Just Get On Base: Stacking Small Wins After a Rough Week

paid partnership with tastytrade Hey all! Nicholas from the Unusual Whales team, here! Last week we talked about coming back from a losing streak, and why chipping away at it is a hell of a lot safer than trying to make it all back in one trade. This week we’ve got a couple of examples of what that actually looks like in practice, both from last week’s show. Before we get started, WhaleWatch Mondays are sponsored by tastytrade! All charting and tooling we use to trade futures are provided by tastytrade; more on that below! Taking the base hit Nasdaq flushed pretty hard right off the open on Monday, and by the time I took this trade MNQ was already down close to 300 points on the day. Naturally, I was looking for a short (Anthony was quick to remind everyone of my uhhh… inherent bias; can’t say he’s wrong). The concern going in was that we’d already seen some liquidity grabs up in the low 30,700s, so a test back up there wasn’t off the table. That said, price was stair-stepping lower, so I took the short around 30,627 with my stop above at 30,652, looking for a new low pretty quickly. If they held the prior low instead, the plan was to take roughly $100 and move on. They gave us the new low, and rather than holding out for a bigger flush, I covered around 30,594 for a roughly 34-point MNQ win. Here’s a quick clip of the trade from entry to exit: Lo and behold, right after we got out of the trade, price popped back up through our original entry. A quick Periscope review gave us some solid context for the bounce: SPX had rejected 7710 right as we entered, and positive gamma at that strike had been building quickly. Once SPX popped back through it, we were heading into negative gamma, which isn’t somewhere I’d want to be sitting in a short due to the risk of acceleration through that negative gamma as market makers “buy into strength”. If I’d still been in “make it all back” mode from last week, that’s exactly the kind of trade I would’ve held for a home-run, and probably watched most of it disappear (and again, I fall into this habit more often than I’d like to admit!) Before we get to the next trade, WhaleWatch is sponsored by tastytrade every Monday! Real trades in real time, right into the open, using tastytrade charts and tools! Get low commissions, including a ten-dollar cap per leg on option trades, so you can keep more of what you earn. Trade smarter with advanced charting tools, backtesting, a prebuilt strategy selector, risk analysis tools, and more features. Use referral code UNUSUALWHALES when opening a tastytrade account at tastytrade.com/whales/tastytrade.com/whales/ Chasing new lows A little later in the morning, MNQ had bounced off the low of the day, rolled back over, and put in a lower high underneath the moving averages. By this point we were down well over 300 points on the day, so this was a bit of a chase; the difference was that we had a defined level to lean against and a pretty obvious target. I shorted around 30,543 with a stop at 30,551, roughly 8 points of risk, and the target was the low of the day at 30,506.75 (the orange line on the chart below). Price went pretty much straight there, and I covered at 30,510.75, just above the low, for a roughly 32-point win. That put us at 3 for 4 on the morning: Base hits add up Neither of these trades was anything special on its own. Roughly 30 points apiece, roughly the same dollar amount, with a loss mixed in between. But after a few red sessions in a row, a couple of wins to get us back on the board gave us a breath of fresh air, without just one trade carrying the weight of an entire week on its back. Base hits all day, baby. If you want to see how this stuff actually gets used when the market is moving, tune into WhaleWatch every Monday and Wednesday morning at 9:20am ET. We trade futures and options live using tools like Unusual Whales GEX Periscope and price action, break down options flow as it hits, and talk through what we’re seeing in real time. Wins, losses, bad entries, good reads, missed setups. You get the whole thing, not sensationalist, unrealistic gains every single day, somehow. And if you want the stranger side of the show, follow @WhaleWatch_UW on X, where we post clips, follow-ups, and the crazy weirdo stuff that goes on in between trades. If that sounds like your kind of morning, subscribe to the Unusual Whales YouTube channel and come hang out with us live :) NOTE: This post is not financial advice. The stock market is risky, and any trade or investment is expected to have some, or total, loss. Please do research before any trade. Do not use this information for investment decisions. 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