Blindfolds
Records and Restraint
Good evening all.
Let’s discuss May.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about May. You could have traded this market blindfolded and still made money. Throw a dart at the board / buy whatever it lands on / hold it a week / sell it green. That is not a shot at anyone. It is just what a melt-up does to a tape. Everything goes up, so everyone wins, and a whole timeline full of people are walking around convinced they are gifted because they bought stocks in the single easiest market in years. Which makes a month as good as the one we just had a little harder to brag about than the screenshots suggest.
May did not slow down. April was the best month of the year and then May walked in and matched it punch for punch, except we did it with nearly double the trade count. Twenty-seven closed positions in April became forty-nine in May, and the win rate did not blink. We closed the month at 81.6 percent, dead even with April’s 81.5, and a full sixteen points clear of where March left us at 65.4. That is the headline. We are not just hitting / we are hitting at volume / and the hit rate is holding while the book gets bigger. We are proud of it. We are also not going to pretend the blindfold had nothing to do with it.
Zoom out and the year tells a clean story. Q1 closed with 82 trades on the board and a strategy that was still finding its footing in a choppy March tape. April flipped the switch. May confirmed it was not a fluke. Two straight months printing better than eight out of ten, on rising size, in the same direction. The trade has been simple all year: read the flow / take the entry / let the winners run / cut the losers small.
The Tape into June
The market did not just hold up in May, it broke out across the board. All four majors closed June 1 pressing record highs. SPY at 758, QQQ at 742, the Dow north of 51,000, and the Russell finally joining the party at 289.
QQQ is leading with the steepest angle off the spring lows, no surprise with the AI names doing the heavy lifting. But the signal that matters is the Russell. Small caps broke out to fresh highs, and that is the breadth confirmation we have been waiting on all year. When the IWM joins the mega caps instead of lagging them, the rally has a wider base under it rather than resting on seven names.
All four are now riding the upper rail of multi-year ascending channels / stretched well above every moving average. That is textbook melt-up structure / beautiful and dangerous in the same breath. The only hesitation worth logging is the Dow printing a tired candle at the highs / the Russell closing slightly red on the day. Minor on their own, but the kind of detail you note when the tape is this extended. More on what that means for our positioning below.
May by the Numbers
49 closed positions
40 winners / 9 losers
81.6% win rate
Average winner: +127.7%
Average loser: -27.0%
Worst single loss: AAOI at -38%
That last line matters more than the win rate. Our worst realized loss of the entire month was 38 percent. The winners ran to 200, 300, 400 percent and the losers all capped under 40. That is the asymmetry we build the whole approach around. You do not need to be right on everything when the math is shaped like that.
The Names that Ran
ARM was the headliner and it was not close. The 250 calls went out at +430 percent, a clean continuation of the same ARM thesis that paid us in March and April. When a name keeps printing, you keep showing up for it. FCEL turned a 15-call into a +365% winner on the fuel cell move, and we caught it twice, the second lot doing the heavy lifting. MSTR 175C ran +332 percent off the bitcoin-treasury tape. GLW was the quiet monster, two lots on the 180 calls closing at +156% and +311% as the optical / AI fiber story finally got priced.
The data center power and AI infrastructure book carried real weight again: MU printed +199% and put up the single biggest dollar move of the month, a 1000 call going from 32.80 to 98.00. NVDA 230C ran +118%, NOW closed two lots at +78% and +144%, AMD 500C did +110%, SMCI +207%, OUST +209% on the lidar pop. NOK surprised everyone with the 13 calls going +308%. ORCL was a machine, three separate lots, three green tickets at +52%, +124%, and +46%. CRWV, NBIS, AMSC, CCJ, MRNA, NET, NVTS, FLNC, TE, AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL puts, TSLA on three of four lots. The breadth was the point. Almost everything we touched worked.
Keeping It Honest
Nine losers, and they tell a real story. AAOI is the one to own. We took the optical name twice and it went red both times, -18 and -38 percent. When a thesis fails twice inside the same month, that is not noise, that is the market telling you the entry was wrong, and we are logging it. INTC 130C gave back -37 on a name that has been a battleground all year. RDDT, MS, USAR on the second lot, AMD on the lone put, all small cuts taken without ego.
