry the cash index, and those two don’t print the same number. Treat 3.5% as the neighbourhood, not the tick. Either way, four down sessions have not got us anywhere near his line yet.

What We Did

We sold puts into this. Both tickets went out as their own alerts this morning with the full detail, so this is the short version.

Portfolio 1 added a GLD October 16 396 put and took in $1,010, on the gold weakness described at the top of this letter. That sits alongside a December 18 395 put the book has held since August 26. Same idea, shorter clock, and if gold keeps sliding we end up owning the metal at prices we chose on purpose.

Portfolio 2 did something smaller and, honestly, more useful to learn from. A QQQ 708 put expiring today got bought back at mid-morning for a scratch, sixty-five cents, and the money went straight back out to the September 16 698 for $240 net. QQQ closed the day at 708.58, down 1.08%.

Battista’s own words on it, and we’re not putting them in ours:

“That’s short dated, short premium working to your advantage, Long Delta market down no loss.”

There’s a whole education in that sentence for anyone selling premium. Short-dated options bleed time value fast enough that a down day in the underlying doesn’t automatically hand you a loss on the short put. That’s the trade-off you accept when you give up premium for a shorter clock, and on a day like today you get paid for it.

Bottom Line

That’s the close, written in the hour after the bell. Four things from today, in the order we’d rank them.

Gold is the story and it isn’t a comfortable one. Wholesale inflation accelerated to 5.4%, crude ran 6.9%, rate-hike odds went to 72%, and gold closed down 1.7%. If you hold the metal as inflation insurance, the policy just didn’t pay on a covered claim. That’s worth more of your evening than the S&P’s forty-three points.

The selling was narrow. Six chip names took the damage, Apple went up 3.57%, two sectors closed green, and the whole eleven-sector board spans two points. Four straight down sessions sound worse than what actually happened underneath them.

Rates are the pressure and they’re global. The US ten-year is 4.953%, the thirty-year has moved 11 basis points in two sessions after refusing to move at all on Tuesday, and Britain, Italy and Germany all went the same way. Japan’s barely moved. Credit didn’t break, but longer paper got hit harder than junk did, which tells you this was about the price of money and not about anyone’s ability to pay.

And two people we read think the market has the inflation story wrong. CPI is tomorrow. We’re not forecasting it, we’re not positioning for it, and we’d rather sell premium into the uncertainty than pretend we know the number.

Disclaimer

This is not investment advice. Nothing in this letter is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Grow Your Pile and Squared T Capital publish what we do in our own accounts for education. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor. A short put can require you to buy stock at the strike price and can lose more than the premium collected. Past results do not predict future results. Do your own work and consider speaking with a licensed advisor about your circumstances.

Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.

Tony Rihan and Tony Battista Grow Your Pile

Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.

Two tickets to report, one in each book, and they’re doing opposite jobs.

Portfolio 1 sold another GLD …

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One ticket in Portfolio 2 this morning. Battista sold a single SPY put five weeks out and took in $750. It named its price and got it in forty…

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That last part is the whole point of this letter. The credit is the small number here.

The Trades

Paid subscribers — both trades below

$3,322.50 of credit across two tickets, one unit each: $2,770.00 from the SPX 1-1-1 and $552.50 from the /MES step. That is 0.33% of the $1,008,467 Portfolio 1 value Rihan read after the fills this morning.

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Portfolio 2 closed an AMD jade lizard for a winner on August 25. Nine days later Portfolio 1 closed a GLD zebra for $590. Both of those structures have proper names because somebody sat down years ago and designed them, and on Thursday one of the two people who did that is joining us.

Liz Dierking and her partner Jenny Andrews created the jade lizard, the big lizard, the spiked lizard and the zebra, among others. She’s a former Chicago floor trader. She hosted a live trading talk show on tastytrade for fifteen years, and she spent a lot of that time pushing “trade small, trade often” so retail investors could actually use this stuff.

We’re not going to dress this up as something it isn’t. We don’t run their playbook as a system. We traded those two structures, on those two dates, and we’ve been carrying questions about how both are meant to be managed that we’ve never had a chance to put to one of the people who built them. Thursday we get to ask.

This is a members-only live session with Tony Battista and Tony Rihan.

Not a member yet? This is the kind of session members join for. Come learn to trade like the pros. growyourpile.com

Who’s joining us

Here’s how Liz and Jenny describe what they’re building, in their own words:

LEVEL UP WITH LIZ & JNY Liz Dierking & Jenny Andrews are building a community where passionate options traders and everyday retail investors come together - laughing, learning, and leveling up side by side. Options trading is not a zero sum game, it’s people helping people, trader to trader, friends to friends. Because the best edge isn’t just strategy - it’s the community you trade alongside.

It launches this fall. Everything past that we’ll let her tell you herself, because what we know about her is what she has published, and we’d rather ask than assume.

Why this one is worth an hour

The jade lizard and the zebra aren’t exotic. They’re two of the most useful shapes we own, and both came out of the same partnership.

The AMD jade lizard came off on August 25 for a winner, about a day after it went on. The GLD zebra came off on September 3 for $590 after three days. Both write-ups are already in your inbox, so we won’t re-run the arithmetic on the call.

What we want is the reasoning behind the shapes. Why the jade lizard is built the way it is, and what she thinks people get wrong about it. Where the zebra belongs, and how she handles one that goes against her early, which is the spot Rihan was in last week and talked about on the air. And what “trade small, trade often” means once your account isn’t small any more, because that’s the question we get most.

Whatever else comes up, comes up. It’s a conversation, not a lecture, and the best hours we’ve had on this show went somewhere neither of us planned.

PPI prints Thursday morning and CPI lands Friday, so it’s a decent week to be in the room.

Bring something to ask

Type your question in the chat and we’ll get to it live. If you have a jade lizard or a zebra on right now, better still, bring the strikes and we’ll pull it up.

See you Thursday.

Members, here’s your invite

📅 Thursday, September 10, 2026

5:00 PM ET · 4:00 PM CT · 2:00 PM PT

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Brent Went To 98.85

The story today wasn’t the stock market. It was a tanker war.

Brent finished at 98.85, up 1.7%, which puts it $1.15 from a hundred dollars. WTI closed 93.76, up 1.3%. At lunchtime Brent was 97.30 and up a tenth of a percent on the day; almost all of the move happened in the last three hours, and the wire tells you why.

Per First Squawk, in the hour before the bell:

“BRENT CRUDE SURGES TOWARD $100/BBL, HITTING A SIX-WEEK HIGH, WHILE US GASOLINE PRICES SET A LABOR DAY RECORD AT $4.15/GALLON; BANKS WARN PROLONGED CONFLICT COULD PUSH OIL TO $120–$150/BBL.”

“OIL APPROACHES $100 AS NEW HOUTHI ATTACKS ON SAUDI ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE AND EXPLOSIONS ON IRAN’S KHARG ISLAND HEIGHTEN GLOBAL SUPPLY FEARS.”

“BRENT RISES 1% TO $97.92 AND WTI JUMPS 1.7% TO $93.03 AS HORMUZ FLOWS REMAIN AROUND HALF PRE-WAR LEVELS, RAISING FRESH INFLATION AND REFINED-FUEL SUPPLY RISKS.”

That last one is a snapshot from around a quarter to four, not a closing print. Brent kept going after it and finished at 98.85, another 93 cents higher. We’re quoting the wire as it ran and we’re not going to reconcile its intraday percentages against our closing ones; they’re measured from different points in the day.

On what actually happened out there, again per First Squawk:

“US FORCES ARE REPORTEDLY STRIKING IRANIAN OIL TANKERS, WITH TWO US OFFICIALS CITED AS SAYING AMERICAN DRONES TARGETED TANKERS OFF IRAN’S SOUTHERN COAST: I24 NEWS.”

“IRAN LAUNCHED A SECOND, PREVIOUSLY UNDISCLOSED ATTACK ON US NAVY SHIPS MONDAY, ACCORDING TO US OFFICIALS CITED BY WSJ; NO AMERICAN VESSELS WERE HIT, BUT THE ATTACKS RAISE CONCERNS OVER IRAN’S GROWING MISSILE CAPABILITIES AND POSSIBLE CHINESE OR RUSSIAN ASSISTANCE.”

And the newest one, which landed after the close and is the one that matters into tomorrow morning:

“IRGC NAVY WARNS OIL TANKER CREWS NEAR KUWAITI & BAHRAINI PORTS HOSTING US FORCES TO EVACUATE, THREATENING TO TARGET VESSELS IN RETALIATION FOR US STRIKES ON IRANIAN OIL TANKERS”

Read that slowly. Kuwait and Bahrain are not Iranian waters and those are not military targets. Telling commercial crews to get off their ships is a threat to shipping insurance and shipping routes, and the freight market prices that faster than the oil market does.

Friday’s letter ran a story headlined “Oil Is Back Above $95…” and quoted the CENTCOM wire about three Iranian crude carriers being struck. That was Friday’s close at 96.03. This is the very next session, because Monday was Labor Day, and Brent is $2.82 higher. That story has not finished.

The rest of the table: gold fell 1.1% to 4,357.60, which is the more interesting of the two metals-and-oil facts, because gold usually likes a shooting war. Natural gas at −2.6% is still the largest percentage move on this table in absolute terms, and it is not remotely the story today.

The Call That Was Right At Lunchtime

Most of the time you read someone’s market post, you nod, and you never find out whether they were right. Today we found out twice. Once at lunchtime, when he was right. Once at the bell, when he was half right.

Around 12:20, amit, who posts as @amitisinvesting, put this up. The page cut him off mid-sentence, so this is exactly where the quote ends:

“software is down because semis are gapping up heavily today / this has become the new normal, so it shouldnt surprise anyone / however, id much rather deal with a software dump from 52-week highs vs making new lows almost every week a few months ago when the semis would pump”

At 12:50 that is precisely what the board showed. Intel was up 10.33%, AMD 6.83%, Marvell 2.48%, Sandisk 2.47%, Broadcom 2.38%, and the big software and platform names were red. Then the afternoon happened.

Midday and the close, September 8.

Three of them held their move and three gave most or all of it back. Intel gave back a point and a bit and still finished up 9.03%, which is an enormous day. AMD gave back about a point. Broadcom was the only one that got better, from +2.38% to +2.97%. But Marvell fell from +2.48% to +0.81%, Sandisk went from +2.47% to −0.11%, and Micron went from barely green to −1.62%. Two of the seven closed red that were green at lunch. And NVIDIA, the largest chip name there is, was never in the trade: red at midday, red at the close, −2.01%.

The software half of his sentence aged better than the semiconductor half. CRCL closed −5.74%, worse than it was at lunchtime. Netflix −1.85%. Microsoft −1.15%. Software kept falling all afternoon; the semis stopped leading around one o’clock.

We’re showing you both prints rather than the tidy version. The tidy version would have you believe a rotation ran all day. It didn’t. It ran for a morning and then gave a chunk of itself back, and the difference between those two descriptions is the difference between a story and what happened.

September 8 close. Chip and chip-adjacent names in bold. The 52-week low and high columns are dropped here for width. CBRS has no year-to-date figure, so that cell says “not quoted.” It is not zero.

Four of the five best names on the day are chips. The fifth is Tesla at +3.98%, which has nothing to do with any of this. At the other end, three of the weakest are CRCL at −5.74%, CBRS at −4.87% and NVIDIA at −2.01%, with IBIT and Netflix both at −1.85% just behind them.

The year-to-date column is the one that sticks, and it barely moved on a day like this. Sandisk is up 632.22% on the year and closed down eleven basis points. Micron is up 250.41% and closed down 1.62%. Intel is up 183.06%. We don’t own those, we don’t recommend them, and they aren’t on any list we track. They’re there to tell you the scale this rotation has run to, and to make the point that one afternoon barely dents it.

The Scorecard

Everything sold off further into the bell. The Dow finished down 1.2% against the S&P’s 0.5%, more than twice the decline, and it was the standout on the downside all day.

The VIX closed 15.63, up 2.2%. Volatility rising on a down day is the most ordinary thing on this page and we’re not going to dress it up as a signal. One honest note: Friday’s close was 14.58 in our weekend letter, and the change column here doesn’t reconcile against that base. So take the 15.63 and the direction, and we’ll leave the subtraction alone rather than publish arithmetic that doesn’t work.

The Sector Board

September 8 close.

Three green, eight red. Energy took the lead, which after the section above is not a surprise, and real estate slipped from green to red in the afternoon. Health care was the worst sector all day and got worse into the close at −2.5%, with financials next at −1.4% after deteriorating through the afternoon. Top to bottom the board spans about three and a half points.

Now the inference, labelled as one, because it is not in the data. A 2.5% health care selloff is the obvious candidate for why the Dow fell more than twice as much as the S&P. The Dow is price-weighted and it carries big-ticket health care names. We cannot prove it here, because what we have is sector ETFs, not Dow component moves, so we don’t know which individual stocks did the damage. Treat it as the likely explanation, not as something we checked.

Nothing Happened In Credit

The absence is the story, and it held all day. High yield finished down three cents. Investment grade down two. Treasuries, TIPS and municipals all within a couple of pennies of unchanged. Nothing on that table moved as much as a tenth of a percent except the convertibles.

Which are the odd row again. CWB up 1.1% on a day stocks were lower is a strange print, because convertibles are equity-linked and usually go where stocks go. It was up 1.4% at midday and held most of it. We don’t have the holdings behind that ETF here, so we can’t tell you whether it’s one large position or something broader. We’re flagging it rather than explaining it.

