Market analysis for April 26th, 2024

Welcome to Friday traders! We had a decent week this week. We've had a few trades we needed to chase, which is pretty much every week but overall, we brought in some good cash flow. Yesterday was another stellar day for our scalping program. We scalped for 46 min. and did seven trades for a total of $1,035 profit on $4,794 of capital. If you're looking for an extra $50,000-$100,000 a year of income (depending on if you use 5k or 10k of capital), working part-time, a couple hours a week, scalping may be for you. Thats what we are on pace for over the last year. 

All four of our 0DTE's hit for us yesterday. The Bitcoin 11% return wasn't the biggest dollar amount but we are still finding that particular 0DTE setup to be one of the best risk/reward opportunites out there. On our four 0DTE setups we used about 16k of capital for a $2,350 overall profit. Unfortunately our NDX debit call spread cover didn't hit and we rolled it to Monday. We also have our MSTR trade today that will need some work. Our NVDA trade hurt us Weds. but came roaring back yesterday. That particular trade has a lot of leverage in it so the daily swings tend to be large.

​June S&P 500 E-Mini futures (ESM24) are up +0.63%, and June Nasdaq 100 E-Mini futures (NQM24) are up +0.86% this morning as upbeat quarterly results from tech titans Alphabet and Microsoft boosted sentiment, while investors geared up for the release of the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge.
Alphabet (GOOGL) surged over +11% in pre-market trading after the Google parent reported Q1 results that easily topped analysts’ expectations, declared its first-ever dividend of $0.20 per share, and announced an additional $70 billion buyback. Also, Microsoft (MSFT) climbed more than +3% in pre-market trading after the tech giant reported stronger-than-expected Q3 results.

We put a new pairs trade on with TSLA short/ META long. We have found these pairs trades to be some of the very best risk/reward setups you can find. It's difficult to find pure arbitrage trades. Trades that aren't effected if the market crashes or soars. It doesn't matter what the market does. It's simply a convergence/divergence arbitrage play.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s preliminary reading on Thursday showed that the U.S. economy grew at a +1.6% annualized rate in the first quarter, weaker than expectations of +2.5%. At the same time, the U.S. Q1 core personal consumption expenditures price index picked up +3.7%, stronger than expectations of +3.4%. Also, U.S. pending home sales climbed +3.4% m/m in March, stronger than expectations of +0.3% m/m. Finally, the number of Americans filing for initial jobless claims in the past week fell -5K to a 2-month low of 207K, stronger than expectations of 214K.
“[The GDP] report was the worst of both worlds: economic growth is slowing, and inflationary pressures are persisting. The Fed wants to see inflation start coming down in a persistent manner, but the market wants to see economic growth and corporate profits increasing,” said Chris Zaccarelli at Independent Advisor Alliance.
Meanwhile, U.S. rate futures have priced in a 2.9% chance of a 25 basis point rate cut at May’s policy meeting and an 11.3% chance of a 25 basis point rate cut at the June FOMC meeting.

Our trade docket for today is the same as every Friday. We look to de-risk. Book profits. Get our buying power back so we can do it all again next week.
GOOG, INTC, MSFT, SPX/NDX/Event contract NDX/Bitcoin 0DTE's, NVDA, SNAP, XBI 

My lean today is bullish:
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Intra-day levels for me:
/ES; 5133/5165/5184/5210 to the upside. 5107/5098/5065/5045 to the downside.

/NQ; 17825/17919/18026/18191 to the upside. 17709/17630/17505/17419 to the downside.

Bitcoin;  65935 consolidation zone. 71487 resistance. 60506 support.

Have a great weekend folks. I'll see you back in the trading room Sunday evening. Our premium for more Theta fairys seems to be gone for now but the 1DTE /NQ trade seems to be back with the proper safety net. We made a whopping $40 dollars on todays but the opportunity is still there.