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Articles by Tim Colby
What Traders Must Get Right
Hey traders, The politics stuff goes over my head, man. I sit down and listen to everything Frank has to say and take my cues from that, because Washington gets complicated and I don’t love paying attention to it. My own ballot went all over the map. But I treat this like any other event. I can’t predict what happens tonight. Nobody can, and the people who try get it wrong a lot. What I can do: figure out what the crowd has on.
Washout or Rally
Hi Traders, In my last note I wrote about the trade everyone already has on, and how violent a market gets when a crowded position meets an event that goes the wrong way. I didn’t expect a live demo four days before the vote. The Nasdaq 100 (QQQ) fell four percent on Friday. That’s only the fifth day that bad since 2023. The chip stocks (SMH) fell eight percent. Intel (INTC) lost almost a third of its value after a quarter where it beat estimates, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) lost 12 percent.
Opportunity Ahead Next Week
Hi Traders, Election night 2016, a little before midnight, S&P futures hit limit down. Down five percent to 2,028, and the exchange wouldn't let them fall any further. That rarely happens. By the close the next day they were green by 1.5 percent. Five weeks later they were up nine percent. The violence of that move came straight from the market consensus being double wrong in that election.
Play the Player, Not the Cards
Dear Trader, In the great poker movie Rounders, Matt Damon walks into a judge’s home poker game, sits down, and reads every hand at the table. He never sees a card. His whole thing is that you play the man, not the cards. Watch how he bets, the sizing, the timing, the way a guy breathes when he’s got it. I’m not good enough at poker to play without looking at my hand. But I am that kind of trader. So is Mark Sebastian. And so were a lot of us who stood in a trading pit long enough and thrived.
24-Hour Stock Market Trading Exists
Hey Traders, I’ve been getting asked about 24-hour trading a lot this week, and I get why. On Monday, October 19th, CBOE started letting people trade options on 24 of the most popular stocks and five ETFs before and after the regular session. Stocks themselves are on track to trade 23 hours a day, five days a week starting December 6th. Now everybody wants to know if this changes everything, whether they’ll need to be up at 3 a.m. watching their positions, and if their strategy still works.
Bitcoin Down, Stocks Up: Trading Signals
Hey Traders, On Thursday the Nasdaq dropped $400 billion in about an hour. All it took was one report saying OpenAI’s revenue came in $20 billion lighter than people thought. I expected a sea of red when I pulled up the rest of the board. Instead, I counted 2,291 stocks moving higher and only 610 moving lower. Whoever dumped the AI buildout didn’t take the cash home, and I wanted to know where it went. So I spent the week tracking it.
Identifying Market Turns Patterns on AMEX Floor
Hi Traders, A mentor of mine used to say, “One stock does not a market make.” So why did one headline about one company move $400 billion? Because that’s how a market acts near a turn, and I want to show you how to spot one. Nobody rings a bell at the top, but turns usually leave the same fingerprints. I learned that on the AMEX floor. When a theme ran on the news all day and everybody I talked to had it on, that fever pitch usually hit right around when the thing rolled over.
Market Fragility Beneath Surface Rally
Hey Traders, On Thursday, one newspaper story knocked $400 billion off the Nasdaq in about an hour. I watched Oracle and Nvidia slide down my screen while my account kept climbing. I’m not holding a single bet on stocks falling. So why was I making money in what felt like a crash? Hans Albrecht and I dig into that on Friday’s State of the Market. The story wasn’t even right, and what happened underneath it has me watching for something specific heading into next week.
News Reaction Strategy
Hi Traders. I can like a company all day long. It doesn't matter. I can like their story, their products, the CEO, the chart. If nobody else is putting money into it, it's not going to move, and I'm sitting there with dead money. That's the most valuable lesson I learned when I left the floor. On the floor you could hear the action. You saw it in your own pit or across the trading floor. The yelling was the clue something was going on.
Junk Bond Yields Hit Critical Level
Hey Traders, The bond selloff is chewing through everything except the biggest names in the index. Junk bonds, consumer staples and real estate can't catch a bid (nobody's stepping in to buy). The S&P 500 just sits there, because a handful of megacaps hold it up while sellers pick apart everything underneath. For a month I've been saying rates are driving the bus. This week the damage showed up somewhere new.
