Tiptoeing into next week’s short calls
Bought to open 1 VXX Mar 19 2021 45.0 Call / Sold to Open 1 VXX Feb 05 2021 20.0 Call @ 0.25 Credit.
Got over a point for the strike 20 short.

At the same time I am liquidating 1/3 of my VXX 03/19/2021 65.0 Long Calls (left over from old diagonal spreads) @ 0.40.
Acquired these on 01/11/2021 @ 0.36.

dumped at a profit
Sold GME 02/05/2021 12.0 Put @ 0.22.
Bought this @ 0.10 as part of a diagonal put spread last week where the short put expired on Friday

Rolled down all my in the money puts in VXX a half point plus brought in cash for next week.

Rolled VXX 01/29 22.50 Puts to 02/05 22.0 Puts @ 0.05 Credit
Rolled VXX 01/29 21.50 Puts to 02/05 21.0 Puts @ 0.10 Credit
Rolled VXX 01/29 20.00 Puts to 02/05 19.50 Puts @ 0.25 Credit
Rolled VXX 01/29 19.50 Puts to 02/05 19.0 Puts @ 0.14 Credit

A sizeable lowering of risk on the put side while keeping my VXX short diagonal strangles in place.

Bought to close 1 SPY Jan 27 2021 380.0 Call / Sold to Open 1 SPY Feb 03 2021 383.0 Call @ 1.05 Credit plus 3 points higher on the short strike.
Bought to close 1 SPY Jan 27 2021 379.0 Call / Sold to Open 1 SPY Feb 01 2021 381.0 Call @ 0.63 Credit plus 2 points higher on the short strike.
Bought to close 1 SPY Jan 27 2021 374.0 Call / Sold to Open 1 SPY Feb 03 2021 376.0 Call @ 0.67 Credit plus 2 points higher on the short strike.

244 after hours high … so far

I know some are playing options in these.

Overstock.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:OSTK) shares rose 22.4% to $82.48 as the company announced a partnership with Pelion Venture Partners to oversee the blockchain assets of its subsidiary Medici Ventures.

Beyond Meat Inc (NASDAQ:BYND) shares jumped 18.3% to $187.78 after the company announced a joint venture with Pepsi to develop, produce, market snack, beverage products made from plant-based protein.

Circuit breaker halt at 114

Has resumed now

From Yahoo Finance
….. But underneath the surface, one of the wildest trading days we’ve seen in some time broke out.
GameStop (GME) remained the day’s top story, as the stock continued its unbelievable run from the ~$4 per share range back in the summer to a whopping $76.77 as of Monday’s close.
In a story published Monday, Bloomberg’s Brandon Kochkodin chronicled the ongoing relationship between Reddit’s “wallstreetbets” (WSB) forum, and shares of the struggling video game retailer. In this story we find a fundamental case for buying the stock: A character from Michael Lewis’ famous book “The Big Short” (Dr. Michael Burry), an activist investor who also founded Chewy (CHWY), and along the way a redditor named “Senior_Hedgehog” plays a major role.
Truly a tale for the modern market.

As Yahoo Finance’s Ines Ferre has chronicled, the last handful of trading sessions have centered on the clash between WSB and GameStop’s short sellers. This saga continued on Monday.

But during the session, we also saw the breakout of a market-wide strategy to pile into names that investors are betting against en masse. According to data from FinViz, more than a dozen stocks with more than 30% of their outstanding shares sold short rallied more than 10% on Monday.

In other words, betting on companies that lots of investors are betting against was the biggest driver of single-stock moves to start the week.

Shares of La Croix-maker National Beverage Co. (FIZZ) rose more than 13% on Monday; more than 60% of the company’s stock is currently being sold short.