If today were the front edge of something, credit is where the first flinch usually shows up. There wasn’t one, on a day with drone strikes on tankers in it.

The Price Of Money

Friday’s letter argued that the market’s problem isn’t growth, it’s the price of money. Here is the version of that argument that should bother you: the thirty-year did not move at all.

The US thirty-year closed at 5.249%. At lunchtime it was 5.249%. Identical to the thousandth, through an afternoon in which oil went to 98.85 and the IRGC threatened commercial shipping. The front end nudged up, the one-year from 4.131% to 4.142%. The ten-year slipped a hair to 4.795%. The UK thirty-year went from 5.801% to 5.823%. That’s the whole day in the world’s most important bond.

The rest of the shape is unchanged. The US pays 142 basis points more than Germany to borrow for thirty years, and 128 more than Japan. Britain pays another 57 on top of the US. Of the six thirty-years quoted here, the two Anglo economies are the two most expensive, and it isn’t a photo finish. The US curve slopes up the whole way, 4.142% at a year to 5.249% at thirty, and 45 of those 111 basis points sit in the last twenty years of it.

Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist at the Schwab Center for Financial Research, made the same point today alongside a chart. Her post was cut off by the page. Quoting to the cut:

“As U.S. gov’t bond yields have risen, spread between equity earnings yields and bond yields has compressed; not a phenomenon unique to U.S.; spread may be tighter in U.S. than in other markets, but same pattern can be observed across developed markets (selection of which shown”

It ends there, at “shown,” so that’s where we stop. The readable half is the useful half. When the earnings yield on stocks and the yield on bonds converge, what you’re paid for owning the riskier of the two shrinks. Her second clause is the one Friday’s letter didn’t make: this isn’t only happening here. The UK ten-year at 5.171% sits 38 basis points above the US ten-year, and Italy’s thirty-year is 110 above Germany’s.

One more thing on the demand side, per First Squawk about half an hour before the close:

“FOREIGN INVESTORS INCREASE TREASURY BUYING, PURCHASING $9.84B OF 2-YEAR, $8.75B OF 5-YEAR & $6.79B OF 7-YEAR NOTES, UP FROM PRIOR MONTH LEVELS.”

Two, five and seven years. Foreign buying up month over month at the front and the belly, and a thirty-year that would not budge off 5.249% on a day the Gulf caught fire. We’re putting those two facts next to each other because they’re both true and they’re both interesting. We are not telling you one caused the other, and we haven’t seen anything today that would let us.

Two Voices, Opposite Readings

This is the part to sit with, and it isn’t our argument. It’s between two people we read every day.

Liz Ann Sonders, this morning, complete and not truncated:

“August @NewYorkFed median 1-year inflation expectations +3.58% vs. 3.63% prior … 3-year +3.19% vs. 3.26%”

Both tenors fell. The one-year is down five basis points, the three-year down seven. Small moves, and nobody should build a thesis on five basis points of survey data. But the direction is down.

Keith McCullough, CEO of Hedgeye Risk Management, in the last hour of trading, also complete:

“The Global #Quad3 commodity trade keeps paying / WTI: +9.7% last week | +23.0% 1M / Copper pushing to ATHs / Nat Gas: +10.9% 1M / Long OIH, ICOP & UNG. Inflation isn’t slowing down- it’s broadening”

Those return figures are his and we’re passing them on as his, not checking them against our table. But the last five words are the whole disagreement. One of them is reading a survey of what people expect. The other is reading what things actually cost, with Brent closing at 98.85 in between them.

Both can be right for a while, which is the uncomfortable part. Expectations can drift down while energy drags a headline number up, and that gap is exactly where a central bank gets into trouble. It is also, for what it’s worth, the thing the thirty-year seems to be refusing to take a view on.

We’re not adjudicating this one. We don’t have the primary data to, and the referee arrives this week anyway: PPI Thursday, CPI Friday, then the Fed on the 15th and 16th. If Thursday and Friday come in soft, Sonders’ survey looks right and the long end has some explaining to do. If they run hot with oil where it is, McCullough’s broadening looks right and 5.249% was the honest number all along.

Around The World

Europe was a shrug that turned slightly sour: France, South Africa and Mexico all gave up morning gains, and the developed blend finished down half a percent. Worth noting that China had the worst tape of the fourteen while the Chinese thirty-year sits at 2.161%, comfortably the cheapest money on the sovereign table. The country with the lowest cost of capital in the group also had the worst equity day. One session is not a thesis and we won’t turn it into one.

The yen is the line to watch, and it firmed into the bell: 153.9830, with the dollar down two tenths of a percent against it. The last figure we put in print for it was 155.6350, in Friday’s Market Intelligence, and that one was a mid-session read rather than a close, so the two aren’t quite like for like.

Bitcoin closed 78,511, down 0.9%, and IBIT finished −1.85% on the day and −10.59% on the year. It is one of only five names on the board above that are red year to date, out of the 21 carrying a year-to-date figure.

Trusted Voices

Only what was actually posted today, quoted as it ran. Where the page cut a post off, we quote to the cut and stop.

Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist at the Schwab Center for Financial Research. Both of her posts are above. The New York Fed expectations print is complete; the earnings-yield-versus-bond-yield post was truncated and we quoted it to the cut.

Keith McCullough, CEO of Hedgeye Risk Management. His commodity post is above and it’s the one that matters. Three more, all complete. On the rates trade: “Long $CLOX vs. Short $TLT = Macro Alpha” — for what it’s worth the short TLT leg neither paid nor cost anything today, TLT closing dead flat at −0.01%. We have no price for CLOX, so that’s half a trade we can see. On gold, before it fell 1.1%: “Nice job reducing your Gold positions on green last week”. And on the copper leg of the same commodity thesis: “Nice rip for our Copper Miners $ICOP ETF today”. Earlier in the day he also posted his signal count, “Signal Strength Stocks (update) = 61 Longs, 76 Shorts #timestamped” — 137 names carrying a signal, 15 more short than long, which on a day all four indices closed red is a tilt the tape agreed with. And one line worth keeping on the wall: “You want your process to be automatic”.

amit, who posts as @amitisinvesting. We don’t have a firm or a title for him, so we won’t invent one. His semis call and how it aged are the second section of this letter. He also posted twice on a Palantir and Nebius announcement, both cut off by the page: “$PLTR $NBIS PALANTIR NAMES NEBIUS AS ITS PREFERRED SOVEREIGN AI INFRASTRUCTURE PARTNER. - Palantir and Nebius announced a strategic AI infrastructure partnership, with Palantir naming Nebius its preferred sovereign AI infrastructure partner and planning to integrate Nebius”, and then, on going and doing the homework himself: “Called up Palantir Architect @chadwahl this morning to get his thoughts on this Palantir/Nebius Partnership and he confirmed what most people assumed: distributed compute across open source models is a sector of AI demand that is only growing. The future is being built in front”. Neither name is on the board above, so unlike the semis call we have no way to check this one. It’s his reporting and we’re passing it on as his.

Bottom Line

We did trade this morning. That’s the combo alert’s job, not this letter’s.

Four things from today, in the order we’d rank them.

Oil is the story and it is not finished. Brent closed at 98.85, $1.15 from a hundred, on drone strikes against tankers, explosions on Kharg Island, Houthi attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure and Hormuz running at about half its pre-war flows. The IRGC then told commercial crews near Kuwaiti and Bahraini ports to get off their ships. Whatever tomorrow does, the risk in that sentence is not priced by a 15.63 VIX.

The rotation faded and we said so. Intel, AMD and Broadcom held; Marvell, Sandisk and Micron gave it back or went red; NVIDIA was never in it. A call that’s right at lunchtime and half right at the bell is normal, and the only thing that would have been wrong is printing the lunchtime numbers under a story about the whole day.

Nothing broke. Outside the convertibles, nothing in credit moved a tenth of a percent, on a day with a shooting war in it. That is either reassurance or complacency and we genuinely can’t tell you which.

And the one we’d turn over tonight: the thirty-year closed exactly where it sat at lunch, 5.249%, while two people we trust read the same afternoon in opposite directions. Sonders has expectations falling on both tenors. McCullough has inflation broadening, with the oil price to back him. PPI Thursday, CPI Friday, the Fed the week after. One of those two readings is about to get a lot harder to hold.

Disclaimer

This is not investment advice. Nothing in this letter is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Grow Your Pile and Squared T Capital publish what we do in our own accounts for education. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor. A short put can require you to buy stock at the strike price and can lose more than the premium collected. Past results do not predict future results. Do your own work and consider speaking with a licensed advisor about your circumstances.

Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.

Tony Rihan and Tony Battista Grow Your Pile

Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.

Read more

We’re writing it up because the chart answers the only question worth asking on this name right now: is this a pullback you buy, or a ceiling you wait out? Our honest answer is neither, not here. There is a level where we’d want to own it, and Friday’s close is about seven percent above it.

Where it closed

AMZN finished Friday at 258.51, down 0.15% on the day. It sits between the Bollinger Bands, under the 20-day, well above the 200-day. Four levels frame the whole picture.

Two bits of arithmetic worth having. The band is 22.29 wide (273.34 − 251.05), which is 8.50% of the middle band (22.29 / 262.20) and 8.62% of Friday’s close. That is a wide envelope for a mega-cap, and wide bands mean the last twenty sessions have not been quiet. And price sits 19.39 above the 200-day, which is 8.11% above the average itself (19.39 / 239.12) or 7.50% of the close, depending which base you measure from. Both are the same gap. We’ll use the 8.1% figure when we’re talking about how stretched the stock is above its trend, because the trend line is the thing you’re measuring against.

RSI is 49.55. That is the midline to two decimal places. It tells you nothing, which is itself the finding: the stock is neither oversold enough to bounce on relief nor overbought enough to be worth fading. The same panel had RSI at the 70 line in April and May and again briefly in July and August, and down near 25 in the February and March selloff. It has unwound all of it. There’s no edge in the oscillator here, and anyone telling you otherwise is reading a different chart.

What the daily chart is actually saying

This is a strong uptrend that has stalled, not broken. Over the three-year window the 200-day has risen steadily from roughly 110 to 239.12 and has never turned lower, and that’s the fact that outranks everything tactical below it. Price has dipped under it twice in that span and both times came back.

Inside that trend the last eighteen months have been violent. Price sold off through the 200-day in the spring of 2025 to around 165, the deepest damage on the chart. It recovered to roughly 240 by that autumn, dropped hard in February 2026 to about 190 where it undercut the 200-day again, and then ran almost vertically from April into May to roughly 280 to 285, riding the upper band the whole way. June gave a chunk back to about 230, where the 200-day caught it. August pushed to roughly 285 a second time and faded.

So the stock has tested the same ceiling twice in four months and failed at it twice. That is what the fade off 273.34 and the close under the 20-day is describing in miniature.

The monthly chart is the one that matters

Pull back to monthly candles and the August bar does something specific: it printed the all-time high near 285 and closed well off it, leaving an upper wick on the highest monthly bar in the stock’s history. September so far is a small red candle underneath it.

A rejection wick on a record high is not a top. Plenty of them get eaten a month later. But it is the market telling you where the sellers live, and it is the second time this year that roughly 285 has done the job.

Now look down, because that’s the part we care about. Roughly 240 is where the stock held in December 2025 and again in mid-2026. And the daily 200-day is at 239.12, right underneath it and rising.

That confluence at 239 to 240 is the whole letter. A horizontal shelf that held twice and a rising long-term average arriving at the same number is the highest-quality support this chart has to offer, and it’s the only level on the page we’d want to be a size buyer against. Everything between 240 and 285 is the market arguing with itself, and Friday’s 258.51 is roughly in the middle of that argument.

What the relative chart adds, and why it matters for premium

Tony’s second chart plots AMZN against SPY year to date. AMZN is up 10.92% on the year and SPY’s line finishes marginally ahead of it. After eight months, all that work for a dead heat.

But the path was not a dead heat. By eye off that chart: AMZN gapped down in early February to about −10%, bottomed near −15% in late February, bottomed again with the index in early April, then overtook SPY and peaked near +18% in mid-May. June and July gave the entire lead back to roughly −3%. Then in early August it gapped from about −3% to +22% in a matter of days, the single biggest move on the chart, and faded through the rest of the month.

That’s a swing of about 33 points versus the index between the February low and the May high (18 − (−15)), round-tripped to level. The beta on the quote card is 1.48.

For anyone who sells premium, this is the section to read twice. A 1.48 beta and two gap events this year is not a quiet stock, whatever the last few weeks of drift look like. What the path has actually done is the thing to size against. We have no chain in front of us, so we are not going to tell you what AMZN options are priced at today. What we can tell you is that this name swung 33 points against the index and gapped twice this year, in February and again in August, and a stock that has done that once can do it again on a Tuesday. The correct response to a record like that is smaller size than the regime baseline would otherwise allow, and better strikes, not more contracts.

What the fundamentals add, briefly

We’re not going to relitigate the quarter. Three things from the July 29 call matter to the chart.

AWS is accelerating, not decelerating. Revenue of $42.2 billion in Q2, up 36.7% year over year, a $169 billion annualized run rate and a $496 billion backlog. The run rate ties to the quarter: 42.2 × 4 = 168.8. Company-wide, revenue was $200.6 billion, up 20%, with operating income of $27.5 billion, up 43%.