Why Chips Still Rise
Hey traders, It started with bond yields, and now credit's piling on too. Junk bonds can't catch a bid (nobody's stepping up to buy them), and the private credit names (firms that lend outside the big banks) keep rolling over. Small caps are trading like junk bonds, too. Semiconductors keep shrugging the whole mess off. The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) was up again Friday, and it's been one of the strongest corners of the market this month. The thing is, chips are part of the problem.
The Name I Would've Missed
Hi Traders, A stock gets crushed. It's down 40, 50, 60 percent, and then it climbs 10 percent from the low. Now you have to decide: is that the bottom, or a dead cat bounce (a short rally in a falling stock before it drops again)? On a chart, you can't tell. The bounce that rolls over into a new low and the bounce that becomes the trade of your year start with the same few green days. I learned to tell them apart on the floor.
Why Skip AI IPO Opportunities Like Anthropic
Hi Traders. Three weeks ago I told you I tried to buy Anthropic at a $380 billion valuation and couldn't find a door I trusted. Since then, Reuters reported the listing has slid toward mid-October, and the prospectus should go public any day. The whisper number (the valuation insiders float before anything's official) sits at $2 trillion, and some reports put the raise itself as high as $100 billion. I wrote almost this exact editorial about SpaceX in June.
Overnight Gap Trading Strategy Guide
Hey Traders, The Fed hiked a quarter point Wednesday, and the new chair wouldn't commit to anything past it. So the market filled in the blank itself: futures now price two more hikes. Thursday gave us the first look at where money wants to go. The Nasdaq and S&P 500 reversed the sell-off fast. Crude slipping back under $100 did a lot of the lifting. The iShares Russell 2000 (IWM) doesn't look so sure. High yield credit (junk bonds, where lenders get nervous first) bounced hard.
Chart I Watched While Warsh Talked
Hi Traders, Going into Wednesday, nobody knew what kind of Fed we had. I don't blame Warsh for that. He just got the job, and he told everyone from day one that he won't forecast his next move. He said it in June, he said it at Jackson Hole, and he said it again Wednesday, almost word for word: "I'm not in the forward guidance business." Nobody has run the Fed that way in 30 years. Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen and Powell all telegraphed their moves.
Finding Real Bid
Hi traders, CPI came in firm and that settled it. The market is now pricing a 90 percent chance of a Fed rate hike next week. The selling we got over the last week was the market bracing for exactly this. All eyes are on the Fed now. And while it waits, the market’s digesting the fact that a hike is coming, deciding this is probably one and done rather than the start of a new cycle, and trying to look past it.
Market Perspective 25 Years Later
Hey Traders, A quarter century ago, to the day, early on a beautiful fall morning, I hustled out of the American Stock Exchange. I trotted three blocks west on Albany St. over to West St. in downtown Manhattan. There were rumors on the trading floor that a plane hit one of the Twin Towers, which seemed impossible. I stood there, just south of the Liberty Street foot bridge, one block from the towers, in disbelief.
One Coiled, One Broken
Dear Trader, The VIX had a wild ride this week. Monday started with the market still digesting Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's hawkish tone from Friday in Jackson Hole. Then renewed fears over Iran ran oil toward $90 and pushed the 10-year to yields we haven't seen since 2023. Stock and bond volatility climbed to their highest level in a month. That reversed hard Wednesday and bled into Thursday on very little catalyst. The rally back caught me by surprise. I didn't expect it to turn that fast.
S&P 500 August Returns in Midterm Years
Hi Traders, Saturday afternoon I was down to the last window and the last few cuts on a trim project. I marked 34 and a half inches for the top of the window, measured twice, and made one clean cut. Then I looked over at my pile… I'd already cut both short pieces. The one I still needed was 57 inches, and I had nothing left to cut it from. I'd bought extra wood at the start, because that's what you do. Every home project, they tell you to add 10%.
Unwinding Signal
Hi traders, Wednesday afternoon I had eight names up on one screen and every one of them was red. Nothing about that session called for it. Oil had closed lower for a third straight day, the 10-year yield hadn't moved, and these are the sleepy dividend payers people buy so they can stop watching the tape. Somebody sold them anyway. That's a tell I learned to trust standing in a pit.