Some retail-related names were also caught up in this trade, as mall REIT Macerich (MAC) saw its shares rise more than 21% on Monday, while shares of Macy’s (M) were up 10%. More than 30% of both companies’ shares outstanding are currently sold short.
However, not all efforts to blow out the shorts succeeded on Monday.
Bed, Bath & Beyond (BBBY) — which has a short interest north of 60% — gained 1.5% on Monday, but not before some chicanery that saw shares rise as much as 50% in late-morning trade. Shares of BBBY, we should note, are up some 200% over the past six months.
And not every single-stock surge on Monday was tied to huge short interest. BlackBerry (BB), for instance, saw its stock spike by some 28% to start the week — causing the company to issue a statement explicitly stating that it had no news to report, and therefore no explanation for the rally. Just about 7% of BlackBerry’s outstanding shares are currently sold short.

Which brings us to beleaguered retailer Express (EXPR).
With a market cap under $100 million before Monday’s trade, this is a name that rarely gets much attention in the broader market. But a 131% rally to start the week changed that.
Before Monday’s open, Express shares were rocketing and the stock didn’t move all that much after the open. On Friday, the stock closed at $1.79 per share; on Monday, Express shares closed at $4.15.
Rarely does this kind of move come and go without explanation. But on Monday, the media and Wall Street analysts were left scratching their heads to explain this one-day double of a 1990s-era suburban mall staple.
“Express has been the subject of Reddit boards where users speculated [about] whether it could be the next GameStop, the video-game retailer that surged again today,” Bloomberg reported on Monday.

Leading everyone right back to where this day started: Reading Reddit and looking for the next big thing.

Bought to Open GME Feb 12 2021 17.0 Puts / Sold to Open GME Jan 29 2021 30.0 Puts @ 0.15 Credit
Bought to Open GME Feb 19 2021 15.0 Puts / Sold to Open GME Jan 29 2021 29.0 Puts @ 0.13 Credit
Paired off with my one crazy GME Call Spread
GME = 75.0 after almost hitting 160 earlier today

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/gamestop-explodes-early-trading-nears-10-billion-market-cap-amc-next

Also holding 2 lottery tickets 02/05/2021 12.0 Puts left over from the spread I did last week.

Explaining The Action: Benzinga PreMarket Prep co-host Dennis Dick and Tim Quast, founder and CEO of ModernIR and Market Structure Edge, discussed the short squeeze trade on Monday morning’s show.
“There are people arguing with me that GameStop’s fundamentals have totally turned around and this price is justified. And I’m trying to say this has absolutely nothing to do with company fundamentals in a move like GameStop,” Dick said.
Related Link: GameStop’s Power Surge: Will WallStreetBets Or The Short Sellers Come Out On Top?
Citron Research editor Andrew Left has taken a lot of heat from critics since taking a short position and setting a $20 price target for GameStop earlier this month. Quast said the difficulties Left and other small-time retail traders face in timing these huge runs is that they don’t have access to the same real-time information that large market makers like Citadel Securities do. In addition, the market makers don’t have to play by the same rules.
“This is something that traders often don’t understand,” Quast said. “There is a market-making exemption for the Citadels and the Two Sigma’s and the Morgan Stanleys and the Goldman Sachs of the world where they don’t have to locate stock to short like you and I would…They have been granted an SEC exemption as market makers from having to locate shares. They can manufacture them.”
“This is how a stock can behave crazily. How is it possible that GameStop is up 817% prior to today…just in the last 90 days?” Quast said.
Short Interest Vs. Short Volume: Quast said there are important reasons for these exceptions to the normal trading rules for market makers, who are responsible for maintaining liquidity in the stock market. But traders must understand what’s actually going on.
“Citadel is going to know what the buy-sell balance is, and when it reaches a point of equilibrium, Citadel will shift short and we will see a mean reversion for GameStop. And the only way you will see that is by watching short volume, not short interest. It will be three weeks out of date, and it’s absolutely meaningless as a measure of float or total shares outstanding,” Quast said.
Quast said these “manufactured” shares produced by market makers are responsible for stocks like GameStop temporarily having short interest well above 100%.
Is This The End? The wild trading action on Monday comes the same day Goldman Sachs issued a note pointing out potential bubble valuations in 39 stocks. Goldman named Crispr Therapeutics AG (NASDAQ:CRSP), Snowflake Inc (NYSE:SNOW) and Plug Power Inc (NASDAQ:PLUG) among the most overvalued stocks in the market based on projected 2022 enterprise value-to-sales ratios.
At around 10 a.m. on Monday, many of the heavily shorted stocks associated with the recent squeeze began to reverse course, including GameStop. On Twitter, Dick speculated that the short squeeze trade may have finally capitulated to the upside.
“It’s cooling off rapidly in last 5 minutes. I think we just topped out,” he wrote. “We just saw ‘Peak Stupidity’ and everyone is learning the hard way right now.”
Benzinga’s Take: The GameStop run among retail traders has worked like a charm up to this point and has likely forced plenty of retail short sellers to cover their positions at large losses. However, successfully timing the entry and exit points in highly volatile short squeezes can be extremely difficult, even for professional traders.

