Something new is coming to Skool. I post actionable, high-probability trade ideas from our hedge fund and my personal portfolio, but that's 10-20% of the actual work. The rest is what happens after: Black Swan Hedges, vomma hedges, rolls, defense when your short strike gets breached, and the moment where you either manage the position or it manages you. Nobody shows that part publicly, so I'm going to. That's why I'm thinking about launching a fully public OptionsJive Model Short Volatility Portfolio, available to every subscriber 24/7, with every position, every roll, and every adjustment visible when it happens. And I want your broken trades too. How should I build the OptionsJive Model Portfolio?

NVDA prints tomorrow after the close. The options market is pricing roughly a 5-6% move, about $13 on a $222 stock. Now look at what Wall Street analysts say about just one line item. For the B-series chips alone, the new product line that drives the entire bull thesis, analyst estimates this quarter range from $9B to $67B. A $58B spread on one product. Data center revenue overall: $65B to $78B. Another $13B spread. The fundamental distribution is screaming wide, but the options market is paying you for a quiet move. Over the last 7 NVDA prints, the average post-earnings move was 4.0% versus an average implied of 6.7%. Realized over implied: 0.60. The event straddle has been systematically overpriced. 97% of sell-side analysts are bullish. The average price target sits 28% above spot. That is a crowded boat. Upside calls are expensive, and downside hedges feel ignored. The surface tells the same story. Front-week IV is loaded for the print. Back-month IV is calmer. Skew is flatter than usual because everyone is long upside. I can target all three distortions at once. That is the masterpiece. Layer 1: Call Calendar (front-week IV crush) Sell 222.5 call expiring 5/22 (3 DTE) at $7.55, Buy 222.5 call expiring 5/26 (7 DTE) at $8.10 Net debit: $0.43. Theta: +62. Buying Power used: $43. The 5/22 short collapses Thursday morning when IV gets crushed. The 5/26 long survives into the following week and holds value as long as NVDA pins near 222. This leg pays me if the body of the move is overpriced. Recent history says it is. Layer 2: Earnings Jade Lizard (longer-dated vol normalization, no upside risk) Sell 205 put expiring 7/17 (59 DTE) at $7.05, Sell 225 call at $15.30, Buy 230 call at $13.30 Total credit: $924 against a $5 wide call spread. Credit greater than width means no upside risk. If NVDA rips to $300, I still keep the call-side credit. POP: 74%, P50: 81%, BP: $7,475. This leg collects theta over 59 days while longer-dated IV normalizes after the print.

Let me be upfront about something before I explain the trade. This has a 45% POP, and most of what I run sits at 70-80%. But still, I'm still putting it on. Let me tell you why. DUOL went from north of $500 in mid-2025 to $110 today, but that's not a struggling company. That's a company that just printed $292M in quarterly revenue, 26% YoY growth, 29% adjusted EBITDA margin, over $1 billion in cash, zero debt, and an active buyback (buying back 514K shares last quarter alone, about 1% of the float in a single quarter). The market re-rated it from hyper-growth AI darling to a profitable-but-slower consumer app. That shift already happened, and it's already in the price. Now here's the part that caught my attention from an options perspective. Into last earnings, the implied move was 15%. The actual gap was about 5.6% down. The market priced a catastrophe and got a mediocre quarter with conservative Q2 guidance. This is a volatile underlying between events, but the one-day gap risk that weekly options price in has been consistently richer than what actually happens. My Trade Idea November 21 expiration, four legs. - Buy 90 Put @ 13.00 - Sell 110 Put @ 19.00 - Buy 110 Call @ 26.60 - Sell 125 Call @ 17.90 The short 110 put and long 110 call together create a synthetic long at the current price. The 90 put is the hard floor, loss stops there. The short 125 call caps the upside but brings the cost down significantly. I entered this for approximately $300 credit. Max profit around $1,800. Max loss capped at $1,700. Buying power used: $1,700. One note on execution: liquidity on this name isn't perfect across all four legs. I had to be patient with the fill. Don't chase the mid, give it time. A few cents of slippage across four legs adds up fast on a structure like this. What I'm Actually Betting On The easy money shorting DUOL from $500 has already been made. At $110, with a billion in cash and no debt, the tail risk isn't "this company goes to zero". In my personal view, the risk is that the market decides slower growth deserves an even lower multiple, and it grinds down another 15-20% from here before stabilizing.