The bill for it went up. Management raised 2026 cash CapEx to roughly $220 billion from roughly $200 billion, spent $53.1 billion of it in Q2 alone, and told everyone plainly that heavy near-term spending will pressure free cash flow until the data centers are earning. The platform’s model rating flags negative trailing-twelve-month free cash flow. We weren’t given a free-cash-flow figure, so we’re not printing one.

The stock is priced somewhere around 20 to 21 times earnings. The quote card says 20.5; the model’s own write-up says roughly 21.6. We’re giving you both rather than picking the one that suits the argument.

That is the Broadcom problem wearing a different suit. The growth is real, the spending to produce it is enormous, and the only open question is whether the price already assumes it works. A model on Tony’s platform reiterated a $311 target on August 1 with an Outperform score of 79. That is a screener model, not a person and not Wall Street, and it’s five weeks old. One more piece of arithmetic: 311 / 1.2030 = 258.52, so the 20.30% upside it advertises is being measured off roughly Friday’s price.

And the single most useful fact for anyone structuring an option trade: the next earnings report is October 21, 2026.

The two scenarios

Up. Reclaim 262.20 and hold above it, and the 20-day stops being resistance and starts being a floor. The next stop is the upper band at 273.34, 5.74% above Friday, and then the roughly 285 high, about 10% up. Getting through 285 on the third attempt would be a genuine breakout on the monthly chart, not a bounce.

Down. Lose 251.05, the lower band, and there is very little between there and the shelf. Roughly 240 and the 200-day at 239.12 are where the buyers showed up twice before, about 7% below Friday’s close. That is where we’d rather be a buyer, and we’d say that out loud rather than pretend we like it here.

Everything between 251.05 and 262.20 is noise, and Friday closed inside it.

How a GYP member would express this

This is analysis, not an alert. We are not opening anything in Portfolio 1, 2 or 3 on the back of it, there is no trade card below, and no Greeks changed today. If we do put something on, it comes as its own alert with the fills, like everything else we publish.

Here is how the framework reads it.

Sell into the shelf, don’t chase the middle. The whole method is to get paid to be a buyer at a price you actually want, and 258.51 is not that price. The 239 to 240 confluence is. On our own regime table, the VIX at Friday’s 14.58 close (per this morning’s letter) sits in the normal bucket, not the low-volatility one. Normal means standard sizing and the ordinary 45-to-21-day cycle. It does not come with the extra distance the low-volatility rule demands. The shelf sits roughly 7% below Friday’s close, and that figure is measured off a level read by eye. So this isn’t two independent rules agreeing. It’s a level worth waiting for that happens to sit right at the edge of the band the low-volatility rule would ask for if we were in it, and we aren’t. Without a chain in front of us we can’t say what delta that shelf is. What we can measure is distance, and the rulebook screens on that as well.

The cycle matters more than the strike here. Our entries go on around 45 days to expiration and come off at 21 days, no exceptions. From Friday, the October monthly expiration on October 16 is 42 days out, which is right in that window, and it lands five days before the October 21 earnings print. That is a full cycle of premium with no earnings event inside it. The September monthly on September 18 is only 14 days out, too short by our own rules, and it carries CPI on Friday the 11th and the Fed on the 15th and 16th. Short of earnings does not mean short of risk.

Into CPI week, prefer defined risk. This morning’s letter said we’d rather be a buyer of cheap volatility than a seller of it ahead of the number, and nothing about this chart changes that. If you want AMZN exposure before Friday, a put spread caps what a gap can do to you, and this stock has produced two gaps this year that a naked short strike would have felt. The cost is a smaller credit. That is the right trade when volatility is ordinary and the calendar is not.

On what a short put actually ties up. We don’t have a per-name margin figure for AMZN from Tony’s platform, so we’re not going to make one up. What we can tell you is the arithmetic on the other side: in a cash account, a short put at a 240 strike requires 240 × 100 = $24,000 of margin required on cash account per contract, which is also the sizing number and close to the worst case. In a margin account the requirement is a fraction of that. Those are two different numbers for the same trade, and knowing which one your account uses is the difference between holding through a bad week and being forced out of one. The 240 strike here is hypothetical, chosen to illustrate the level. We have no options chain, no implied volatility and no premium data for AMZN in front of us, so there is no credit quoted anywhere in this letter and there won’t be one until there’s a fill.

Trader Take

No edge at 258.51, real edge at 240. RSI at the midline, price between the bands, the 20-day 1.43% overhead and the lower band 2.89% underneath. That is a coin flip with a spread on it. The reason to have this chart open is that the stock sits roughly 7% above the best support it owns, and waiting for that level is the trade. Reclaiming 262.20 changes the near-term picture; losing 251.05 starts the trip to the shelf. Sizing beats cleverness on a 1.48-beta name that has gapped twice this year.

Investor Take

AWS accelerating into a $220 billion capital plan is the entire investment case and the entire risk, and they are the same sentence. Amazon is up 10.92% year to date and has still not beaten the index it round-tripped 33 points against. If you own it, you have already been paid nothing for a great deal of turbulence, and that’s before you ask whether roughly 20 to 21 times earnings is right for a company deliberately suppressing its own free cash flow to build data centers.

That is the connection to this morning’s letter. When the price of money goes up, the market discounts far-off cash flows harder, and Amazon is now a company whose cash flows are further off than they used to be by management’s own choice. Nothing about that says sell. It says the entry price matters more than it did two years ago, and 240 is a materially better entry than 258. The 200-day has risen from roughly 110 to 239 over three years and has not turned down once. Let it come to you.

Disclaimer

This is not investment advice. Nothing in this letter is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Grow Your Pile and Squared T Capital publish what we do in our own accounts for education. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor. A short put can require you to buy stock at the strike price and can lose more than the premium collected. Past results do not predict future results. Do your own work and consider speaking with a licensed advisor about your circumstances.

Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.

Technical levels quoted here are drawn from single charts at a single point in time and are not predictive. They are as of the Friday September 4, 2026 close and will move.

Tony Battista and Tony Rihan Grow Your Pile

Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.

I reviewed the week’s major market developments with one question in mind: what actually changes the setup for traders and investors heading into next week?

The defining theme was the return of the rates trade. A surprisingly strong jobs report, a global bond selloff, renewed oil/geopolitical risk, and extraordinarily high expectations for AI stocks created a much more complicated backdrop than the headline indexes suggest.

The Five Stories That Moved Markets

1 · The Jobs Report Was Too Good for the Fed

Friday delivered the week’s biggest surprise. The U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August, nearly triple the roughly 56,000 economists expected, while unemployment held at 4.1%. Labor-force participation also improved. Stocks initially struggled, Treasury yields jumped, and markets increased the probability of a Fed hike at the September 15–16 meeting to roughly 60%.

Trader Take: We are back in a “good news can be bad news” environment. Strong economic data can push yields higher and pressure QQQ, semiconductors and other high-duration assets. Watch the 2-year Treasury yield—it may be one of the most useful tells for equity direction right now.

Investor Take: A resilient labor market is fundamentally good for earnings and the economy, but it reduces the case for easier monetary policy. Favor companies that don’t need lower rates to make their valuations work.

2 · The Bond Market Became the Real Story of the Week

September started with a global bond selloff. The U.S. 10-year Treasury yield reached its highest level since early 2025 as investors grappled with inflation, government borrowing and the possibility of additional Fed tightening. Yields subsequently eased when Fed Governor Christopher Waller sounded more patient, only to rise again after Friday’s strong employment report.

This is important because the stock market is increasingly trading off the bond market rather than the other way around.

Trader Take: I’d keep the 10-year and 2-year yields on the screen next to SPX and QQQ. A sustained breakout higher in yields could create a very different volatility environment, particularly for expensive technology stocks.

Investor Take: Higher yields raise the discount rate applied to future earnings. That doesn’t mean sell stocks; it means quality, cash flow, profitability and reasonable valuations become more valuable.

Since Friday’s close, Saturday, September 5. Per First Squawk: “Treasury sell-off piles pressure on weakest US borrowers - FT”. That is the credit column in the cross-asset table further down. High yield (HYG) lost 0.73% on the week and investment grade (LQD) 0.82%, and both closed within a dollar of their 52-week lows. The bond market didn’t just push yields up; it started charging the weakest borrowers for it.

3 · Broadcom Proved AI Is Booming — But “Great” Isn’t Good Enough Anymore

Broadcom delivered remarkable AI numbers. The company raised its fiscal 2027 AI-chip revenue forecast to approximately $115 billion from $100 billion and expects that figure to roughly double to $230 billion in fiscal 2028. Third-quarter AI-chip sales more than tripled to $16.7 billion. Yet the stock struggled because the outlook didn’t clear Wall Street’s extremely high expectations.

That’s an important market signal.

Trader Take: AI has moved from “buy anything AI” to “show me the numbers.” Earnings reactions matter more than the headline beat. When an outstanding report can’t push a stock higher, pay attention—that can indicate expectations and positioning are already stretched.

Investor Take: The Broadcom numbers actually strengthen the long-term AI infrastructure thesis. But they also reinforce why price matters. Great business + unreasonable expectations can still equal a disappointing investment return.

4 · Oil Is Back Above $95 — And That’s a Problem for the Inflation Story

Middle East tensions returned with force as U.S. and Iranian military attacks resumed. Brent crude moved above $95, reviving fears that higher energy prices could feed back into inflation just as the Fed is debating another rate increase.

This creates an uncomfortable combination: strong employment + expensive oil + persistent inflation = more ammunition for the hawks.

Trader Take: Energy remains a legitimate momentum trade, but geopolitical markets can reverse violently on a single headline. Smaller position sizing and defined risk make sense. Also watch whether higher crude begins pressuring transportation, consumer and other energy-sensitive sectors.

Investor Take: Sustained $95+ oil could alter both inflation and corporate-margin assumptions. Energy exposure can provide some portfolio diversification against precisely this scenario.

Since Friday’s close, Saturday, September 5. The wire overnight, verbatim. Per Walter Bloomberg: “U.S. CENTCOM: U.S. FORCES STRUCK THREE IRANIAN CRUDE OIL CARRIERS -STATEMENT” and “U.S. CENTCOM: U.S. STRIKES COME AFTER IRAN LAUNCHED BALLISTIC MISSILES TOWARD TWO U.S. NAVY WARSHIPS”. Per First Squawk, cut off where the page cut it: “U.S. CENTRAL COMMAND SAYS ITS FORCES STRUCK THREE IRANIAN CRUDE OIL CARRIERS ON SEPT. 5 AFTER THE IRGC LAUNCHED BALLISTIC MISSILES TOWARD TWO U.S. NAVY WARSHIPS PATROLLING REGIONAL WATERS, WITH A U.S. AIRCRAFT CARRIER AND GUIDED-MISSILE DESTROYER SUCCESSFULLY EVADING MULTIPLE” and, from the CENTCOM commander, “’LET THE MESSAGE TO THE IRGC BE CLEAR: IF YOU SHOOT AT TWO OF OUR SHIPS, WE WILL IMPOSE AN EVEN HIGHER ECONOMIC COST — TAKING OUT THREE OF YOURS’”.

Brent closed Friday at $96.03, up 9.01% on the week and 57.82% on the year on Tony’s platform. None of Saturday’s news is in that price. US markets are closed Monday for Labor Day, so Tuesday is the first session that gets to vote on it. We’re not going to guess the direction; we’d just note that Tony’s Trader Take above was written before any of this, and it already said smaller and defined.

5 · Next Week’s CPI May Be More Important Than Friday’s Jobs Report

This week’s employment report answered one question: the labor market isn’t falling apart. Now Wall Street needs to know whether inflation is.

August PPI arrives Thursday and CPI Friday, immediately ahead of the September 15–16 Fed meeting. After Friday’s strong jobs number, futures markets are roughly divided over whether the Fed hikes. That means inflation could become the deciding vote.

The scenarios are unusually clean:

Cool CPI → yields could retreat → growth/technology gets relief.

Hot CPI → Fed hike odds rise → yields higher → pressure on expensive equities.

Trader Take: I’d be reluctant to become overly aggressive immediately before CPI. Elevated event risk can create much better entries after the number than trying to predict it beforehand.

Investor Take: Don’t restructure a long-term portfolio around one CPI print. But if inflation stays sticky while oil and yields remain elevated, the market may need to reprice the assumption that easier monetary policy is coming anytime soon.

Where The Year Actually Stands

YTD and Friday’s closes are the six tiles on the members dashboard, Jan 2 basis. “This week” is the Aug 28 close to the Sep 4 close, five sessions. The 52-week column is Tony’s platform at Friday’s close.

Tony’s one-line summary of the week when he sent the tiles over: “very little movement during the week.” The table agrees. The biggest move among the three equity ETFs was QQQ, at 0.35%. Here’s how the weekly column was built, so you can check it:

The Aug 28 closes are the ones we published in last Saturday’s letter. Tony’s platform carries its own one-week column, and it gives the identical six figures to the hundredth, so the two sources agree on the window and on the arithmetic.

Now look past the equity rows. Bitcoin was the biggest mover of the six, up 3.03%, and it’s still down 11.21% on the year and 37% below its 52-week high. Long Treasuries lost 0.81% and closed about 1.3% above their 52-week low, which is the tile that matters this week and the one Tony’s second story is about. Gold gave back half a percent and sits a full 20% below its high. We’re short the GLD Dec 18 395 put in Portfolio 1, so a gold pullback is something we get paid to wait through, not something we’re chasing.