And then there is DELL… SIGH
DELL is the biggest fumble of the month and very likely the biggest fumble of the entire year. We were in the 300 calls for June around 9.00. We got stopped out at 7.30 for a 23 percent loss on what I will call exactly what it was… a poor judgment on my end. Not a thesis miss. Not a flow miss. A discipline miss. The flow was right. The entry was right. The exit was the mistake. Those calls are now trading north of 160.00. From where we got shaken out, that is a move of more than 1,500 percent. A seventeen-bagger that we watched walk straight out the door. I am not going to dress it up. That one stings, and it is going in the book as the trade I want back more than any other this year. Note to self, trading on a boat drinking tequila - not always the best decisions are made, that’s the scene of the crime!
The Blindfold Comes Off
Here is the part nobody in the timeline wants to say out loud. We are good at this. We are also in a full-blown melt-up bull market, which means right now, so is everyone else. An 81 percent win rate two months running is not purely skill. A lot of it is the blindfold. When everything is bid and breadth is this wide, the hard part is not picking winners / the hard part is staying disciplined while trading with your eyes closed still pays.
Because the blindfold always comes off. It comes off the week the tape rolls over, and the people who never actually learned to see, the ones who confused a melt-up for a gift they earned, are the ones who get carried out. That is when the bill arrives. It gets collected on the names you sized too big because the last ten worked, on the stops you widened because cutting felt dumb in a market that only goes up. We are not going to relitigate a great month by pretending the macro did not do half the lifting. We are going to bank it / stay humble / keep the losers small / keep our eyes open even when blind buying would have paid the same. That is the whole point. Our edge is not that we made money in May. Everyone made money in May. Our edge is that we read the actual flow instead of guessing, so that when the blindfold finally comes off the rest of the market, ours was never on. This is exactly how we nailed the market bottom on March 30th-31st.
Where Today’s Money Went
Before we get into the live book, look at where the premium is actually flowing. The board below is today's top net premium inflows, every name on it cleared over a million dollars in flow.
Net Premium Flow board courtesy of our guy Charles, on X. He is a good friend of ours here at Unusual Flow and a phenomenal follow. If you are not on his feed, fix that.
Read the board and the whole month makes sense. NET sits right on top, and that is the same NET we closed at +125 percent in May, so the institutions are still piling into the exact name we were already riding. Under it the picture is software and AI semis stacked end to end: DDOG, CRM, COHR, STM, NOW, AMD, MCHP, CSCO. Every one of those is a node in the same data center / AI buildout we have been pressing all year. INTC shows up again, which is fitting for a name that has chopped us up and keeps drawing flow anyway. Defense pokes in with RTX, and PLTR lands on the board too, a name we are still holding in the open book (removed EOD for re-eval tomorrow against resistance).
This is the bridge into the paid section. Charles gives us the where. Below, I show you the how: how my own flow reads stacked up against this board, which of these inflows I was already in front of, and where the next entries are setting up. That is the part worth paying for.
Before the book, a quick word for everyone behind the wall. We run a highly active Discord for paid subscribers, and it is where the real-time conversation lives. Closer-quartered banter, faster back-and-forth, and a much cleaner organizational structure for alerts than any feed or inbox can give you. If you want to be in the room while these setups develop instead of reading about them after the close, this is where you do it. Paying subscribers only.
Coming Soon - Volux
Here is the thing about everything in this letter. The net premium reads / the divergences flashing in the options before they ever hit price / the repeat flow that tips a move days early / I pulled all of it by hand, across five tabs and a stack of screenshots. That is the work. It is also exactly the work we are about to put in your hands.
Volux is the flow intelligence platform we have been building all year / and the full launch is close. Options flow / breadth / AI-driven research / and real screeners in one place / built for how a trader actually reads a tape instead of how a data vendor wants to sell you one. The same conviction framework behind two straight months north of 81 percent / systematized / so the edge is not locked inside one guy’s daily routine anymore.
The waitlist is open now. Get on it early / be first through the door the day we go live.