It has been a wild couple of weeks for participants in US equities. Up is down. Black is White. Dogs sleeping with cats. This is what happens when market regimes go through change. The ripples can be seismic.

The one thing we can count on as options traders is that implied volatility -- more specifically, the fear premium being priced into options right now -- will eventually subside. If there is anything that can be counted on to be "mean-reverting" in this crazy world of ours -- it is most definitely implied volatility. This means we definitely want to be on the hunt for opportunities to put elevated options premiums to work for us. We want to be net sellers of options here.

With 53 days until December options expiration, now is the ideal time to start scanning the most liquid ETF options in our universe for income trades.

The big question coming into this wasn't whether or not we wanted to be sellers of stocks, but how low could stocks go? The point I tried to make was that they could go a lot lower than any of us think. I've been around too long and have seen too much to be surprised by anything anymore. So if the risk is skewed to the downside, in theory there is unlimited risk. Whether there is or there isn't, is not the point. The fact alone that we're even talking about it has been reason enough to not be long this market.

When looking below trying to figure out how low we can go, I can draw all sorts of Fibonacci retracement levels and horizontal lines of all colors, but the truth is that the market doesn't care about JC's lines. Forced selling sparked by margin calls and hedge funds blowing up causes prices to blow through any "levels" all the time. Remember, when we identify specific prices, they are just levels of interest, not necessarily support levels. We won't know if they were actually support until well after the fact.

With that scary disclaimer in mind, I did my best to identify the most important levels of interest. This is where we want to be looking...

Disney is another stock that has been on our watch list for a short trade, but has stubbornly held on... until today. We had been waiting for $DIS to close below $113 and on Wednesday our criteria was finally met.

Could the broader markets be due for an oversold bounce here? Sure. But we think Disney's price action (better late than never) was an ugly omen for the start of a pretty bearish movie coming in this name over the next several weeks.

This past weekend I was down in San Diego for the annual Trade Ideas Summit. I gave a presentation earlier in the day, which you can watch here, and then sat on panel later in the afternoon with some really smart guys. So I thought it would add value to share this conversation with everyone.

My good friend Sean McLaughlin, who is also the Chief Options Strategist at Allstarcharts.com moderated the panel, which included Brian Shannon and Dr. Brett Steenbarger. This conversation revolves a lot around process. Dr. Brett gave us a ton of insight as to what we can do psychologically to help us...

When the stock market is not going up, the blame game gets played. It's a combination of shareholders losing money and media types needing something to say. It's always someone or something's fault and rarely described as a normal occurrence. The truth, however, is that yes, stocks falling in price is part of the regular cycles that we've always seen. In fact, stock markets that don't have periods of falling prices are incredibly abnormal. 2017 for U.S. Stocks was the exception that proves the rule.

The reason I mention this is because we have not been in an environment where we want to be selling strength since early 2016. Many of you have been following my work for many years and remember my gloom & doom days of 2015 and even as far back as 2008. You guys already know that I'll be bullish stocks when appropriate and bearish when necessary as well.

It's...

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

When the weight of the evidence is pointing in one direction as it has been for most of the last two years, it makes sense to be aggressive and take advantage of the clear trends while they're intact. However, when conditions change and the evidence becomes more mixed, a more neutral approach is appropriate. But what does that look like from a practical sense?

When the weight of the evidence is pointing in one direction as it has been from early 2016 through mid-2018, it makes sense to be aggressive and take advantage of the clear trends while they're intact. However, when conditions change and the evidence becomes mixed, a more neutral approach is appropriate. So what does that look like from a practical sense?

From the desk of Tom Bruni @BruniCharting

The new 52-week high list has been pretty scarce as of late, but Verizon's earnings announcement propelled its stock above an important level of resistance to 17-year highs, signaling further upside may be be ahead.

We don't do a lot of "earnings" plays here at All Star Options. We don't scare away from entering smart trades with defined risk ahead of earnings reports, but only if we feel there's a larger play in the cards.

However, when all the stars align, we'll consider specific opportunities.

We've got one all lined up with Avis, $CAR.

The thing about the market is that there is no holy grail. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to find it. The holy grail does not exist. We have to weigh the evidence knowing full well that we're working with incomplete information. The idea is to accumulate all of the data and make a conclusion based on all of it, not just some of it.

Today, I want to go over a few of the divergences that have put the bulls in a precarious situation. There is a large crowd of permabull "passive" investors that are taught just to buy stocks and hope for the best. They are shown all of these sexy equity curves and told again and again how much they would have made had they invested in the S&P500 in 1950 or 1982 or whatever cherry-picked date is forced upon them.

It doesn't make these people good or bad. It's just what it is. I think it's important for market participants to understand the way things work. Based on the tiny tiny sample size of a 100 years or so, sure a lot of these theories could make some sense. We've had less than a handful of secular bear markets during...

This weekend we updated our chartbooks for Premium Members of Allstarcharts India, so I wanted to do a quick post outlining the changes to our universe of stocks since the end of the first quarter.