The volatility line is the one to sit with. The VIX closed Tuesday at 16.35 (our Tuesday letter) and Friday at 14.58 (Tony’s platform). That’s 10.8% cheaper over a week that included a global bond selloff, Brent up nine percent, and a payroll print nearly three times consensus. Friday morning’s letter quoted 14.14 mid-session; it finished the day a little higher, but still nowhere near where it started the week.

On the index level, Tony’s year-to-date chart at Friday’s close has the Russell 2000 at +19.89%, the Nasdaq 100 at +17.01%, the S&P 500 at +12.75% and the Dow at +11.13%. Those are the platform’s basis and run slightly different from the tiles above (the tiles use the Jan 2 close; the chart uses the platform’s). Both are right; the ordering is the same either way. Small caps lead, the Dow trails, and there’s about nine points between them.

Trader Take: Five sessions of nothing at the index level while the bond market moved is exactly the setup where a 14-handle VIX undercharges. The week’s realized move in SPY was eleven basis points. The week’s move in what SPY is discounted against, the 10-year, was to its highest level since early 2025, per Tony’s second story. One of those usually gives, and we’d rather keep the tail insurance Portfolio 1 already owns than sell more premium into CPI.

Investor Take: The year’s standings didn’t change and neither should a long-term allocation because of them. What changed is the cost of money underneath the standings. The Russell’s lead is the position most exposed to a hike, because small caps carry the most floating-rate debt. Enjoy the lead; don’t add to it on the strength of it.

The Sector Board

Tony’s platform at Friday’s close, the eleven S&P sector SPDRs, best week to worst.

Four sectors up on the week, six down, and financials dead flat at 0.00%. That’s a market that went nowhere in aggregate while the pieces moved, which is the same thing the six tiles said.

The year is a two-sector story, and neither of them is the one people talk about at dinner. Energy is up 43.28% and technology 30.08%. At the other end, consumer discretionary is down 3.77% and communication services 4.83%, the only two sectors red on the year. Top to bottom that’s a 48-point spread. Tony’s fourth story explains the top of it: Brent finished the week above $96, and XLE was the best sector on the week too, at +2.20%, sitting 2.2% below its 52-week high. The bottom is the flip side of the same coin. Discretionary is where the consumer pays for $96 oil and a Fed that might hike, and the market has been pricing that all year.

Technology held. XLK gained 0.86% on the week that Broadcom put up the numbers in story three and got sold for them. The sector didn’t get sold; one stock did. That distinction is the whole point of Tony’s “show me the numbers” line: the money isn’t leaving AI, it’s getting choosier inside it.

Financials at 0.00% on the week, 0.9% off their 52-week high, is worth a second look next to story two. Yields went up and banks didn’t rally on it. Friday’s letter had the front end rising while the long end didn’t, and a flatter curve is a thinner spread between what a bank pays and what it earns. Higher rates help banks; higher short rates don’t, and Friday was the second kind.

Friday on its own was a different board. Eight of eleven sectors fell, led by discretionary and communications, with tech, industrials and utilities the three that closed green. Utilities up 0.82% on the week and 2.01% for September on a week yields rose is a small oddity we’ll leave alone rather than explain.

Trader Take: Energy led the week at +2.20% and sits 2.2% from its 52-week high; discretionary is the only sector down on the week, the month and the year. If the trend and the distance from the high agree, that’s where we’d want to be short puts, and XLY is the one where they don’t.

Investor Take: Two of eleven sectors are red on the year and both are consumer-facing. Anyone who let this year’s winners run is, by default, overweight energy and technology at 2.2% and 5.8% below their highs. Trimming that back isn’t a call on either sector; it’s arithmetic.

Cross-Asset: Where The Price Of Money Showed Up

The same platform, Friday’s close, the nineteen names on Tony’s watchlist, best week to worst.

Read the bottom three rows together. Investment-grade credit, long Treasuries and high yield were the three worst things on the page this week, down 0.82%, 0.81% and 0.73%, and every one of them closed within a point and a half of its 52-week low: LQD 28 cents above it, HYG 60 cents, TLT $1.04. That’s Tony’s second story in a table. It isn’t an equity selloff. Equities were flat. It’s the price of money going up across every kind of bond at once, and the VIX watched it happen from 14.58.

The top of the page is the other half of the week. Brent +9.01% is by far the biggest move anywhere on this list, and it’s now 57.82% up on the year 16.7% below its $115.25 high. NVIDIA gained 5.89% in the week Broadcom got punished for a great quarter, which tells you the AI money is still there and getting more selective, not smaller. Emerging markets rose 2.32% and are 25.57% up on the year, better than any of the four US indices; Portfolio 3 owns EEM and has since January.

The dollar fell half a percent in a week US yields rose. We’d normally expect the opposite, and we’re not going to build a story on one week of it. We’re noting it because it’s the kind of thing that, if it keeps up, says something about who’s buying the Treasuries at these yields and who isn’t.

Trader Take: The three bond ETFs at the bottom of the table are each within $1.04 of a 52-week low while the VIX sits at 14.58, 58.7% below its own high. Cheap equity volatility next to expensive money. We’d rather be a buyer of that volatility than a seller of it into CPI.

Investor Take: Brent at +57.82% and emerging markets at +25.57% lead the year; investment-grade credit at −4.27% and long Treasuries at −5.68% trail it. The diversifier that worked in 2026 was commodities and non-US equities, not bonds, which is the case for the shape of Portfolio 3 and not a reason to chase either.

What We Actually Did

We publish every trade, so here’s the week in numbers. Eighteen tickets across Portfolios 1 and 2, $4,765.25 realized, three tail positions allowed to expire, and a book that finished Friday with 7.10% of buying power in use in Portfolio 1 and 29.47% in Portfolio 2. Every figure below is from the fills and ties to the closed-trade records on the members dashboard.

Portfolio 1 took profits and restocked, in that order of importance. Thursday, before the jobs number, both zebras and the 1-1-1 came off. Tony’s own line on the SPY zebra, from the alert he sent himself that morning: “Taking the Zebra off that was not working Before the Jobs Number;” It scratched for four dollars. The gold zebra was the opposite trade: opened Monday, closed Thursday, $590 in three days on a $6,270 debit, 9.4%. And the 1-1-1 is the one worth teaching from. It was put on for a $257 credit on Aug 18 and taken off for another $185 credit sixteen days later, $442 total, and not a dollar of premium was ever paid. What was paid was margin: the short 750 put tied up about $11,000 for those sixteen days, so it’s roughly 4.0% on capital, not free money. Credit in, credit out is a real thing. Capital-free isn’t.

Friday, after the print, the three ladder steps. Tony’s words: “Looking at my Book I had several income ladder trades over 70% profit, Even though I have very little capital deployed I have to stay mechanical and take those profits. Looking to sell more puts into sell offs if we ever have them again.” The three came off at 75.0%, 71.8% and 74.1% of maximum, all sold Jun 5, all held 91 days, all with more than two months still on them. That’s the rule executing, not a view on the market. Tuesday’s four new /MES steps for $2,140 are the restock; two of them are 7600s, above the ladder’s existing October 7550, which is why they paid what they paid.

Then the expiries. The two SPY tail puts and the yen put lapsed Friday for a combined $284, and that’s the design working. The near steps of a tail ladder are supposed to expire worthless most of the time. That’s what pays for the one that doesn’t.

Portfolio 2 managed the QQQ ladder four days running and didn’t grow it. Tuesday’s two rolls out to Sep 8 cost $276 on the legs closed and brought in $426 of new credit. Wednesday’s roll-down from 710 to 705 cost $199 and realized a $122 loss on the contract closed. Thursday’s second roll-down, same strikes, cost $135 but realized +$132, and the alert’s published reason was one line: “Reducing Delta on our QQQ Ladder;” Friday, with QQQ back at 719 and the number behind us, both 705s were bought back for 24 cents and one Sep 10 708 sold at $1.50, +$494 on the two legs closed. Net for the ladder on the week: +$228 realized, and a position that went from three Sep 8 710s to one 710 and one 708, with a slot deliberately left open. The IWM put was the clean one, and Battista credited it to a member. Sold Tuesday at 75 cents, bought back Wednesday at 17 cents. “Easiest money ever made”, and we’ll cut his line there.

Trader Take: Look at what the week wasn’t. The session before a binary print, Portfolio 1 cut three structures, and Portfolio 2 cut delta on Wednesday and again on Thursday. Nobody in this shop called 162,000. The reasoning out loud on Thursday’s Office Hours pointed the other way. The trades came off anyway, because reducing risk ahead of something you can’t handicap is a different skill from predicting it, and a more reliable one.

Investor Take: $4,765 realized in a flat week, with less premium at risk in both books at Friday’s close than earlier in the week, is what “letting theta work” looks like when you also take it off the table. The thing to copy isn’t the trades. It’s the 70% rule and the fact that it was followed on a week when the book had, in Tony’s words, very little capital deployed and no need to.

Where The Books Stand

Tony’s end-of-week readings, taken after Friday’s close and now on the members dashboard.

Portfolio 3, the ETF macro book, is $107,048.01, up 7.05% since inception, twelve positions, no changes this week.

Portfolio 1 is running 7.10% of buying power, which is what “very little capital deployed” looks like in a number. Open: the /MES put ladder, now six steps (Sep 30 7600, Oct 16 7550 and 7600, Nov 20 7350, Dec 18 7300, and the Dec 18 7500 written on the March contract); the SPY income ladder, down to three (Oct 16 748 and 750, Dec 18 710) after Friday; the GLD Dec 18 395 short put, marked about $275 against us at Friday’s close with gold 20% off its high; the SPX January 2027 income box; the BSH factory’s step two, six SPY Sep 30 570 puts; the /6J Oct 9 yen put, the surviving step of that ladder; 100 IBIT; and BIL for the cash. Theta is $147 a day on $15,438 of extrinsic, and the /MES and SPY steps carry Tony’s standing margin estimates of about $2,500 and $11,000 per contract respectively. The margin required on a cash account is the strike times the multiplier for each, and it is a very different number; we publish both in every alert.

Portfolio 2 finished the week at $260,776. The same book read $259,636 on Tuesday morning before the first roll, so across the week: value up $1,140, delta 217 to 183, theta $167 to $131, extrinsic $3,434 to $2,859, buying power 29.59% to 29.47%. Less premium at risk, less daily income, about the same capital committed. That’s what four rolls and a profit-take look like in Greeks. Open: the SPY ladder, five puts (four Oct 16 745s and Tuesday’s 737); three SPX Sep 18 butterfly structures, two of them free and one broken-wing, two weeks out; the QQQ ladder at two contracts, the Sep 8 710 and the Sep 10 708; the stock sleeve bought with trading profits; and BIL and SGOV. The QQQ 710 was marked at 53 cents Friday against a $4.43 basis, so about 88% of that premium is in hand with one session left, Tuesday’s.

Portfolio 3 has cash and T-bills of $23,259.08, 21.7% of the book, between the cash line and BIL. Leaders on their own entries: copper (CPER) +28.54%, silver (SLV) +21.66%, lithium (LIT) +16.45%, emerging markets (EEM) +16.30%. SPY, held since Jan 2, is +12.39% on the position. TLT is the one red line at −5.54%, which matches the tile. Silver is worth a footnote: the position is up 21.66% since it was bought last October, while SLV the ETF is down 7.14% on the year on Tony’s platform. Both are true. It’s a question of when you bought.

What the calendar does to these books next week. Monday is Labor Day, no session. Tuesday the QQQ Sep 8 710 expires. Thursday is PPI and the QQQ Sep 10 708 expires the same day. Friday is CPI. The Fed meets the following Tuesday and Wednesday, and the SPX butterflies expire that Friday, Sep 18. Four sessions, two inflation prints, and a ladder leg expiring on the first of them.

Trader Take: Portfolio 2’s short QQQ premium now expires Tuesday and Thursday, before and on PPI day, with nothing carried into CPI Friday. That wasn’t an accident. If Tony’s fifth story is right that entries are better after the number than before it, the open slot on that ladder is where the next one goes.

Investor Take: Portfolio 3 owns energy exposure through the broad commodity fund and copper, not through XLE. That’s a diversification decision, not an oil call. Story four is the scenario it’s there for.

Trusted Voices

The people we read, in their own words, from the posts Tony pulled Saturday morning. Where a post was cut off on the page, we stop where it stopped.

Charlie Bilello, Chief Market Strategist at Creative Planning, made the loudest call of the week on Tuesday, before any of the data: “The Fed cut rates by 50 bps in September 2024, declaring victory against inflation. That was a policy mistake, and they compounded the mistake by cutting another 125 bps. They should hike rates by 50 bps this month and follow that up with 50 bps hikes in October and December.” That’s 150 basis points by year-end, a much bigger ask than the roughly 60% odds of a single hike that Tony’s first story describes the market pricing. By Friday he’d shortened it to five words: “The Rate Hikes Are Coming...” He also flagged the one central bank already doing it: “Global Central Bank Update: -New Zealand hiked rates for the 2nd meeting in a row, 25 bps move up to 2.75%.” And on Monday, on the supply side of the bond story, a post that was cut off mid-sentence: “US National Debt has increased by $715 billion since July 1 while the 10-Year Treasury yield has jumped from 4.48% to 4.75%. Washington’s solution? Increase buybacks of longer-dated Treasuries to $4 billion. But swapping longer-maturity debt for shorter-maturity debt doesn’t”, and there the page ends. The part we can read is the part Story 2 is about.

Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist at the Schwab Center for Financial Research, put the number we cared most about on Friday in one line: “Two-month net revisions to nonfarm payrolls added 55,000 jobs”. That’s the same figure our Friday letter built its argument on; a month first reported negative was rewritten positive, and the net correction equals the entire August consensus. She also posted the New York Fed’s supply-chain gauge: “@NewYorkFed Global Supply Chain Index was little changed in August, edging up to 1.06 vs. July’s reading of 0.94 (revised up from 0.79)”. Our read: little changed, but revised up, and above one. Not a reason to expect goods inflation to fall on its own.

Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO and Chief Strategist at QI Research, was the one voice pointing at the other side of the labor market, and she posted it on Tuesday, September 1, three days before the print: “Business closings have been above the critical 200-level for three consecutive months.” The @dailyjobcuts August tally she reposted: 7,000-plus layoffs, 214 business closings, 21 companies hiring. A strong hiring month and a third straight month of elevated closings can both be true. Hers is the one to keep watching if the next payroll number isn’t 162,000.

amit (@amitisinvesting) wrote the week’s most honest sentence on a Thursday he described as the S&P up a percent with oil at a three-month high, and the page cut him off before he finished it: “to be honest, the S&P up 1% on a day where oil makes a 3 month high is a little weird but maybe the market has moved on from caring about rising bond yields and oil? feels crazy to think that’s the case but this type of move today in the face of bad macro is either a trap or”. We don’t know how the sentence ended either. His Friday recap of the report, verbatim and also truncated: “AUGUST U.S. NONFARM PAYROLLS: - The US economy added 162K jobs in August 2026, beating expectations by 56K jobs - July’s payrolls were upwardly revised by 23K - Unemployment rate 4.1% vs 4.1% expected - Employment increased in food services and drinking places and in local”. Two of those figures don’t match what we published Friday. Against the 55,000 consensus in Friday’s letter (Tony’s stories above round it to 56,000), the beat is about 107,000, not 56,000, and his 56K reads like the consensus figure rather than the beat; and we had the prior month going from minus 23,000 to plus 21,000, a 44,000 revision, where he has 23K. Same release, different arithmetic. We’re flagging it rather than picking a side without the BLS table in front of us.

Where The Indices Sit On The Year

No chart of a single name this week. What Tony sent instead was his year-to-date chart of the four US indices, Jan 2 through Friday’s close, and it’s worth reading on its own. No indicators below, because none were on it; this is the shape of the lines and the levels on the right axis.

All four bottomed together around April 1. The Nasdaq 100 was near minus 10% at that low, the other three between minus 5% and minus 8%. From May the Russell 2000 took the lead and kept it. The Nasdaq peaked in early June and again in early July; the Russell peaked in early-to-mid August near +25%. Then all four dipped into the last week of August and bounced Sep 1 through 4. At Friday’s close the right axis read: Russell 2000 +19.89%, Nasdaq 100 +17.01%, S&P 500 +12.75%, Dow +11.13%.

So the year’s leader has given back roughly five points of a 25-point run and still leads by nearly three. Against their own 52-week highs, using the ETFs on Tony’s platform:

The index nearest its high is the S&P, at 1.2% away. The two that led the year, the Russell and the Nasdaq, are the two furthest from theirs. That’s consistent with what the sector board and the cross-asset table said: the market that made the highs was a small-cap-and-growth market, and the market that’s holding them is a big-cap, energy-and-tech market. Tony’s first two stories are why. Small caps carry floating-rate debt; long-duration tech carries a discount rate. A 2-year that keeps rising leans on both, and the S&P, the closest of the four to its high, is carrying the least of either.

What would change the read: a new high in the Russell with the 2-year still rising. That would say the market has stopped caring about the price of money, which is amit’s “trap or” question from Thursday. We’d treat it as the trap until proven otherwise. What confirms the read: the Nasdaq failing to reclaim its early-July level on a cool CPI. If good news can’t get growth back to its highs, the ceiling is rates, not earnings.

Trader Take: The S&P is 1.2% from its high and the Nasdaq 4.0%. A short call spread on SPY has 1.2% of air above it; the same trade on QQQ has 4%. Same market, different distances, different trades.

Investor Take: All four indices are at least 18% above their 52-week lows and no more than 4% below their highs. That’s the range the year has actually traded, and the low end of it is what a long-term allocation has to be sized to live through, not the top end.

Bottom Line

The most important change this week is that the market’s problem isn’t growth—it’s the price of money.

The economy just produced 162,000 jobs instead of the 56,000 expected. AI infrastructure spending remains extraordinary. Corporate America is still producing strong earnings.

Those are fundamentally bullish developments.

But ironically, too much economic strength could now become the catalyst for tighter monetary policy.

For traders, I would remain constructive but cautious: maintain some positive delta, don’t chase extended rallies, keep buying power available, and watch Treasury yields almost as closely as SPX.

For investors, I still see a constructive long-term backdrop. But this environment increasingly rewards quality companies with earnings, free cash flow and pricing power rather than speculative businesses whose valuations depend on falling rates.

The setup for next week is simple:

Jobs told us the economy is strong. CPI will tell us whether that’s becoming a problem.

And that could make next week’s inflation report one of the most important market events of September.

Disclaimer

This is not investment advice. Nothing in this letter is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Grow Your Pile and Squared T Capital publish what we do in our own accounts for education. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor. A short put can require you to buy stock at the strike price and can lose more than the premium collected. Past results do not predict future results. Do your own work and consider speaking with a licensed advisor about your circumstances.

Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.

Tony Battista and Tony Rihan Grow Your Pile

Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.

A very large Latin American pension fund came to Rihan with a real problem. Latin American markets run out of room fast. They run out of Mexican treasuries, Chilean treasuries, the Mexican equity ETF. When you have that much money there are only two pools deep enough to hold it: the S&P 500 and US treasuries.

So they asked him for an S&P 500 strategy. Three conditions, plus a fourth that mattered more than any of them:

1. It has to be long.

2. It has to have a buffer.

3. It has to have no bad extrinsic. His rule is “death before debit,” but as he clarified Thursday, “it’s actually death before extrinsic.”

4. It has to survive the pension fund’s investment committee, which meant every piece of it had to be defensible, in writing, to people who are paid to say no.

He presented it to the head of the Mexican SEC, because a pension fund there can’t use a strategy the regulator hasn’t blessed. They liked the trade. Then they asked him to sit on the board of one of Mexico’s public banks. He said no. The trade never got approved.

That fourth condition is why the whole session was structured as algebra rather than as a trade idea. He had to derive it.

The build, step by step

Start with the boring answer and break it.

A hundred shares of SPY. A hundred deltas. Long, no extrinsic, and Rihan is quick to say it’s not a bad trade at all. It just has no buffer, which is the one thing they asked for.

Buy the at-the-money call. Now you’re a hundred and fifty deltas. But you paid for it, and that premium is what he calls bad extrinsic. That’s his own phrase, and Battista made a point of crediting it to him. It just means long premium: negative theta, a cost of carry, the thing decaying against you every day you hold it.

Sell a call above it. Turn that long call into a vertical. You give back some of the delta, you get back some of the money, and now you’re around a hundred and twenty-five deltas with half the bleed.

Now the algebra. Above the line you have shares. Below the line you have derivatives. So convert the shares: sell an at-the-money put, buy an at-the-money call, and you own long synthetic stock. Nothing about the position changed. It’s still a hundred and twenty-five deltas. It’s just written in a different alphabet.

And once it’s written that way, something falls out of it. You’re now long two at-the-money calls. Which means you can sell a second call above without ever being naked. That’s the extrinsic gone, on the upside, with no uncovered short call anywhere in the structure. Rule one at Grow Your Pile is that we don’t sell naked calls, and it isn’t negotiable.

Where’s the bean in the rice?

Rihan's phrase, and he apologized for it being a Mexican saying. You get a plate of rice and there's one black dot in it. Where's the problem? The upside is clean. The problem child is the downside: that short put.

So you buy a put at the money, on the same strike as the one the synthetic left you short. That's the only place it can sit if it's going to do what comes next. Protection costs money, though, and that's bad extrinsic straight back into the trade. So you sell a put below it to pay for that. It doesn't quite cover it, so you sell a second one below. You're long a put, so neither of those leaves you naked anywhere.

Now line the whole position up left to right and read it off the way he did on screen. Two short out-of-the-money puts. Then a short at-the-money put and a long at-the-money put, sitting on the same strike. Then two long at-the-money calls. Then two short out-of-the-money calls.

That pair in the middle cancels.

Take them out and count what's left. Two short out-of-the-money puts, two long at-the-money calls, two short out-of-the-money calls. Two of everything, carrying about a hundred deltas between them. Divide by two.

**One long at-the-money call. One short out-of-the-money call. One short out-of-the-money put.** A 1-1-1, and about fifty deltas. Rihan read forty-nine off the screen. A defined-risk call structure, a buffer under the market, and, done right, a credit on the way in.

That's the Smart SPX. Battista calls it a beautiful trade. Rihan just calls it the smart.

If you want the fast version without the derivation: buy the at-the-money call, sell a higher call worth about half of it, then sell a put low enough to finance whatever extrinsic is left. Rihan goes one strike further than “financed” so he collects something, because he’s greedy that way. Roughly a dollar in SPY, ten dollars in SPX.
The part Battista lit up about

When Rihan finished cancelling the legs, Battista recognized it immediately, because it’s what he did for a living.

“When I was a market maker on the floor of the exchange, what you just did with your position we would do every day at the end of the day.”

No computers to do it for them. He’d cancel long call spreads against long put spreads, pull the boxes out, then butterfly off whatever was left. Two hundred contracts became a hundred, a hundred became forty. Boxes don’t move. Butterflies barely move. What’s left is your real risk, and that’s the only thing you have to manage. He’d trade three or four thousand contracts a day and carry five thousand on the sheets, and this is how he found out what he actually owned.

Same exercise Rihan just did on eight legs. That’s the point of the algebra.

Where the risk really is

A member asked whether the short put makes the drawdown worse. Fair question, and the answer is no.

Yes, those puts grow faster on the way down, because they have premium in them. But delta is king. You took the position from a hundred deltas to about fifty. All the way from the current level down to your short put strike, you lose less than the index does. Past the short put, you’re one-for-one with the S&P again.

You can’t have everything. Upside participation, no cost, and no downside risk is not a menu you get to order from. What you did was move the risk down, and pay for it by capping the top.

The cleanest way he frames the bargain: the structure takes out the losing months in the four-to-five-percent-down range, and in exchange it caps your winning months at around two percent. That’s the whole trade in one sentence. If that swap doesn’t appeal to you, this isn’t your strategy, and he’d say so himself.

The natural follow-up: if your short put sits at roughly a fifteen delta, one standard deviation out, why not just sell that put by itself? Because the naked put pays you a fixed, fairly small number. This structure gets you the same buffer and a multiple of that. That’s the trade.

And it needs saying plainly: if the market goes nowhere, this makes you almost nothing. It’s a bullish trade. You have to be right about direction, eventually.

Doing it in your size

Rihan builds these in SPX because that’s how he thinks. Battista pulled him back to SPY for anyone trading smaller, and the SPY version is identical — buy the at-the-money call around fourteen dollars, find the call worth about seven and a half, sell the put underneath. Same shape, same fifty-ish delta, same buffer. There’s a small dividend wrinkle in SPY that SPX doesn’t have, and SPX markets are wider.

SPX is ten times the size of SPY. You can do three or four SPY versions and still be half an SPX. If you aren’t comfortable trading ten contracts of SPY, QQQ or IWM, you have no business doing this in SPX.

Neither of them likes mini SPX, and not for the size. It just isn’t liquid enough. Both would rather do SPY or /ES and /MES. And in futures you can run it as a campaign: one on every week or every month, over and over.

Then Battista asked the only question that matters and answered it:

“What’s the only thing that takes us out of this game? Size. Retail investors are not successful, not because they’re not smart enough, or the game is rigged against them, or they don’t understand direction. They understand direction better than anybody else. Retail investors fail because they trade too big. They can’t stay in the position to give themselves time to be right.”

Managing it

When it works. Rihan’s backtest let it run to expiration. In practice, ninety percent of max is plenty, and take it off. Or, in his words, if you’re a chicken like him, you take it off at a scratch.

The move worth stealing. This one is Battista’s and it’s the best piece of position management in the hour. The heavy risk is the put side. So when the market rallies and the put you sold for thirty dollars is worth fifteen, take some of that money and buy a put below it for two or three dollars. Now you own a put spread instead of a naked put, your downside is capped, and you can leave the upside on into perpetuity. It costs you part of the profit. It buys you the ability to stop watching it.

Rihan does a version of the same thing with the credit he collects on the way in. That dollar in SPY, or ten in SPX, sits in his head as money to spend on a long put later. Spend it, and the risk is out of the trade.

When it goes against you. You roll the short put down and out. Then you roll it again. Volatility expands on the way down, so you get paid more to do it. And even if price never comes all the way back, when volatility contracts you get a lot of that premium back anyway. Rihan’s line: the lower price may last, but the anxiety doesn’t.

He backtested this fifteen to twenty years before the pension fund would look at it, and the crisis period is the part they cared about. Coming out of 2008, his numbers put the strategy back at breakeven around July 2009, against January 2010 for a long-only position. Six months earlier. Not a different universe, but six months is a long time to be underwater.