Gold Moved a Copper Stock
Friday, Freeport-McMoRan broke out to an all-time high. Up nearly 8 percent to close just under $77, on more than double its average volume. The wires credited copper. Copper didn't make a new high that day. It sat about 2 percent under the record it set on August 12. Copper is the trigger everybody has wired to Freeport, me included. That's the rule. Copper breaks out, Freeport breaks out. The dog wags the tail. Friday the tail wagged and the dog never moved.
60% Profits In Pepsi Today Is Just The Beginning
Editor’s note: Pepsi showed up on my Delta Strike scan Friday with heavy call buying, so I bought it. I closed those calls today for 60%. Tim Colby found the same name before I did and he’s still holding, looking for a much bigger move. He’s been trading since 2001, we traded together in the CBOE. He’s one of the few people I check in with in the morning to find plays. He’s going live on Thursday, August 27th, at 7 pm ET to share how finds winning trades.
MicroStrategy Bitcoin Investment Thesis
Hi Traders, I can't believe I'm writing this. Please don't tell my dad. Wednesday morning the Treasury said one sentence about the long end of the curve, and four markets moved on it. The department raised the ceiling on its long-end buyback operations from $2 billion to at least $4 billion, starting September 9. Bonds rallied, gold ran more than 3 percent, and Bitcoin put in its best session since June while one corner of the equity market got sold. That reaction spread is my method this week.
Risk Management for Market Crashes
Hi traders, Long-dated Treasuries had their biggest day since September 2025 on Wednesday. Nothing scared anybody into them. The Treasury just raised its hand. In my last note, I put the long bond at the top of the watch list, and it turns out Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is watching it too. Wednesday morning he announced Treasury will at least double the size of its bond buyback operations, from $2 billion apiece to at least $4 billion, aimed at maturities of 10 years and out.
Outperforming Market Indexes on Down Days
Hi Traders, Every major index closed lower Tuesday. My sector ETF book closed higher. That combination isn't supposed to happen. The Macro Barometer, my sector ETF system, buys funds and doesn't short them, so a session where traders dump risk should leave it red with everything else. It didn't. Here's what was happening underneath, because days like Tuesday are the reason I built the thing. The S&P 500 gave up about seven tenths of a percent.
Why Bonds Stopped Working as a Safe Haven in 2026
Hi Traders. Three of my risk charts have spent this year out of step with each other. The short answer is oil. The long answer changes what "safe" even means. During this spring's oil shock, as fear worked into the market, bonds didn't rally. They got sold. Part one was why the yen, the VIX and the 30-year bond normally spike together. Part two was two governments defusing a bomb while the VIX slept through it. This one is about the gauge that stopped doing its job.
Fear Gauge Breaks
Hi Traders. I keep three charts side by side and have since 2013. Yen futures, VIX futures, and the 30-year bond. They don't just look alike. They go up on the same days, in the same hour, often in the same few minutes. A Japanese currency, a stock fear index, and a U.S. government bond should have nothing to do with each other. Last Thursday night they came apart. The yen went from about 164 to the dollar to 157.96 in a little over an hour.
Three Numbers That Lied in July
Hi Traders, On days when the S&P 500 closed green, more stocks finished red than green. Some sessions ran 350 down against 150 up. On days the index closed red, it flipped: 350 up, 150 down. That happened over and over for a month. The scoreboard said one thing and the field said the opposite, and it said it almost every single day. The month-end math tells the same story.
Why Smart Trades Fail in 2026
Hi traders, One of my favorite sports is rock climbing. Two of my kids are old enough and heavy enough to belay me now (hold the other end of the rope and catch me if I come off). Climbing kills you if you get the risk management wrong even once. By 10, they'd had years of safety training from me. Being heavy enough was the last gate they had to pass to be my partner on the wall. There's a brutal fact in this sport.
The Bald Eagle Rule Every Trader Needs
Hi Traders, A bald eagle spends up to 98 percent of a winter day sitting still. Not gliding. Not hunting. Parked on a branch, watching water. I picked that up at theAlaska Raptor Center in Sitka last week and I haven't been able to shake it. We took a cruise out of Vancouver, which is an easy way to see a slice of a place that stays genuinely rugged and remote. I see a bald eagle a couple times a year from my house if I'm lucky.
