Strength everywhere, and the dips paid for waiting
The tape was strong from the open, and the cleanest work on the desk came from buying pullbacks into levels rather than trying to pick a top. One name was fought from the short side and cost two half-size attempts before the third ran to target — the sizing choice is why those attempts stayed small.
The 1h 10m session is on the other side of this.
Everything above is the write-up. This is the morning itself, with the names on every call and the room talking through it.
The desk was long-biased almost from the first minutes: an opening chase in AAPL was closed quickly for a small gain rather than held into an unclear push, and from there the read was that anything dipping against the indexes was worth a look. That read held. A pullback long in NVDA was started small, trimmed into the first move, then added back once the position had been cut enough that the wider zone no longer needed a tight stop — the size was adjusted to fit the stop, not the other way round.
The exception was a short worked three times in HOOD. The first two attempts were taken at half size with the stop over the wick and both were paid for; the third, taken after the level had been tested again, ran to VWAP and closed for the full point. Nothing about the thesis changed between attempt two and attempt three — what changed was that the level had held on a retest, and the half-size decision meant three tries were affordable rather than one.
INTC was the clearest setup of the morning. A parabolic push on high volume that looked like short covering was faded from two seats independently, one scaling out in four pieces and moving the remainder to break even after the first target, the other taking a defined partial and finishing the rest. ORCL was entered on a stop-limit above a small consolidation and scaled in three, with the stop moved up after the second trim. A second AAPL long late in the session was taken with a single guideline as the target for the whole position, stated before entry and honoured when it printed.
The morning in figures
Net points are per share. Apply your own size to get your own number: at 1,000 shares, 3.94 points is $3,940.00. At 100 shares it is $394.00. At one share it is $3.94. The desk publishes the move, not a dollar result, because the dollars depend entirely on how you size, and that is your decision rather than ours.
Every trade called that morning
Losers included. Rows with more than one leg were scaled out; open any row to see each exit.