BZ: Steve Weiss On CNBC’s Halftime Report Says Bought GameStop Puts In March Because ‘This Is All Going Down,’ Says ‘This Should Be A $2 Stock’

Sell Mortimer … Sell

Bought to open VXX 02/19/2021 38.0 Calls /Sold VXX 01/29/2021 19.0 Calls @ 0.02 Credit
Bought to open VXX 02/19/2021 33.0 Calls /Sold VXX 01/29/2021 18.0 Calls @ 0.03 Credit.
These pair off with existing VXX Put spreads.

Sold to close the long Puts I owned against the short puts that expired Friday despite BB being up 45% today.
Sold to close BB Mar 19 2021 6 Puts @ 0.23.
Bought them @ 0.18 and they were fully paid for by Friday’s short.

Bought 1 GME 02/12/2021 100.0 Call while selling 1 GME 01/29/2021 80.0 Call @ 2.00 Credit on the open.
Execution prices were 22.0 for the buy and 24.0 for the sell.
We will see if the tornado bucks me off on Friday

Sold to close SPY 01/29/2021 385.0 Calls @ 2.20.
Bought these on 12/22 at 1.83 and again on 12/24 at 1.33

Will buy a new long several weeks longer in time (at a higher strike) to hedge my short calls.

Bought to close VXX 01/22/2021 18.00 Diagonal Calls @ 0.01. They won’t trade any lower.

Sold these @ 0.47 & 0.48 on 01/15.

I’m letting expire other short VXX short calls I have for today at even higher strikes

Bought to close 01/22/2021 SLB 26.50 Diagonal Calls @ 0.01. Sold on 01/15 @ 0.29
Bought to close 01/22/2021 SLB 27.00 Diagonal Calls @ 0.01. Sold on 01/19 @ 0.20

Rolled SLB 01/22/2021 23.00 Diagonal Calls up to 01/29/2021 23.50 Calls@ 0.02 Credit

Rolled VXX 01/22/2021 19.50 Puts to next week for 0.22 Credit.
Rolled VXX 01/22/2021 20.00 Puts to next week for 0.17 Credit.
Rolled VXX 01/22/2021 21.50 Puts to next week for 0.20 Credit.
Rolled VXX 01/22/2021 22.50 Puts to next week for 0.17 Credit.

My short VXX 15.00, 15.50 and 16.00 short puts are still looking like they will expire tomorrow.

Oil Producers and Drillers Tumble: Biden Poised To Freeze Oil And Coal Leasing On Federal Land.

DVN and EOG are each down over 8%

Bought to close SLB 01/22/2021 23.50 Diagonal Calls / Sold 01/29/2020 24.00 Calls @ 0.02 Credit plus a half point bump in the short strike.

Waiting for short 26.50 and 27.00 short calls expiring tomorrow to drop to a penny.