IMAGE: Monthly Returns of the $SPX / S&P Return vs Smart SPX

Don’t read that chart on its own. He was equally blunt with the pension fund about the other half: through the worst of the volatility this thing takes a beating of its own, because the short positions get repriced against you while it’s happening. You still feel the crash. You just get whole sooner.

And the data stops in 2016. That’s the deck as he presented it at the time, and nobody has extended it since. So take it for what it is: his backtest, not a promise, and we haven’t rerun it.

When to put it on. Both of them said the same thing without prompting: on a down day, with volatility expanding. Rihan will sometimes put the call spread on first and wait a day or two for a better level on the put, and he’ll tell you straight that that’s market timing and not textbook. Sometimes he’ll put two units on and only sell one of the puts.

“It’s trading, Tony.”

Herb’s question: this, or the one-by-two?

Herb asked whether the Smart is better than the one-by-two for a market going up. Rihan trades both, and the distinction he drew was clean:

The one-by-two is a trade he puts on when he wants the market to come down to him. He’s trying to capture the space between his long put and his short put.

The Smart is what he puts on when he thinks the market is done going down and he wants to be double bullish: bullish on the short put, bullish on the long call spread.

You can hold both. The one-by-two actually gives the naked put a little cover.

Herb also got a second thank-you, because Herb is the reason we started trading short-dated IWM puts at all. He pushed us into it, we did his trade this week, and it worked. That is not a direction we would have gone on our own.

Members — the replay

VIDEO: replay link:

What our books actually did this week

You saw all four of these in alerts. Here they are in one place, because together they’re the whole session in miniature.

The 1-1-1 is the one to look at. It went on August 18 for a $2.57 credit — $257 in our pocket to be long the S&P twice — and it came off this morning for another $1.85 credit, $185. Credit in, credit out. We never paid premium at any point in that trade’s life. Total: $257 + $185 = +$442.00 on one unit.

That is the trade we spent the hour building, and it’s why he keeps saying death before extrinsic. The structure was designed so that the cost of being long was zero, and it finished that way.

And then there’s the four dollars. Same trader, same week, and he’ll tell you about both without being asked. That is the other half of the lesson, and it’s the half most people never get to see.

What’s coming

Liz Dierking is next week’s guest. We’ll confirm the day in the invite. Come with questions, this one’s worth showing up for.

Faster trades. This isn’t finalized, so treat it as a teaser. We know the gap between when we place a trade and when the note reaches you is a real problem. Five, ten, twenty minutes, and the market has moved. Sometimes it works for you, sometimes against you, sometimes you miss it entirely. We think we have a workaround that gets the trade to you instantly if you want it that way. We expect to close the deal in the next week or two and have it running around the middle of the month.

One of you paid us a compliment about the alerts on the call, and the answer is worth repeating. It’s easy to post a trade. We write out the reasoning because the trade isn’t the product. Knowing why we did it is. Teach you to fish, not hand you a fish.

Thanks to Herb, Bart and David for the questions. Three of them changed where the hour went.

And it ended the way it always ends: you’ve got to risk it to get the biscuit.

Grow Your Pile Office Hours is educational and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Options involve risk and are not suitable for all investors. Strategies discussed carry different risk profiles; long-premium strategies can lose the entire premium paid, and short-premium strategies can produce losses that far exceed the credit received. A short put can require you to buy at the strike and the loss can be substantial in a falling market. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.

Tony Battista and Tony Rihan Grow Your Pile

growyourpile.com

Three buy-to-closes in Portfolio 1 inside 76 seconds this morning. Two SPY ladder steps and one /MES step, one contract each, all three sold on Ju…

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What Actually Happened

Yesterday afternoon on Office Hours, with the market up about a percent and barely a downtick in it, Tony Battista put a fair question to Tony Rihan. Even if you had tomorrow’s jobs number in your hand, how would you know which way the market was going to take it?

Rihan didn’t have the number, so he worked backwards from the tape to what it implied. “This rally, that means the Fed is gonna be […] they’re gonna not be hawkish, you know, so that means the job number should be bad.”

Then the two of them went looking for the line. They pulled the consensus up on the screen, fifty-three thousand jobs, and rounded it off. “So if we are less than fifty thousand, maybe there’s something to it.”

The screen said fifty-three thousand on Thursday afternoon. By the time the release landed, the figure quoted against it was fifty-five. Either way, same neighbourhood, and the marker was fifty.

It printed at 162,000.

Three times the estimate. Mohamed El-Erian used the same phrase in his own write-up, “roughly three times the consensus forecast,” and we’ll take the agreement.

The revisions are the bigger story and they’re getting less attention than the headline. A month that was first reported at minus 23,000 is now plus 21,000. That single revision is worth 44,000 jobs, and the net across the two revised months is 55,000 — which happens to be the entire consensus estimate for August, sitting there in the correction to months that are already over. Do the subtraction and the remaining 11,000 sits in the month before.

That matters more than one hot print. A single number three times the estimate can be noise, weather, a seasonal factor, a strike ending. A hot number plus a negative month turning positive is a different labor market than the one everyone thought they had a week ago. It’s also the kind of thing a central bank actually responds to, because it changes the trend and not just the last dot on it.

On composition, from the same Walter Bloomberg post that carried the headline figures: the biggest gains were in food services, up 59,000, and local government education, up 42,000. Liz Ann Sonders put the greatest strength in leisure and hospitality, which is the bucket food services lives in — same fact, one zoom level out. Those two lines are 101,000 of the 162,000. The other 61,000 is spread across everything else. We’re not going to tell you what that means about job quality; we’re telling you where the number came from.

Participation is the part El-Erian flagged and it’s worth a second. His read was that the report was stronger on both sides of the labor market, demand and supply — payrolls went up and so did the number of people showing up to work. The headline participation rate rose to 61.6%, men to 67.2%, women to 56.4%. But the prime-age rate didn’t budge at 83.4%, which puts the increase somewhere other than the 25-to-54 group.

The Part That Doesn’t Resolve

This is the part of the day we can’t tidy up for you, so we won’t try.

The 2-year Treasury yield rose to 4.416%, its highest since January 2025, and traders added to bets on a Fed rate increase this month. Not a cut. A hike.

And the S&P fell a tenth of a percent. The Nasdaq 100 was down eight points on twenty-nine thousand. The VIX went down 1.3%, to 14.14. TLT, the long end, was up 0.43%.

Read that again. A three-times-consensus surprise, revisions that flipped a negative month, the front end of the curve repricing toward tightening, and equity volatility got cheaper.

The one mechanical thing you can say without inventing a story: the front end sold off while the long end was bid. That’s a flattening, and it’s what a market prices when it thinks tighter now means less to do later. It’s a coherent trade. It is not the same thing as saying the market has it right.

What we’re not going to do is turn “the S&P was down a tenth” into a thesis. Sometimes a market absorbs a genuine surprise because positioning was light and there was nobody left to sell. Sometimes it absorbs it for a day and deals with it at the next open, which is Tuesday, because Monday is Labor Day. We’ll find out which.

The Sector Board

Energy is the easy one: crude fell 2.3% and Brent 2.0%, so the sector that sells oil went down with it. Financials at −0.7% fits too, once you look at the curve rather than the headline. The front end rose and the long end didn’t. A flatter curve is a narrower gap between what a bank pays for money and what it earns lending it out, and a hot jobs number doesn’t fix that.

But the sector board is lying to you today, and the single names show you how.

Semis Bought It, Mega Caps Sold It

XLK finished the morning up 0.8% with Apple down 1.42% and Microsoft down 1.36%. That only works one way.

Every chip name we follow is green, five of them by two to three and a half percent. Every mega cap we follow is red. The index looks calm because those two cancel each other out.

That’s not a small thing for anyone selling index premium. A flat index built out of a plus-three and a minus-one is a very different market from a flat index where nothing moved, and the second one is what a 14 VIX is priced for.

Bitcoin belongs on the page too. BTC at 79,795, down 2.1%, and IBIT down 2.68%.

Credit Didn’t Blink

Six instruments, and the widest move on the board is two tenths of a percent.

We wrote on Tuesday that high yield had finally moved after five sessions of refusing to, down 0.9% that day. Today it’s flat again. Whatever the front end of the Treasury curve thinks is happening, corporate credit isn’t pricing any of it, and inflation-protected paper didn’t move either.

Credit is the slowest instrument on the board and the one that lies least. When it’s flat, the honest description of the day is that nothing broke.

Rates: The Front End Is The Whole Story

The 2-year at 4.416% is the highest we’ve had to write down since January 2025. Put it next to the rest of the American curve and the shape is the point.

The 1-year sits at 4.148%. So the 2-year is trading 27 basis points above the 1-year, and about 36 below the 10-year at 4.771%. Front-loaded, in other words: the market is pricing the tightening into the next couple of years rather than into next quarter or into the next decade.

One caveat we owe you. We don’t carry Tuesday’s 2-year in our own record, so we can’t tell you how much of that move happened this morning versus over the week. What we have is today’s level and the direction of the bet, and the bet is toward a hike.

The long end barely participated. Against the levels we published on Tuesday, September 1, the 10-year is down about 3 basis points, the 30-year down about 4 and the 5-year down about 2 — three sessions of essentially nothing, with a hot jobs number in the middle of it. The 1-year-to-30-year spread is 108 basis points today against the 112 we printed on Tuesday.

That’s the flattening again, in numbers instead of adjectives.

Global Yields

On Tuesday we pointed out that America was borrowing 59 basis points more expensively than Italy for ten years. Today the gap is 63. It hasn’t gone away and it hasn’t narrowed.

Run the 10-year column against the United States and you get the same picture with more decimal places: 63 basis points over Italy, 100 over Spain, 145 over Germany, 186 over Japan, and 309 over China. Only Britain pays more, at 5.127%, and Britain’s 30-year at 5.759% is still the highest long yield on this board — though it has come in about 12 basis points since Tuesday. Japan’s 30-year has done better than that, down about 22 basis points against what we printed on September 1. Both numbers sit in our own tables if you want to difference them yourself.

China’s 10-year at 1.680% is more than three full points below America’s. That is not a rate cycle. That is a country with a different problem.

Silver fell close to three times what gold did. Gold divided by silver comes out at 68 this morning. Silver is the one that behaves like an industrial metal when it wants to and a monetary one when it doesn’t, and today it picked the first.

Oil giving back 2% takes some of the heat out of Tuesday’s letter, which was written on the day Brent went through $95 on a Gulf escalation. Brent is 1.6% lower than where we printed it on September 1. The war headline hasn’t gone anywhere. The oil price has come off anyway.

GLD, the ETF, was down 0.88% while spot gold was down 1.1%. Different instruments, different clocks, same direction.

South Korea was the worst market on our board on Tuesday at −2.8%. Today it’s the best at +2.4%. Chips will do that.

Emerging markets up 1.2% on a day the American front end priced a hike is the wrong way round from the textbook, and we don’t have an explanation we’d stand behind. It’s on the page because it happened. Four markets are red: India, Britain, Australia and Brazil. Oil down 2% covers two of them, the commodity exporters at the bottom.

The yen is at 155.6350, a tenth of a percent stronger on the day. The bigger number is that we printed 160.22 on Tuesday. That’s a 2.9% move in the yen in three sessions, and almost none of it happened today.

And in Kyiv, a Russian drone attack struck Ukraine’s SBU security service headquarters. Zelenskiy said so; a Reuters witness reported smoke over the centre of the city. No market on this page moved on it.

Trusted Voices

Liz Ann Sonders, Schwab. She had the report broken out before most people had the headline. “August nonfarm payrolls +162k vs. +55k est. & +21k in prior month (rev. up from -23k).” And: “Two-month net revisions to nonfarm payrolls added 55,000 jobs.” On the composition, “greatest strength in leisure & hospitality.” On the supply side, “August labor force participation rate rose to 61.6% […]; rate for men up to 67.2%; rate for women ticked up to 56.4%,” with the “prime age labor force participation rate unchanged at 83.4%.”

Mohamed El-Erian. The cleanest framing of the day, and it’s the one we’ve leaned on above: “The latest US jobs report came in significantly stronger than expected across both sides of the labor market: demand and supply. Specifically: Job Creation: Nonfarm payrolls surged from an upwardly revised 21,000 to 162,000, roughly three times the consensus forecast.”

His post continued past what we could see, so that’s where we stop. We’re not going to finish anyone’s sentence for them.

Charlie Bilello, Creative Planning. Not about America at all, which is why it belongs here today: “Global Central Bank Update: New Zealand hiked rates for the 2nd meeting in a row, 25 bps move up to 2.75%.”

Two hikes in a row, and a cash rate at 2.75%. Set that beside a US 2-year at its highest since January 2025 and traders adding to bets on a hike here, and the useful part is simply this: it isn’t only a US story. One central bank actually hiking and another being priced to isn’t a trend, and we won’t call it one. It is two markets pointed the same direction on the same morning.

What We Did Into It

Yesterday Tony Rihan closed both zebras and the Smart SPY 1-1-1 in Portfolio 1, and Tony Battista took delta out of the QQQ ladder in Portfolio 2. All of it went out before the number, in alerts members already have. The realized total across the three Portfolio 1 closes was $4.00 plus $590.00 plus $442.00, which is $1,036.00, and it ties to the cent against the broker’s realized-today column.