We'll get back to tech trades next post. But today I want to talk about something more boring, and more interesting. McDonald's just dropped after earnings. It delivered strong results, offered cautious commentary on the consumer, and the stock has been drifting lower ever since. There was no gap down, just a slow, quiet grind. And this is exactly the kind of setup I look for. McDonald's Q1 2026 numbers came in clean across the board; it earned $2.83 adjusted EPS (against $2.74 expected), generated $6.52B in revenue (against $6.47B expected), global comparable sales grew 3.8%, with U.S. and international markets both up 3.9%. Management acknowledged pressure on the low-income consumer, but it had an answer. Value meals are holding traffic. The new Big Arch burger is pulling customers in. The business is not broken, but it simply told the truth about a difficult consumer environment, and in my view, the market punished it for the honesty. The Options Market Got It Wrong, Again Going into earnings, the options market was pricing in a 3.3-3.5% move. The actual move came in at -1.43%, followed by a slow drift lower over the next several sessions. This is a pattern. MCD's realized earnings moves have consistently landed around 1.7-2.2%, but the options market keeps pricing 3-3.5%. Here's what makes this particularly exciting to me: IV didn't collapse after earnings. The IV Rank is still sitting around 44. For a mega-cap defensive with low beta, high margins, and an asset-light franchise model that generates cash in every economic cycle, that's a gift. The market is still paying you a significant volatility premium. The VRP opportunity is still sitting right here. My Trade: Put Ratio Spread This is not a directional bet that McDonald's will bounce. My structure is designed to harvest that volatility premium, with a favorable worst-case outcome already baked into the payoff. My structure: - Buy 1x 265 Put (July 17) @ $6.15, Sell 2x 260 Put (July 17) @ $4.20 - Max profit: $773, Net credit: $273, Probability of Profit: 80%, P50: 92%, Theta: $5.44/day

The market is pricing a 9-11% move into tonight's print, but PLTR's average realized move over the last six quarters is closer to 20-21%. Front-week IV is near 90%. Looks expensive, but it isn's. Implied has underpriced this event consistently, and not once or twice, but every single quarter in that sample. We are buying a dollar of earnings risk for fifty cents. That's why the structure matters more than usual here. Options flow going into tonight is heavily call-sided (call skew). Speculative positioning is stacked into the 150-160 zone, which is also major technical resistance. That leaves dealers short gamma and long stock into that level, which means if the print is good but not great, and the stock fails to break through 150, we get IV crush plus dealer hedging pressure flipping the tape lower simultaneously. The left tail looks structurally fatter than the skew implies. The valuation makes it worse: PLTR trades at 90-230x earnings depending on how you measure it, 40-50x sales. Those multiples only hold if 2026 guidance confirms a long runway for 60%+ growth and commercial AI demand stays at triple-digit rates. Tonight’s EPS beat or miss matters less than how Karp frames the next 12 months. Any wobble in that narrative and we get multiple compression, really, really fast. So the structure choice here is also not obvious. Normally, steep put skew is where you reach for a Jade Lizard, we use it when the market is pricing downside fear and we want to collect that inflated put premium. PLTR has steep call skew tonight. That's the opposite of the textbook setup. But skew isn't the only variable. The volatility surface here; binary narrative, crowded upside, fat left tail, extreme multiple etc. demands management flexibility above everything else. A strangle gives you two naked legs and limited options when one side runs, the Earnings Jade Lizard caps the upside completely and leaves one clean leg to manage. That trade-off is worth more than the skew edge we're giving up.