The Alpha Pod is open until the 23rd. Here’s a morning of it.

Apple looks overbought to me in the near term. The question I keep coming back to is whether we break out here or reject.

Long term, I’d agree we might be going much higher. But there are a couple of reasons I’ve faded it for the 20 Nov expiry, and I thought I’d walk you through the whole thing rather than just hand you the conclusion.

Start with the flows.

Mag7 names are likely to be a source of funds for the Anthropic IPO next week. If SPCX is any kind of analogue, you’d expect them to trade poorly at the margin. And AI names like the neoclouds are bouncing back, which means there’s less money chasing the relative safety of Mag7.

That’s the backdrop. Now the options side.

Look at where the call gamma is stacked. There’s a lot of it up to 360, and around 50% of that expires after 20 Nov. Spot’s at 355.63, call wall at 360.

So for me that 360 area should help keep a cap on the stock without some major piece of news flow. Dealers sitting long gamma up there tend to sell into strength as they hedge so you get friction rather than a hard ceiling.

This one speaks slightly differently to me.

Skew has been moving in lockstep with spot for the last week or so. But it’s actually lower than it was a month ago, and a month ago spot was 4% lower. That’s worth sitting with for a minute.

And fixed strike vol is going nowhere despite some very decent realised vol, with a vol percentile around 20%. When realised is decent and implied won’t budge, that usually tells you the street is long a load of gamma in the name.

Which is what the large call open interest is also indicating.

The compass shows the name as more stretched than most on the upside, which is what drew my attention to it in the first place. It also say vol is cheap, so those with higher conviction and a willing ness to pay THETA would consider buying puts or put spreads. I less convinced we really puke lower, but I do think the stock is somewhat capped into next week.

So I’ve faded it with a bear call spread, 360 / 365. Defined risk, and I’d probably cut the trade on a clean break above 360.

Now, that’s one name, on one morning.

In the Alpha Pod we run that across multiple names daily. What compounds, in my experience, is seeing the same shapes turn up again and again: where the gamma is sitting, when skew is saying something different to spot, when the compass disagrees with your gut. You stop needing someone to tell you what the trade is and you start to see it for yourself.

I went through this one properly on a call this weekend if you want the longer version:

And if you want to see where this process has got me since we started in 2024, here’s the closed-trade P&L on a small $25k margin account.

Realised, closed trades only. You can see it’s a long way from a smooth line, and there are a few patches in there I’d rather forget. That’s honestly what it looks like when you do this for long enough.

Anyway. We’ll see whether 360 holds.

Imran

PS. The Alpha Pod is open and free until 23 November. After that it goes back behind the paywall.

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