The gold exit looks well timed with hindsight — spot gold is down 1.1% today and silver more than 3%. The SPY zebra is the other half of that coin. It expires today, and SPY opened at 772.52, above both of its strikes.

So let’s be straight about what happened here, because it isn’t a forecast we got right. The reasoning out loud on Thursday pointed at a weak print. The print was three times consensus. Nobody in this shop called that, and the trades came off anyway.

The defensible act was reducing risk ahead of a binary you can’t handicap. That’s a different skill from prediction and a more reliable one. You don’t need to know what the number will be. You need to know that you don’t, and to size accordingly.

Which is where Thursday’s call ended up too. Battista, on why people blow up: “Retail investors fail because they trade too big. They can’t stay in the position to give themselves time to be right.” Not wrong. Too big.

Bottom Line

A labor market that a −23,000 print and a +55,000 estimate had everyone calling soft got revised into something else this morning, and the market’s answer was to sell the front end, buy the long end, and leave equities exactly where they were.

We’d put more weight on the revisions than on the 162,000. A month that printed negative is now positive. The two-month net correction is 55,000 jobs, which is the whole August estimate, arriving as a correction to months already in the books. One hot print is an argument. A hot print plus a rewritten trend is a different economy on paper than the one that was there a week ago, and the 2-year at 4.416% is the instrument that noticed first.

For anyone selling premium, the number to sit with isn’t the payroll figure. It’s 14.14.

That’s what the VIX did on a day the market got a three-times-consensus surprise, watched the front end of the curve reprice toward a hike, and saw its own index composition split wide open between chip names that were green across the board, five of them by two to three and a half percent, and Apple and Microsoft both down around 1.4%. Volatility got cheaper. You are being paid less today than you were yesterday to underwrite a market that just received real news and decided it didn’t care.

We’re not closing anything on that. Nothing gapped and nothing in credit moved more than two tenths. The VIX was 16.35 in Tuesday’s letter and it’s 14.14 now, so this is a market that has spent three sessions getting calmer, not one that woke up cheap this morning. But there’s a difference between a quiet market and a market that has stopped charging for surprise, and the second one is where the expensive lessons live. The tape spent this morning not reacting. That’s the observation. What it means shows up later, and usually not on a Friday.

Disclaimer

This is not investment advice. Nothing in this letter is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Grow Your Pile and Squared T Capital publish what we do in our own accounts for education. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor. A short put can require you to buy stock at the strike price and can lose more than the premium collected. Past results do not predict future results. Do your own work and consider speaking with a licensed advisor about your circumstances.

Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.

Tony Rihan and Tony Battista Grow Your Pile

Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.

Two more closes in Portfolio 1 late this morning, three minutes apart. Gold ran, so the December zebra came off after three days. And the Smart SPY structure — the 1-1-1 — went out the same way it came in: for a credit.

The Trades

Paid subscribers — both trades below

Tony Rihan Commentary

On gold: “Closing a GLD Zebra after a large GLD run over the last few days.”

On the other one: “this 1-1-1 trade was put on for a credit and taken off for a credit this is a good teaching experience.”

The 1-1-1, and why it’s the better lesson of the two

He’s right that this is the teaching trade, so let’s take it apart properly.

We opened it on August 18 and were paid $257 to do it. We closed it today and were paid another $185. Total: +$442 on a position where we never once wrote a check for premium. Leg by leg, from the fills:

The short put did most of the work, and it’s worth being exact about why, because the obvious explanation is the wrong one. That put was sold with SPY at 767.89. The exit implies SPY around 768.20. That’s thirty-one cents, four hundredths of one percent, over sixteen days — the market went nowhere. The $419 on that leg was time decay and a softer volatility bid. Almost none of it was direction. We were long SPY twice over and SPY didn’t move; we got paid anyway, and that’s a fact about the structure rather than a good call on the market.

Now the part worth slowing down for.

Money coming in both times does not mean the trade was free. It means no premium was paid. Capital was committed the whole time, because a short 750 put is a short 750 put whether or not the package around it produced a credit.

So the honest headline is not “we got paid twice.” It’s $442 on roughly $11,000 of committed margin over sixteen days, about 4%. On the cash-account figure it’s 0.59%. Neither of those is an infinite return, and there’s no version of this trade where the return is infinite, because the denominator was never zero.

One-lots on a million-dollar model book are the sizing here, and that’s the part to copy. If $75,000 on a cash account is more than you want tied up in one name, the adjustment is a lower strike, not a smaller contract count — you can’t sell half a put.

Annualize the 4% if you want to. We’d rather you didn’t. One sixteen-day trade doesn’t repeat twenty-three times a year on a schedule.

Gold: three days, $590

The zebra reconciles two ways and both give the same answer. Net to net: paid $62.70 ($6,270) on August 31, sold at $68.60 ($6,860) today, so +$590.00. Leg by leg: the two long 375 calls went 43.67 to 48.57 for (48.57 − 43.67) × 2 × 100 = +$980, and the short 405 call went 24.64 to 28.54 for (24.64 − 28.54) × 1 × 100 = −$390. Same $590.

That’s 9.4% on the $6,270 debit in three days, and the debit was also the maximum loss. There’s no margin-versus-cash-account split to show you on this one — a zebra is a long debit structure with no naked short leg, so the capital committed was the $6,270 we paid, full stop. The two-column margin picture we publish on short puts simply doesn’t apply here, and pretending otherwise would be dressing it up.

Where the money came from is worth understanding. We paid $1.87 of time value on this package at entry — $62.70 against $60.83 of intrinsic value with GLD at 405.83. Above 405 the structure carries about 100 deltas, so gold’s move had to cover that $1.87 first and everything after it was ours. Three days later it had, comfortably.

Tony’s reason for taking it off is one line and it’s the right one: gold ran hard, fast. This was a December position sized to be patient. It didn’t need to be.

Two zebras, same structure, opposite outcomes

We closed a second zebra this morning, the SPY Sep 4 762/767, and Tony sent that one out in a separate alert earlier today under the heading “P1: Taking the Zebra off that was not working Before the Jobs Number.” We’re not going to re-run it here. But put the two side by side, because the contrast is the most useful thing on this page:

Identical structure, identical holding period. One scratched: it cleared its 768.16 breakeven by four cents and paid us four dollars for the trouble. The other made 9.4% on its debit.

The difference wasn’t the structure. It was that one of them was given four days to be right and the other was given a hundred and nine. Both cost real money to own; only one had room to work. A zebra doesn’t have an edge. It has a cheap way to express a view, and the view still has to be right inside the time you bought.

Portfolio 1’s three closes today came to +$1,036 in total, which is about a tenth of one percent of the book. The SPY zebra’s +$4.00 is from this morning’s separate alert and its record on the dashboard; the other $1,032 is the two trades above.

Portfolio 1 Greeks

One caveat, and we’d rather flag it than paper over it. The right-hand column is a single portfolio header read at about 11:36 this morning — the same minute the gold ticket filled, and three minutes before the SPY ticket did. We cannot confirm whether it already includes the 1-1-1 close, so treat it as a reading taken during the closes rather than a clean post-trade snapshot. We’re not going to publish a confirmed “after” we haven’t verified. The clean post-trade Greeks will be in the next Portfolio 1 letter.

What the direction tells you is safe enough. Delta down about 122 — we sold two long structures and gave back the long exposure. Theta up about 72 — the zebras were paying time value every day and they’re gone, so the book earns roughly seventy dollars a day more than it did on Friday. Buying power down 1.10 points, a little over eleven thousand dollars on this account, most of it the short 750 put’s margin coming back.

The Decision Framework

Why close gold three days in. The position was built for December. Gold delivered a large chunk of the move it was bought for in three sessions, and the structure’s job — 100 deltas above 405 for $1.87 of time value — had been done. When a long-dated position pays you most of what you asked for in the first week, holding for the rest is a new decision, not a continuation of the old one. We’d rather make that decision with cash in hand. The Aug 26 short 395 put is still on, so we’re not out of gold, we’re out of leveraged long gold.

Why close the 1-1-1 with 106 days left. Because the reason for the trade got weaker while the price got better. It was a directional bullish position with a breakeven 2.66% below spot, sitting on the same December expiration as another short SPY put. Two short puts in one expiration is a stack, we said so on August 18, and taking one off ahead of a jobs number is how you unstack cheaply.

What would have stopped us. On gold: if the run had been our own thesis playing out on schedule rather than faster than expected, we’d have let it run. On SPY: if the 750 put had been the only short put in December we might have carried it — the structure was working.

The sanity check we ran on the margin figure. Our SPY naked-put estimate is $11,000 against $75,000 on a cash account, which is 14.7%. We expect an equity-ETF naked put to land between roughly 14% and 20% of that cash-account figure. It does, so the $11,000 is a reasonable number to divide by. If an estimate falls outside that band, it’s usually the estimate that’s wrong, not the market.

How to adapt this. The transferable idea from the 1-1-1 has nothing to do with SPY. It’s this: when a structure is opened for a credit, work out what capital it ties up before you decide what the return was. A credit-in, credit-out trade with a short put underneath it is a very good trade. It is not free money, and anyone who describes it that way has skipped the only step that tells you whether it was worth doing.

Disclaimer

This is not investment advice. Nothing in this letter is a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Grow Your Pile and Squared T Capital publish what we do in our own accounts for education. Options involve substantial risk and are not suitable for every investor. A short put can require you to buy stock at the strike price and can lose more than the premium collected. Past results do not predict future results. Do your own work and consider speaking with a licensed advisor about your circumstances.

A zebra, or back ratio, is a long debit position: the entire amount paid can be lost, and it will be lost in full if the underlying finishes at or below the lower strike at expiration. The structure closed above contained an uncovered short put; receiving a net credit to open a position does not make it low-risk and does not reduce the downside. Assignment can occur at any time before expiration, not only at expiration. Margin figures shown are estimates that vary by strike, expiry, volatility, broker and margin regime — our accounts run portfolio margin, and your own broker’s number is the one that matters. Realized figures are calculated on the entry prices carried in our book for the legs that were closed.

Past performance is not indicative of future results, and results shown are those of our own accounts and are not representative of any subscriber’s results. Read the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options before trading.

Tony Rihan and Tony Battista Grow Your Pile · Squared T Capital

Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.

P1: Taking the Zebra off that was not working Before the Jobs Number;

P2: Reducing Delta on our QQQ Ladder;

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Yesterday afternoon we sold an IWM put expiring Friday. This afternoon we bought it back. Twenty-seven hours, and most of the money was already…

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A few years back a pension fund in Latin America came to me with a problem.

They had a large amount of money that had to go to work, and when the number is that big there are really only two places to put it — the S&P 500 or the bond market. They wanted to be long, because a pension fund can’t be short, and because of how much money is being printed I happen to agree with them. But they wanted a margin of error. Something that didn’t punish them for being early.

There’s no such thing as safe. There is such a thing as a buffer, and building one is a design problem you can actually solve.

What came out of that conversation is a trade I’ve called the Smart SPX ever since. Some people call it the Double Long. One friend calls it the stupid stupid, because you end up long the market twice.

Thursday we’re building it from scratch, live, with chains on the screen. And we’re going to look at the one we’re carrying in Portfolio 1 right now, including the part of it that hasn’t worked yet.

This is a members-only live session with Tony Rihan and Tony Battista.

Not a member yet? This is the kind of session members join for. Come learn to trade like the pros → growyourpile.com

How we get there

Start with the obvious answer, then break it. You want to be long the S&P. Buy a hundred shares. That’s a hundred deltas and it works fine — right up until the market goes against you, because there’s no margin of error anywhere in it. You’re just long, at whatever price you paid.

Then break the next obvious answer. Buy an at-the-money call instead. Now you have a stop built in, because the most you can lose is the debit. But you’re only long fifty deltas, not a hundred, and you paid a fat extrinsic for the privilege. One of my rules is death before debit, and an at-the-money call is a lot of debit.

So use the algebra. Sell an at-the-money put and buy an at-the-money call at the same strike, and you’ve built a hundred deltas without owning a share. That’s a synthetic long. Same exposure, different plumbing, and the plumbing is where the opportunity is.

Now finance it. Sell a call above your long call, which turns the call side into a vertical. We are not selling naked calls — that’s rule number one and it isn’t negotiable. Then let the short put pay for that vertical. Done properly the whole structure goes on for a credit, which means you’re long the market twice and the market paid you to do it.

The one we’re carrying right now

Portfolio 1 has had a Smart SPY on since August 18, expiring December 18. Long the 770 call, short the 800 call, short the 750 put.

The vertical cost $15.71. The put brought in $18.28. So the whole thing went on for a $2.57 credit — $257 in our pocket to be long the S&P twice, with the short put struck well under the market.

Fifteen days in, it’s up $248. Here’s the part worth an hour of your time: the call side has made nothing. SPY is at 765, still below our 770 long strike, so the vertical is actually down $35. Every dollar of that gain has come from the short put decaying.

That’s not a flaw. That’s the design. The second long is what pays you while the first long waits.

Managing it, both directions

When it rallies. The call vertical is thirty points wide, so its ceiling is $3,000. We don’t wait for the last dollar — we take the vertical off around ninety percent of max and stop paying for the privilege of being right. The short put also collapses fast in a rally, so we close that at about ninety percent too. Above 800 at expiration this particular one makes $3,257, and we won’t be there to see it, because we’ll have taken it off long before.

