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The futures were unchanged this morning. Know what happened at cash open? The NASDAQ ripped higher the second retail could start buying calls.

I've been in this business long enough to remember when S&P futures actually told you something about the trading session ahead. Not anymore. Overnight trade has not been a good indication of the trading day.

Retail options order flow is coming in right at cash open, and it's the options marketplace leading the horse. That sets the tone for the day.

You buy calls through your broker and get tagged with an "R" for retail. Market maker has to sell you those calls. The moment they sell calls, they don't want to be short calls - market making isn't about directional trading at all. So the market maker goes out and buys stock.

Their equation neutralizes to zero delta. 

But when enough retail traders buy calls, you force market makers to buy enough stock to move prices.

This morning I watched it happen with NVIDIA. When I looked at ThinkorSwim option statistics early on, calls traded at the ask or above was smaller than traded at the bid or below - meaning no intensity of call buying. The stock was range bound.

Then the call buying picked up. Suddenly there's almost 50,000 more calls being bought than sold. Stock price went from $187 to $194. Why? Because retail was buying calls and forcing the stock up.

Retail figured out how to game the system better than the professionals. 

The Wall Street Journal just wrote about how retail options trading has absolutely exploded, and they're right.

Look at the volume concentration from this morning: NVIDIA gets 600,000 options contracts, Tesla gets 600,000 contracts. Then you go slightly off the beaten path to XLI financials - 11,000 contracts. Either you're on the team or you're not.

Nothing matters right now other than magnitude and retail's ability to move markets through options flow. There's zero fundamental basis for the moves on screen. Remove that crap. The market's going 180 miles an hour and can't see five feet in front of it.

My forecast for 2026: Retail is king of the hill. It's going to become more and more chaotic as retail realizes call buying isn't the only option. Nobody's tried buying puts in years, but that's coming.

Professional money management isn't in charge anymore. 

They're reactive to retail. If you're an older trader thinking the S&P overnight means we're going up, it doesn't mean anything.

Everything right now is about reading retail options order flow. You can't ignore this anymore.

The market has never meant less fundamentally, but wake up and trade it. Complaining about broken fundamentals isn't going to fix your problem.

In 2016, zero days to expiration options were 5% of SPX volume. Today? Over 60%. 

Daily notional volume routinely hits $1 trillion. When retail concentrates that kind of firepower into contracts expiring in hours, the tail starts wagging the dog in ways we've never seen.

We just witnessed the biggest quarterly expiration in history - $7.1 trillion expired in a single day. The European Central Bank is studying this for systemic risk. This isn't gradual change. This is complete rewiring happening right now.

The same retail flow driving daily moves is now compressing entire market cycles into hours. If you're not tracking this, you're trading yesterday's market with tomorrow's volume.

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