What Traders Learn
Right after I got my floor trading badge on the American Stock Exchange in 2001, a Susquehanna trader gave me the best compliance advice I've ever heard. Never email anything you don't want to see on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. He had a reason for saying it.They'd just caught one of their trainees stealing, and a routine check of his email is what did it. Twenty-five years later, Susquehanna is on the cover of the Journal again.
A 2001 Lesson from the AMEX Pit
Hi Traders. I was 22 years old, standing in a specialist pit at the American Stock Exchange, watching a man lose nearly twenty grand in a single session. He knew it was coming. He said so out loud before the first put traded. That was the day I learned what informed order flow looks like: trades from somebody who knows something the rest of the market doesn't. It's also the day I stopped fighting that flow and started reading it. It was 2001. I wasn't even trading yet.
Why Sitting Out Is a Real Position
Hi Traders, I sat down to write this and had nothing. The market's opaque to me right now. I'm down to two medium-conviction positions and a lot of watching. My first instinct was that this was a problem to push through. Then it hit me. The not knowing is the story. If the market's next move isn't clear to me, it isn't clear to a lot of other people either, and pretending otherwise would be the least useful thing I could write.
One to Love, One to Leave
Hi Traders, For the last few weeks, semiconductors were the market's ATM. Every time the market needed money somewhere else, it came out of the chips. That trade has run its course. This week gave me the tell. Volatility spiked short term, and what rotated during that move told the story. Most stocks sold off. Breadth (the count of stocks rising versus falling) on Wednesday ran 400 down to 100 up. But the S&P held notably stable, and semiconductors did the heavy lifting, led by Nvidia (NVDA).
What Keeps Traders Engaged
Hey Trader, As most of you know, I was a professional trader for sixteen years before I took some time off to be with my kids. I came up on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. There was a fantastic community of traders down there, and here is the part outsiders never understood. Even though we were competitors, we helped each other out when it mattered.
Seeing the Market vs Seeing What's Next
The rotation I’d been writing about for weeks has been paying. It paid because the market narrative was clear. I could see what was happening and I could see what was coming next. When you have both, you press. The last 24 hours muddied that picture. Yesterday Iran hit a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. The US bombed 80 targets overnight, and Trump called off the ceasefire. Oil has ripped six dollars in two sessions, and the clean rotation snapped back to what all of March looked like. Here’s the thing.
Survival vs Growth
Hi traders, The high yield corporate bond market took out 10 days worth of highs this morning. Small caps took out a two-day low. On the same day, at the same time. If you read my piece back in May, you know why that stopped me cold. I showed you that the iShares Russell 2000 ETF (IWM) and the iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF (HYG) are the same trade wearing different clothes. Since 2010 they have closed in the same direction 81.8 percent of the time. Four out of every five trading days.
Why I'm Leaving AMD for Biotech
Hi traders, Semiconductors have become the ATM of this market. VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) delivered years' worth of expected returns in two months. The money is walking out the door to fund whatever works next. The Magnificent Seven names are getting the same treatment. Hedge funds have been dumping big tech at the fastest pace on record, and that cash isn't going to the sidelines. It's rotating.
Rotation Out of Semiconductors
Hi Traders, June was my first month trading again after seven years away. On risk capital, I finished the month up about 50 percent, with only half my capital deployed, all in options. I just posted a video recap on the site walking through how I did it. I cover the two themes that carried the month: the last of the war premium coming out, and the rotation away from semiconductors into the broader economy.
One to Buy, One to Sell
Semiconductors look like they've put in a top. Not every name, though. That's the whole story. When a sector takes a breather, the market doesn't sell the whole thing at once. It starts sorting. The strongest names keep the bid (buyers keep stepping in), the real earnings stories, the ones with a reason to own them. The rest, the names that got dragged up just because they share a ticker neighborhood, those get left behind first. That sorting is already happening on my board.
