The only two pops worth selling all morning
The level skew in the morning plan pointed one way — short the pop — and the tape only offered two of them. The desk worked a semiconductor short patiently for most of an hour, nudging the entry higher rather than chasing it, and when it filled it filled near the high and came out in scales. A biotech short taken off a completed daily range was handled the same way.
The morning in figures
Net points are per share. Apply your own size to get your own number: at 1,000 shares, 9.12 points is $9,120.00. At 100 shares it is $912.00. At one share it is $9.12. 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 11m 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 plan had longs on one name and shorts on everything else, and that lopsidedness was read as a bias for the session before a single trade went on: sell strength, don't buy weakness. The first attempt at it, a short on the telecom that was getting hit on the cell-tower news, was bid for the whole opening stretch and never got there. It was left as a resting order rather than reached for, and it simply expired unfilled.
The semiconductor name took the longer road. Two different short levels were floated, a couple of points apart, and the lower one got a partial fill early for a few points. The higher level was then moved up slightly — a deliberate choice to ask for more rather than to meet the tape halfway — with a defined stop above. It sat untouched through the PMI print and most of the next half hour before the pop finally came, filled close to the high tick, and was scaled out in thirds with the last piece protected by a stop pulled down behind it. One of the two runners was closed before its final target; the observation afterwards was that a break-even stop on the remainder would have carried it further, which is a reasonable thing to say out loud about a trade that worked.
A short in a biotech was entered on a round number after the name had completed its average daily range, with a deliberately wide stop and planned adds, and taken off in two halves at separate targets. A small futures short was held off a one-minute moving-average alert and closed for a modest move. Past the half hour the tape thinned out, nothing else cleared the bar, and the desk stood down rather than manufacture a trade — which, on a morning where the conversation drifted well off markets, was the correct read of what was on offer.
Every trade called that morning
Losers included. Rows with more than one leg were scaled out; open any row to see each exit.