Intel and Amazon gap shorts carried a melt-up morning
Into a market gapping and breaking out almost everywhere, our desk took the Intel front-side short off the open with a tight whole-number stop and covered into the flush rather than argue for the hold. The Amazon gap-to-close short was the other piece: the stop was left where it was rather than slid to break even, the position was added to, and it was scaled out on the move down. An RKLB short stopped over the high and was re-entered higher — a plan re-entered rather than abandoned.
The morning in figures
Net points are per share. Apply your own size to get your own number: at 1,000 shares, 4.50 points is −$4,500.00. At 100 shares it is −$450.00. At one share it is −$4.50. 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.
The 1h 08m 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 open was frantic and most of the tape was breaking out on the daily, which is the worst possible backdrop for shorting names out of habit. The two shorts that paid were the ones with a defined cut level attached before entry: Intel against the whole number, Amazon under the gap-to-close with the cut spelled out loud. The Amazon decision worth watching is the refusal to move to break even — the stop stayed at the level the thesis actually needed, and the trade was added to rather than defended.
The friction was real and treated as friction. AMD was shorted into a fifty-two week high and stopped quickly; that got called a good attempt at a bad beat rather than re-tried. The last three quarters of Meta came off at a stop after a partial had already been banked. From there the desk mostly stopped trading: MU was looked at twice and declined both times, a resting Nvidia order was cancelled, a second Intel short was passed on as roughly one-to-one, and the SPY short was named and left alone. Standing down on a melt-up day was the decision, not the absence of one.
Heard in the room
TrueTrader is a live trading desk — a group of traders working the market open out loud, every weekday. These are unedited captures from that room on this morning, in the order they were said.
On a wild day when everything's moving and it's tempting to force trades, he chooses to sit out unclear setups rather than get tilted chasing.
“I'm honestly waiting for something that's very clear just to preserve mental capital.”
Every trade called that morning
Losers included. Rows with more than one leg were scaled out; open any row to see each exit.