Corey Hoffstein 🏴☠️@choffstein
Don't even ask the question. The answer is yes, it's within the collar. Think the S&P is going to rip to new all-time highs? Sorry, there's a short call at 7155 capping your upside. The hedge fund already sold it. You think you found alpha? You found the ceiling of a put spread some quant structured three months ago in a conference room overlooking Park Avenue.
You think the market is going to crash? Priced in. There's a long put at 6475 and market makers are going to buy futures all the way down to defend it. You think you're being clever buying puts at 6400? Congratulations, you just paid premium to bet against the gamma hedging flows of the largest bank in the United States.
The JPM Collar is an all-powerful, all-encompassing being that knows the very inner workings of every retail trader's Robin Hood account before they even open it. Your portfolio was structured decades ago when JHEQX was valuing its expected quarterly roll based on implied volatility that would lead to your birth, what age you would discover options, how many times you would get wrecked on 0DTEs every week, how many times you would stare at SpotGamma charts pretending to understand them, etc.
Anything you can think of has already been collared, even the things you aren't thinking of. You have no original trades. Your "conviction" is just an illusion, a product of the omniscient put spread.
Free will is a myth. The collar sees all, knows all, and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the collar has already priced in the heat death of the universe and set strikes accordingly, long put at Entropy-5%, short put at Absolute Zero).
Every quarter, like clockwork, the high priests at 383 Madison Avenue roll their positions. They sell calls. They buy puts. They sell lower puts. And the entire S&P 500 bends to their will. You think Powell controls the market? Powell wishes he had the gamma exposure of JHEQX.
You want to go long? Cool. The ceiling is the short call. You want to go short? Also cool. The floor is the long put. You want to make money? That's the 980 point range they've already defined for you. Stay in your lane. The collar has spoken.
So please, before you make a post on wsb asking whether SPX is going to break out, or whether we're going to crash, or what strike to buy, just look up the JPM collar strikes for the quarter. That's your range. That's everyone's range. We're all just trading inside JPMorgan's hedged equity terrarium.
Don't fight the collar. The collar is inevitable. The collar is eternal.