Reading the Tech Selloff (54 characters)
The Nasdaq 100 fell as much as 3.4 percent on Tuesday. Bloomberg called it a rout. The wire said chipmakers raised doubts about the whole AI rally. Every headline I read Tuesday morning was decisively bearish. I woke up uneasy. My trading portfolio is long. Only long. No hedges, no shorts, nothing built to make money when the market turns red. I'm okay with that. That positioning was a function of what I saw happening in the market.
Buy Biotech, Skip Defense
Hi traders, Here is a clean read on risk that jumped out at me, and it comes out of one sector. Healthcare just split itself in half. The safest, most defensive corner is getting sold. The most speculative, highest-risk corner is getting bought. When the lottery-ticket end of the market leads the bond-proxy end (the safe, dividend-paying names people hold the way they hold bonds), that is not a healthcare story. That is a risk-appetite story, and it tells you the rotation into risk has teeth.
Two Market Waves Bigger Than SpaceX
Hey Trader, Ask a surfer about the wave of the day and they rarely point at the biggest one. They point at the one they were in position for. Last week ended with the loudest wave being the SpaceX IPO, the largest in history, with wall-to-wall coverage. But two bigger waves actually moved market: The Fed got a credible new chairman, and the US and Iran signed a framework to end the war.
Warsh's Fed Balance Sheet Committee and Your Mortgage Rate
Hi Traders, Last time I told you the new Fed chair changed the rules, and that the biggest story was still hiding. Here it is. Look at the one number that mattered most on Wednesday. The two-year Treasury yield screamed higher. The 30-year barely moved. Quick translation. The two-year tracks what traders expect the Fed to do with rates over the next couple of years. The 30-year is the long-term rate tied to things like your mortgage. Most people saw that gap and shrugged.
What Traders Should Know
Hi Traders, The Fed has a new boss, and on his first day he changed the rules of the game. Kevin Warsh ran his first meeting as Fed chair Wednesday. He kept policy unchanged, which everyone expected. That's not the story. The story is everything else he did. He stopped handing the market a roadmap. He didn't fill out the famous "dot plot" (the chart where each Fed official marks where they think rates are headed). He cut the vote count out of the official statement for the first time ever.
The Trade Hiding Underneath
Hi Traders, Ask a surfer how often they catch a wave and the honest answer is: not that often. They sit. They watch. Most of what rolls in, they let go by. But the watching isn't waiting. The watching is the work. Every wave they let pass tells them something about the set behind it: the rhythm, the size, where to be. You miss a dozen to sit in the right spot for the one. The missing is how you learn where the one will break. That's how I read markets. Patient, watching, letting most of it go by.
Consumer Spending Recovery Signals
Hi traders, SpaceX (SPCX) listed yesterday morning. Biggest IPO in history. And it was the second biggest thing on my screen. The war is ending, and the end of a war is a household budget event. That's the bigger launch. This war broke every script anyone drew up. Gold went nowhere when the shooting started. The market turned defensive before the first missile flew. So I won't pretend I know the script from here.
Why I'm Buying Retail and Leaving Energy
Hi Traders, I wrote you a full map: the consumer is staging a comeback, and the recovery is walking through the economy in paycheck order. Read it here: What If the Consumer Is Back? Short version: the war is ending, the war premium comes out of oil, and every dollar that doesn't go into the gas tank goes somewhere else. I call it the gas dividend. My method for tracking it is the same board I've shown before.
Why the Dollar Is Driving Stocks
Hi Traders, Everyone's reading this selloff as fear. My board says it's a switch. I keep a board of 40 futures markets on my screen. Stocks, bonds, currencies, metals, grains, energy. I measure every move against that market's own normal wiggle, so a big move in a sleepy market ranks higher than a big move in a wild one. It's the fairest way I know to see what actually changed. Over the last 30 days, two markets rallied hard. The dollar, up almost 10 on that adjusted basis. Lumber right behind it.
How to Read a Red Day
Dear Trader, The market looks ugly out there, and the semiconductors are leading the way down. The part most traders will miss while they stare at the red: this is not a market breaking. It's a market rotating. Those are two very different things, and that gap matters. I came into the day watching the Russell outperform the Nasdaq. It was green on the open. If you caught State of the Market last week, you know where this rotation started.
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