When it drops to the short strike. We roll the put down and out. Then we roll it again. Down and out to infinity, because sooner or later the S&P bounces, and when it does we take the trade off and get our money back. This is the piece people get wrong, and it’s the piece that decides whether the strategy works over a decade or blows up in a quarter.

The discipline that keeps it alive. While you’re rolling a put down and out, you do not put another Smart SPX on. You wait. When that put is back to breakeven you close it, and then you start again. Stacking a new one on top of a defending one is how a good trade turns into a bad year, and we’ll be blunt about that.

What else we’ll get into

Why SPX and when SPY instead. Contract size, tax treatment, and how the choice changes what account this belongs in.

Where to put the strikes. How far apart the vertical should be, and how far below the market the put wants to sit. The answer moves with volatility and we’ll price it live rather than hand you a number.

What it costs to hold. Margin against the short put versus what the same position would require in a cash account. Two very different figures, and we’ll show both.

Your questions, live. Bring a position. We’ll pull the chain up and work through it on screen.

The idea underneath it

Most people think about risk by asking how much they could lose. That’s a fine question and it’s not the interesting one. The interesting question is what you’re being paid to accept, and whether the payment is worth it.

The Smart SPX doesn’t remove risk. You’re short a put, and if the market falls far enough that’s real money. What it does is get you a hundred deltas of upside, a defined-risk call structure, a buffer below the market, and a credit on the way in. You gave up the upside above your short call to get it, and most of the time that’s a trade worth making.

Come and decide for yourself whether it is.

See you Thursday.

GYP: Members — here’s your invite

📅 Thursday, September 3, 2026

5:00 PM ET · 4:00 PM CT · 3:00 PM MT · 2:00 PM PT

The Smart SPX Trade

With Tony Rihan & Tony Battista · Live, with option chains on screen

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Yesterday we rolled the QQQ ladder out five days, and this letter said that if QQQ was below 710 next Tuesday we’d be having the same conversat…

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Closing Levels:

Now hold gold next to it. A geopolitical shock in the Gulf, and gold fell 2.7%. Silver fell 3.7%. That is not what a fear trade looks like.

That single pairing is the most useful thing on today’s board. When oil spikes on war headlines and gold rallies, the market is buying safety. When oil spikes and gold falls, the market is repricing inflation and interest rates, and gold is losing to a higher discount rate faster than it gains from fear. Today was the second kind. This wasn’t a risk-off day. It was a rates day with a war headline attached.

The Sector Board

That’s a textbook energy-shock board. The sectors that benefit from a higher oil price go up, the ones that pay it go down, and money hides in the businesses people can’t stop buying from.

Credit Finally Moved

We have written “credit did not move” in five consecutive letters. Today it moved. High yield down 0.9%, high grade down 0.9%, convertibles down 1.3%.

These are not large numbers. But the point of watching credit is that it stays still through equity noise and only moves when something real changes. After a week of shrugging at rotation, single-name blowups and a Fed chair’s first speech, it took an oil shock to get its attention. That’s worth more than the size of the move.

Yields went with it: the 5-year at 4.56%, the 10-year at 4.80%, the 30-year at 5.27%. The UK 10-year moved further, up 16 basis points to 5.22%.

And this is the part that should hold your attention: markets are now increasingly pricing a possible September Fed hike. Not a pause. A hike. Two weeks ago the argument was about the pace of cuts.

Technical Breakdown — The US Dollar

The dollar sits underneath gold, oil, rates and every commodity on the board, so it's worth a proper look on a day like this.

The structural change is the 200-day. The dollar spent 2025 in a long decline, from about 110 in January 2025 down to the mid-90s by early this year, and the 200-day sloped down the whole way. That line has now flattened and turned up, and it sits at 99.14 with price above it at 99.70. After a year of every rally failing under a falling average, the average stopped falling. That’s the first thing on this chart that’s genuinely different.

The second thing is how quiet it is. RSI at 50.25 is the middle of the range — no momentum in either direction. Price is sitting between the middle Bollinger band at 99.47 and the upper at 100.26, well inside a band that’s only about 1.6% wide. A flat RSI and narrow bands after a multi-month base is a coiled chart, not a trending one.

The levels that matter. Below, the 200-day at 99.14 and the lower band at 98.67 — losing both would say the base failed and the 2025 downtrend is resuming. Above, 100.26 is the upper band and the round number sits just past it. A close through 100 with the 200-day rising underneath would be the cleanest technical signal this chart has offered in a year.

Now the part that matters for everything else in this letter.

Gold. Gold is priced in dollars, so a firmer dollar is a headwind, and gold fell 2.7% today with the dollar up 0.27%. The dollar isn’t the whole reason — a 0.27% move can’t cause a 2.7% one — but it’s pushing the same direction as the higher real yield, and the two together explain what a war headline could not.

Oil. Here’s the interesting one. A rising dollar normally caps the oil price, because oil gets more expensive for everyone who doesn’t earn dollars. Today the dollar rose and oil went up 5.7% anyway. When crude climbs into a dollar headwind, you’re not looking at a currency effect or a demand story — you’re looking at supply. That’s a useful confirmation that today’s oil move is about the Strait of Hormuz and nothing else.

Rates. The dollar firming while yields rise is the ordinary relationship — higher yields attract capital. What’s notable is that the dollar is doing it quietly, 0.27%, on a day the 10-year moved four basis points. Neither is panicking.

What we’d watch. If the dollar breaks 100 while oil holds above $90, that’s a genuine squeeze on every commodity importer and on emerging markets — and note that South Korea fell 2.8% today and Germany 1.8%, the two biggest energy importers on our board. If instead the dollar rolls back under the 200-day at 99.14, the more likely read is that today’s move was a one-day risk reaction rather than the start of something.

Global Yields — Where America Actually Ranks

Read the 10-year column top to bottom. The United States pays 4.800% to borrow for ten years. Italy pays 4.206%. Spain pays 3.827%. Germany pays 3.369%.

America now borrows 59 basis points more expensively than Italy, 97 more than Spain and 143 more than Germany. For most of the last two decades Italy was the country whose bond yields people watched for signs of a crisis. Today it funds itself more cheaply than the United States does.

We’re not going to dress that up as a prediction. It’s a fact on a screen, it’s the same fact Charlie Bilello was pointing at with his $715 billion of new debt since July 1, and it’s the same fact David Solomon put plainly yesterday when he said the country will have to drive higher growth “given our levels of spending and debt.”

The United Kingdom is worse off than anyone here. A 5.883% thirty-year is the highest long yield on the board, 61 basis points above the US. Its ten-year at 5.254% sits 45 basis points above the American one, and it moved 16 basis points today alone — four times the US move. Whatever is happening to sovereign borrowing costs, Britain is getting it first and hardest.

And then the other direction entirely. China’s ten-year is 1.684%, more than three full percentage points below America’s. That isn’t a rate cycle, it’s a deflation signal. Japan’s thirty-year at 4.188% against a ten-year of 2.996% is the steepest long end here — the Bank of Japan’s normalisation, still working through.

What it means for a premium seller. Curves this steep and this dispersed are not the backdrop equities have been priced against for a decade. The US curve is positively sloped by 112 basis points from one year to thirty, and the long end is rising because of supply and inflation rather than growth. That’s the Sonders regime again, seen from the bond side, and it’s the thing that will keep pressing on equity multiples regardless of what Dell books in AI orders.

Around The World

South Korea was the worst market on the board at −2.8%, and Germany followed at −1.8% — the two most export-dependent economies on the list, both of which import their energy. Mexico and South Africa fell 1.4%.

Brazil was the only market up, at +1.5%. An oil exporter on a day oil jumped 5.7%. The board is telling one story in every language.

Bitcoin fell 1.9% to $77,375, and IBIT lost 2.1%. The dollar firmed slightly, the yen weakened to 160.22.

The Single Names

Look at the gold line. GLD is down 2.86% today and its year-to-date is now +0.11%. After a run that took it up more than 17% off the July low, gold has given back essentially the entire year in a fortnight. It is 22% below its 52-week high.

Apple was the strongest large cap on the board, up 2.6% and 19.6% on the year — the best year-to-date of any mega-cap we track. On a day the market sold growth, it bought the one with the most cash and the least AI capital expenditure attached to it.

Trusted Voices

Two of the people we read most are now flatly opposed on the only question that matters, and both published today. We’re printing both, because the disagreement is more useful than either view alone.

Charlie Bilello, Creative Planning — the hawk. He isn’t hedging. “The Fed cut rates by 50 bps in September 2024, declaring victory against inflation. That was a policy mistake, and they compounded the mistake by cutting another 125 bps.” His prescription: hike 50 basis points this month, then 50 more in October and 50 more in December. He’d also end quantitative easing immediately and start selling the mortgage book.

He brought two numbers with him, and the second one lands hard on today’s oil print. US national debt has risen $715 billion since July 1 while the 10-year has gone from 4.48% to 4.75%. And: for the first time in history, the national average gasoline price was above $4.00 a gallon every single day of August. That was before crude added 5.7%.

Danielle DiMartino Booth, QI Research — the other side. She argues the inflation the hawks are reacting to isn’t there. Applying Truflation’s 0.03% month-over-month reading to July’s official core PCE, the two-month average falls to 1.66% and the three-month to 1.79% — below target. Her defence of the source: the correlation between Truflation core PCE and the official BLS series since 2011 is 0.89.

She also went at Warsh directly: he is “purportedly in search of alternative data resources” yet “threw his weight last Friday around the lagged, imputed, and distorted Core PCE.” And separately, a number that argues her case from the real economy: business closings have been above the critical 200 level for three consecutive months, with August running 214 closings and more than 7,000 layoffs.

So: one says hike 150 basis points before Christmas. The other says core inflation is already at 1.79% and the Fed is reading broken data. We aren’t going to pretend to settle that. What we’d point out is that today’s tape voted with Bilello — oil up, yields up, equities down, and the market pricing a possible September hike — while DiMartino Booth’s business-closings number is the sort of thing that shows up in the data long after the argument has moved on.

Liz Ann Sonders, Schwab. The mechanism behind the whole session. The 10-year closed August at its highest since January 2025, and the rolling one-year correlation between yields and stocks has moved further into negative territory. Her framing: in the Temperamental Era of the 1960s to 1990s, yields keyed off inflation and moved inversely to stocks; through the Great Moderation from the late 1990s to 2022, they keyed off growth and moved with them. We’re back in the first regime, which is precisely why an oil-driven rise in yields took equities down today rather than up.

Bespoke Investment Group. Where the damage sat: software (IGV) down 3.5%, semiconductors (SOXX) down 2%. Neither is working as September begins. Software took it worse than chips — the reverse of most of last week.

Amit. Two things. The seasonal note, which is unwelcome and true: September is historically the worst month of the year, down 0.6% on average, higher only about 45% of the time, the worst month of the last ten years and the third worst in a midterm year. And on the day’s one genuinely good corporate number — Dell — see below.

Keith McCullough, Hedgeye, and Doug Kass, Seabreeze. Both chose a down afternoon to talk about being wrong in public. McCullough: “Unlike most on X, I post my Long Only portfolio daily, so subs know we lost real money today,” and “I’m good at math and I can’t count how many days I’ve lost money in the last 27 years of doing this.” Kass, the same hour: “Unlike others I am often wrong and always in doubt.”

That’s the part of this business worth copying, and it’s the same reason this morning’s alert published a six-month TLT loss with every ticket shown.

The One Good Number: Dell

On a day when almost everything fell, Dell reported and it was a monster.

They raised full-year revenue guidance by more than $23 billion in one step and lifted the AI server outlook from about $60 billion to $74 billion. Amit’s note adds the order figure: $60.9 billion of AI server orders booked.

Set that against what the market did today. The AI buildout produced its cleanest number in weeks, and technology still finished as the second-worst sector on the board. That’s the regime Sonders described doing its work — in a market pricing off inflation and rates, a good earnings number is simply not the input that matters.

Bottom Line

The market went down because oil went up, and gold falling is how you know that’s the right explanation.

If today were a fear trade, gold would have caught a bid. It fell 2.7% and silver fell 3.7%. What actually happened is that a Gulf escalation pushed the oil price up 5.7%, that pushed the inflation expectation up, that pushed yields up — 10-year at 4.80%, 30-year at 5.27% — and in the regime we are now in, rising yields take equities down with them. Sonders named the mechanism this morning. The tape spent the afternoon demonstrating it.

Three things follow for anyone selling premium.

The VIX rose 9.6% to 16.35, and that’s the first time in two weeks it has paid attention. Volatility has been persistently cheap through a Fed chair’s first speech, an Nvidia print and a week of violent single-name rotation. It is still not expensive at 16. But the direction changed today, and short premium is a business where the direction of volatility matters more than its level.

Credit moved for the first time in five sessions. We have written “credit did not blink” so often lately that it became furniture. Today high yield fell 0.9%. It is a small move and it may mean nothing. It is also the one instrument on the board that had refused to react to anything, and it reacted to this.

And the ladders now carry an oil price. Every short put we hold is on an equity index, and equity indices are now being priced off an inflation input that moved 5.7% in a session. That is not a reason to close anything — nothing has gapped, and the strikes we sold today were chosen with room. It is a reason to know that the thing driving your positions this week is not earnings, not the AI trade, and not the Fed’s next meeting. It is a waterway in the Persian Gulf.

Tony Rihan and Tony Battista Grow Your Pile

Every options trade in all three portfolios is published, win or lose, with entry, exit and running P&L at growyourpile.com.

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